The forerunners of the museums that we visit today were known as ‘Cabinets of Curiosities’. Starting – just about – at the very end of the sixteenth century – we find mentioned and illustrated collections of objects gathered from exotic places: things that a gentleman might be unfamiliar with; things that could expand our knowledge and cause wonder. Curiosities, undoubtedly. Here’s one collection illustrated in 1599:
This is an engraving from Ferrante Imperato’s Dell’Historia Naturale (Naples 1599), the earliest illustration of a ‘natural history cabinet’ (courtesy Oxford University). It shows a room fitted out to display imported paraphernalia: (hopefully mounted) creatures, dried specimens, fossils – also books and illustrations. The collector here takes on the role of educator – perhaps showman. Here you might encounter unicorn horns, a dragon’s blood, mermaid scales as well as the full sized alligator hanging from the ceiling.
Frans Francken the Younger, Chamber of Art and Curiosities, 1636 above (Public Domain). Another selection of paintings intermixed with fish, carved beads, sculptures, with on the table exotic shells, gem-stones mounted with pearls, coins and medals.
Rathfarnham Castle (above) is a good example of an Irish Fortified Manor House. This mainly seventeenth century building type would have been the relatively comfortable home of an aspiring clan – perhaps a titled family with church or merchant connections: Finola has written about a West Cork example. Austin Cooper – a tax collector who indulged his hobbies of sketching and writing while travelling through Ireland in the performance of his duties – wrote of Rathfarnham:
. . . What renders this a Place of any Note is the Cas. belonging to the E. of Ely. This Cas. is square, with a large square Tower at each corner – on the S. side in the Center is a semicircular Tower . . . The hall is but low, at the same time exquisitely elegant . . . The gallery is a beautiful room, at the far end is a curious cabinet of Tortoise Shell & Brass containing some most extraordinary Work in Ivory . . .
Austin Cooper’s Notes, rathfarnham Castle
Rathfarnham Castle has, in modern times, a distinguished continuing association with contemporary ceramicists and in 2015 established a modern Cabinet of Curiosities which continues the tradition of displaying ‘extraordinary work’, and provides excellent material for a Sunday morning post!
The curiosities are not labelled – and nor are their creators. Peter Bagshaw, OPW at Rathfarnham, has kindly provided me with a list – thank you, Peter – attached at the end of this piece. I cannot necessarily individually identify each item: I will leave you to work out which might be which . . .
This eye-pot looks great when you pan out a bit . . .
This one certainly harks back to some of those manufactured creatures that turned up in cabinets of old.
Leather teapot – a fashion item, perhaps?
I think the final image might be my favourite: a young person clutching an angel’s wing? Could this be The Sequestrator?
Yeats country – Benbulben and Classiebawn Castle (above). Finola took this fine view seven years ago, when we set out to visit the haunts of William Butler Yeats. We have to turn to Yeats now, as it’s exactly one hundred years since he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature – in December, 1923. I have carried a place in my heart for Yeats, ever since I was at Primary School on the Hampshire/Surrey borders, not far from Thomas Hardy’s Wessex. Yeats and Hardy were rivals for the coveted award – the final vote in 1923 was between the two of them: in the end, only two Nobel committee members voted for Hardy, and Yeats achieved the prize. The Guardian newspaper said that “…Mr Yeats is to be congratulated, almost without reserve, on lifting this substantial stake. He is a poet of real greatness; prose, too, he can write like an angel…”, however then arguing that Thomas Hardy would have been a worthier recipient of the award!
The Irish press congratulates Yeats on his achievement (above – Irish Independent 29.11.1923). My schoolboy encounter with the poet must have been when I was around ten years old and we were tasked to learn The Lake Isle of Inisfree. I can still recite it, word for word, to this day, sixty seven years later. But it was far more than mere words for me, then. Our teacher – Mr Sharpe – was careful to explain that this man was cooped up in the city of London – on its “pavements grey” and was yearning for the countryside he loved:
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made; Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
Inisfree serves the poet’s romantic dreams of a remote idyllic landscape far away from the noisy metropolis. It does exist as a place – on Lough Gill in Co Sligo: Yeats spent childhood summers nearby. Interestingly, I searched the internet for pics of the island, and the above came up. It’s from a Roaringwater Journal Post which I wrote in 2016. And it’s not Inisfree, but another ‘lake island’ – just outside Skibbereen, in West Cork – Cloghan Castle Island on Lough Hyne: there’s a holy well nearby, and an 8th century church dedicated to St Brigid – but all that is another story. The diversion just serves to warn against trusting what you find online!
Thoor Ballylee Tower, Co Galway (above) – this 14th century tower house was described by Seamus Heaney, another Irish Nobel Literature prize winner, as The most important building in Ireland, because of its associations with Yeats, who spent many summers there with his family.
Here is the finely crafted cover of The Tower: a book of poems by W B Yeats, published in 1928 (courtesy Yeats Thoor Ballylee Society). The Tower was Yeats’s first major collection as Nobel Laureate after receiving the Nobel Prize in 1923. It is considered to be one of the poet’s most influential volumes and was well received by the public. (Below) a 1917 drawing by Robert Gregory – son of Isabella Augusta (Lady) Gregory and Sir William Gregory of Coole Park, Co Galway – of The Tower (courtesy Yeats Thoor Ballylee Society).
Going back to my early school years: I was an incurable romantic, and a daydreamer. I paid enough attention to lessons to get by, but my heart lay outside the school gates. Just minutes away were hop-fields and, beyond those, pastures, woodlands, streams – idyllic places where I loved to wander. I could completely relate to Yeat’s desire to be far away from the city, and that’s why his poem appealed to me. I knew very little about Ireland, and had no idea that was where I would one day make my home. I am here now, sitting at my desk, with the hills and oceans of Yeats’ own country beyond.
W B Yeats and his wife George Hyde-Lees heard the news that the Nobel Prize had been awarded to him on 14 November, 1923. The photograph above (courtesy Irish Independent) is said to be taken on that day. It’s also said that they celebrated by cooking sausages! The Irish Independent records: “Irish poet and senator, William Butler Yeats created history when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Irish citizen to achieve such an accolade. The prize was awarded to Yeats ‘for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation’.”
Somewhat surprised by the award, Yeats would later write in his (unpublished) autobiography: “Early in November (1923) a journalist called to show me a printed paragraph saying that the Nobel Prize would probably be conferred upon Herr Mann, the distinguished novelist, or upon myself, I did not know that the Swedish Academy had ever heard my name.” The news of the award was widely praised in Ireland with members of Dáil Éireann proudly announcing that it had placed Ireland on the international stage. It was a sentiment reiterated by the laureate himself, who at the awards ceremony claimed that the Nobel Prize was less for himself than for his country and called it Europe’s welcome to the Free State. In his presentation speech, Per Hallstrom, then chairman of the academy’s Nobel Committee, praised the poet’s ability to ‘follow the spirit that early appointed him the interpreter of his country, a country that had long waited for someone to bestow on it a voice’.
A portrait of Yeats painted by Augustus John OM RA in 1930 (courtesy Sothebys – private collection). Before Yeats passed away he requested that his final resting place be in Sligo. He died in Menton, France in 1939 aged 73 and was buried there. His wish was fulfilled in 1948 when his body was exhumed and buried in St Columba’s Church, Drumcliff. His headstone reads:
Our last, and most magnificent, cashel in this series is Staigue. Majestic, imposing and mysterious, it sits at the head of a long valley with views down to the sea, almost 4kms away.
Staigue is the one that has never been excavated, and so it is the one that we can project our own speculations on regarding its age, its function, and its association with the fairies.
The thing that distinguishes Staigue from the other Cashels in Kerry I have written about so far is its sheer size. It’s what provokes awe. The first to write about it, in 1821, was the then-landowner F C Bland, who said:
When the appearance of the country, which is barren and uninviting, is considered, it must create surprise, what could have been the inducement to erect such a structure in such a place; and, when the traveller, whose curiosity has supported him through a long journey, the latter part of which for ten or twelve miles has been through a wild, uncultivated, though not an uninteresting country, first approaches it, he experiences a sensation of disappointment. For it stands a single object on a hill, and from its figure (being round) producing but little effect of light and shade; and, having no familiar object by which to measure its magnitude, and its importance being rather diminished by the extent and desolation of the surrounding scenery, he attaches a meaner opinion to it than it deserves. But when he enters it, he is struck with astonishment; and his imagination almost instantly transports him to distant ages lost in remote antiquity. He vainly endeavours to figure, in his “mind’s eye,” the beings who erected it, their manners, habits, and costume; until, “lost and bewildered in the fruitless search,” his mind returns to sober investigation, again to lapse into conjecture. This effect is not lost by familiarity:—I have visited it a hundred times, and have always experienced the same sensation.
I know how he felt. Bland did a series of measurements and drawings of the fort, and they provide a charming antiquarian look at how it was 200 years ago, when it had been in use as a cattle pound. That’s one of his drawing at the head of this post. Here’s another.
But his account is more than charming – it provides an indication of how the fort looked at that time (even though the drawings are not exactly accurate). This is important because we need to know what interventions have been made over the years to the fort – interventions that can significantly altar the profile and appearance of the fort, as we have seen in the other three. For example, he referred to an ‘eve stone’ a term that is unfamiliar to me, and said:
In one part, where the wall is perfect, it is surmounted by a projecting eve stone, which, when complete, must have added greatly to the effect of the whole. This is indeed the only attempt at ornament in the entire building.
His own drawing do not show any special feature and whatever it was, no really obvious eve stone has survived the two centuries since he wrote this account. However, the National Monuments record does state The rampart stands to a maximum external height of 5.7m at N, where both Bland and Dunraven noted a number of coping stones projecting slightly over its inner wall-face (1825, 18-19; 1875, 24). Two of these remain in situ, and average 1m x .4m x .08m thick. Perhaps I need to go back and take a closer look.
The good news is that, of all the cashels we have examined so far in this series, Staigue seems to have remained most true to its original state. That is not to say it is identical to how it was 200 years ago – it has been tidied and stabilised, although when and by whom remains uncertain. There is a suggestion that Bland himself employed local workmen to do some restoration work, and another that the OPW did some in the 19th century.
While no records of these works remain, overall, the fort looks similar now to the older images we have of it. Historic edifices like Staigue cannot be left to crumble if significant numbers of people are visiting it. Sooner or later, as people climb on the walls, knocking off stones, it will deteriorate, creating a safety hazard and a dangerous situation for the monument itself.
The trick is to intervene as sensitively as possible while still providing safe access and I would say that this has been done well at Staigue, although readers may want to weigh on on this question. The photos above and below are from the Irish Tourist Board collection (used in compliance with their Creative Commons License) – they amply demonstrate that climbing on the walls was as irresistible in 1964 as it is now. The ditch around the fort is also quite obvious in the aerial photo.
In essence, Staigue is similar to the other Cashels, with massive walls, two internal rooms or ‘cells’ in the walls, an entrance through the walls on the south side, and sets of stairs giving access to the top of the walls.
The stairs – the Irish word staighre (pronounced sty-rah) may have given the cashel its name – are the most striking feature. Commonly referred to a X-pattern, the first set lead up to a flat ‘landing’ from where the next set take off in both directions. You can see this really well in this 3D model of Staigue done by The Discovery Program. The image below is a still from the model – click here to go to it – it’s fun to manipulate it for yourself.
The entrance, surmounted by not one but two massive lintels, leads through the south wall, with a slightly inclined profile. The walls is lowest at this point.
The two mural chambers are to the left of the entrance and opposite it. Their use is unclear, but they may have functioned, like souterrains, as cold storage for food.
We do not know what buildings may have been inside the fort, although, as we saw in the other three, it was common for these cashels to have houses, whether for dwelling or for ceremonial use (as at Cahergal) or both. It is highly likely that any future excavation of Staigue would reveal similar constructions. The OPW sign (extract below) makes that assumption and says The fort was the home of the chieftain’s family, guards and servants, and would have been full of houses, out-buildings, and possibly tents or other temporary structures.
You remember our old friend General Vallancey from Beranger’s West Cork? In that post I told you that he was an antiquarian of the fanciful sort – forever banging on about druids and Chaldeans and coming up with far-fetched theories. In fact he pronounced Staigue to be a Phoenician amphitheatre! Perhaps Bland’s romantic illustration, below, put him in mind of such an interpretation.
Westropp, one of whose main activities was bringing common sense to antiquarian discourse, in a series on forts written between 1896 and 1901, situated Staigue very much in line with other stone forts on the Western seaboard. The photograph below is from that series. He acknowledges the defensive nature of the huge walls, but declined to use what he saw as the simplistic term “fortress”.
As for their use as cattle pens (as Bland had suggested), he says:
It was, however, not unusual to keep the cattle in the residential fort; we find this in legend, as in the case of the cattle of Iuchna the curly-haired, and in that story, so often quoted, of the three forts of Ventry. What is stronger evidence is that the ancient laws of Ireland made provision for seizing cattle kept in forts, and even for keeping them impounded therein on dark nights. That this extended to later times we have seen in the fort-names Cahernagree, Lisnagry, &c., and perhaps even in the “pounds” of Dartmoor and the local name for Staigue fort “Pounda-na-Staigue.”
We have seen that the three other Kerry Cashels have been dated to the Early Medieval and Medieval period: Leacanabuaile to the 9th and 10th centuries, Cahergal in use between the 7th and 9th centuries and again during the 11th and 14th, and Loher from 400 to 1600. It is puzzling therefore, that the OPW sign at the fort assigns a likely date of the early centuries AD before Christianity came to Ireland. In other words, the Iron Age. This assertion, of an Iron Age date, is repeated in various online sources about Staigue (including an even more vaguely worded reference to “during the Celtic Period.”). There is no evidence that Staigue was built significantly earlier than the other Kerry Cashels. In all likelihood, it belongs in the same medieval tradition of cashel-building.
If you get to Kerry, go visit all four of these remarkable testaments to our past. You will find yourself wondering at the context in which they were built, and the complex and highly stratified society in which resources could be marshalled to build something that would serve to remind all who saw it, who’s in charge here!
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