Wheels Within Wheels Read Free

Ballysaggart. More fortunate settlers arrived in 1832, a group of Cistercian monks who were presented with a mountainside by Sir Richard Keane of Cappoquin. Ten years later Thackeray observed that ‘the brethren have cultivated their barren mountain most successfully’, and now the grey Abbey of Mount Mellery stands solitary and conspicuous against its background of blue hills – an echo of those ancient monasteries which once made known, throughout civilised Europe, the name of Lismore.
    In the seventh century St Carthage founded a cathedral and college in Lismore and by the eighth century the place had become a university city where in time both King Alfred the Great and King John (while still Earl of Morton) were to study. In 1173 the ‘famous and holy city’ was ransacked by Raymond le Gros; and when King John replaced the razed college with a castle it, too, was destroyed. Soon, however, the local bishops had built another castle, which Sir Walter Raleigh eventually acquired. But Sir Walter was not a very competent landowner and in 1602 he gladly sold his castle, surrounded by a little property of 42,000 acres, to Richard Boyle, First Earl of Cork. Some two hundred years later an heiress of the Earl of Cork married a Cavendish and Lismore Castle is still owned by the Devonshire family. Thackeray observed: ‘You hear praises of the Duke of Devonshire as a landlord wherever you go among his vast estates: it is a pity that, with such a noble residence as this, and with such a wonderful country round about it, his Grace should not inhabit it more.’
    Between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries West Waterford had to endure less than its share of Ireland’s woes. The Villiers-Stuarts of Dromana and the Keanes of Cappoquin always lived on their estates and generally were compassionate landlords – while the Devonshires, though absentees, were not more than usually unscrupulous. Moreover, a local historian, Canon Power, noted that the region ‘seems to have been largely cleared of its original Celtic stock on the conclusion of the Desmond wars and … the first earl of Cork was able to boast that he had “no Irishe tenant on his land”.’
    This successful mini-plantation may partly explain a scarcity of Republicans in the area. Many local families had not been settled in West Waterford for as long as the main land-owning clans; and in the absence of inherited resentments – based on racial memories of conquest and land confiscation – unusually harmonious relations developed between landlords and tenants. But one has to grow up in a place to be aware of these nuances. My parents, looking in from outside, recognised none of the benefits that for centuries had been made available to both sides by West Waterford’s feudal system. Judging the rural social scene by urban standards, they saw only arrogance and profiteering on the one side and spineless servility on the other. And nowhere a slot for themselves.
    What sort of person would I now be had I grown up a typical Dubliner, regarding the countryside as something to be enjoyed in literature and avoided in life? But I simply cannot imagine myself as an urban animal. To me, city-dwellers are The Dispossessed, unfortunates who have been deprived of every creature’s right to territory. There is a sense in which country folk, however impoverished, own their birthplace and all the land around it that can be covered in a long day’s tramp – the natural, immemorial limit to the territory of a human being. Or perhaps it is that each region owns its people, exacting a special, subtle loyalty, a primitive devotion that antedates by tens of thousands of years the more contrived emotion of nationalism. Either way, there exists an element of belonging such as surely cannot be replaced or imitated by any relationship, however intense, between the city-dweller and his man-made surroundings. 

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    During the first year of my life the steep climb up to Ballinaspic was among