Working with the Ellen Hutchins Festival over the last few years, I have come to think of Ellen as a ghost-friend. Having just finished this year’s involvement (above, Karen Minihane reads one of Ellen’s letters on Esk Mountain) I was looking over my posts about the Festival over the years and realised it had been over ten years since I wrote and posted about her life. So I am reposting this account from 2015, unchanged, to show you our excitement at what we were discovering. It’s also a good introduction to Ellen.
Ballylickey House, Home of Ellen Hutchins. Although the house burned down, it was rebuilt exactly as the original
Re-posted from 2015
In West Cork, we have been celebrating the short but extraordinary life of Ellen Hutchins who died 200 years ago this year. Acknowledged in her lifetime as one of the most knowledgeable and accomplished botanists in the British Isles, she contributed specimens and drawings to the great collections in Glasnevin and Kew and kept up a lively and learned correspondence with some of the leading botanical scientists of the day. When she died, aged only 29, her name had already been memorialised: several plant specimens bore the title hutchinsia.
It’s been a fantastic week of lectures, guided walks, exhibitions and demonstrations. Jointly organised by the Bantry Historical Society, the National Parks and Wildlife Service and the Hutchins family, the week has been a marvellous success, with all the events well attended and everyone eager to learn more about Ellen. For a program of what was available, take a look at the excellent Ellen Hutchins website and the Facebook page.
While many of Ellen’s specimens ended up in Kew Gardens, some went to what has become the Dublin Botanical Gardens
The website contains biographical data about Ellen, her accomplishments, her family and her place in the scientific community, and a links and resources section leading to much more information. Ellen Hutchins was born in Ballylickey, near Bantry, in 1785 and spent most of her life there. During schooldays in Dublin she lived with family friend Dr Whitley Stokes who introduced her to the discipline of botanizing. She became an avid and scholarly collector of plants and seaweed, annotating, sorting and cataloguing as she went, and an expert illustrator of marine and terrestrial specimens.
Quiet cove, Bantry Bay
Ellen identified new species of seaweeds on the shores around Bantry Bay
She roamed freely around the shores of Bantry Bay and took her family’s boat out to Whiddy Island. She also climbed (we’re not sure how) to the top of Knockboy, the highest mountain in Cork at 700m, identifying new species of plants right at the top. We followed her footsteps last weekend, led by Wildlife Officer Clare Heardman of Glengarriff Nature Reserve, botanist Rory Hodd, writer Kevin Corcoran, and Madeline Hutchins, great great grandniece of Ellen, who has been uncovering all kinds of new material on her ancestor.
What a day we had! It was warm and dry until we got to the top, where we were subjected to a hailstorm for form’s sake before the sun re-emerged. It was an insight into what gets botanists excited – tiny plants, apparently, with subtle variations from other tiny plants.
Among the bog cottonRory talks rootsBog asphodelNot heather after all – wild thyme!
We were in awe of the knowledge on display, and the boundless enthusiasm of all the plant experts in the group. The highlights for them were finding some of the species that bore Ellen’s name, although Rory and Clare were particularly pleased to find a dwarf willow at the summit that had originally been identified by Ellen over 200 years ago. Along the way, we also learned a lot about the characteristics of that kind of high mountain environment, with its burden of boggy moss and highly acidic environment.
Kevin Corcoran demonstrated the properties of sphagnum moss, and showed us how soft the bog underneath us was, by probing with his staff
We felt on top of the world on Knockboy. We drove up to Priest’s Leap and only climbed the final 300m. But how did Ellen get up there, with her long skirts and her intermittent poor health?
In Bantry House we viewed Ellen’s drawings, beautifully framed and presented and on loan from their permanent homes in Kew Gardens, Trinity College, Dublin and elsewhere. Her drawings were used by other botanists to illustrate books and were considered to be superior in their exactitude.
The Bantry Library hosted an exhibition about her life. This was curated by Madeline Hutchins and here we came closer to appreciating the woman herself, of whom no portrait exists. We learned, through her letters, of the struggles of a home life dominated by an ailing mother, a disabled younger brother and two bitterly feuding older brothers. She suffered from intermittent ill health, which often prevented her from collecting, but when she was strong her delight in her outdoors pursuits was palpable. One of her greatest pleasures was her correspondence with fellow botanists, among whom she earned true respect, especially Dawson Turner.
Dawson Turner: Although they never met, he thought of Ellen as a beloved sister and was devastated when she died
Although we were not able to join the group tour of the Ardnagashel Arboretum, we ventured down there on our own and were shown around the east section by the gracious Arethusa Greacen, herself a Hutchins on her mother’s side. The arboretum was started by Ellen’s brother and was maintained and added to by succeeding generations of Hutchins – the botany gene was obviously strongly embedded in the family!
Myrtle groves and colour at Ardnagashel
The enormous contribution made by Ellen Hutchins to science has languished in obscurity for two centuries, known only to a few experts in the field (a bit like that other West Cork woman of science, Agnes Clerke of Skibbereen). All that changed last week. West Cork, and Bantry/Ballylickey in particular, has celebrated and honoured Ellen Hutchins in style. There is talk of future events, perhaps even a summer school.
A new plaque has been erected on the wall of the old ruined church in Garryvurcha graveyard, final resting place of Ellen Hutchins
Well done to the hardworking organisers of this exceptional festival! Thank you to them for illuminating the life of this remarkable woman and to helping us appreciate, in the most hands-on and interesting way, her enormous contributions to science.
The team behind the Ellen Hutchins Two Hundred Year Celebration: Madeline Hutchins, great great grandniece and biographer of Ellen; Clare Heardman of the National Parks and Wildlife Service; Angela O’Donovan of the Bantry Historical Society. This photo was taken from the Ellen Hutchins 200 Years Facebook Page, with appreciation
A painting by Edith Somerville* is the subject of this week’s detective story – we know it is a West Cork stone circle – but which one? [See the end of the post for the proper citation for the painting.] In a recent piece in the Irish Arts Review, Michael Waldron, Curator of Collections & Special Projects at the Crawford, wrote about Edith Somerville as a painter. We are so used to thinking of her as a writer, especially in her collaboration with her cousin, Violet Martin, (they wrote as Somerville and Ross), that we forgot that she was also an accomplished artist (and a Master of the Foxhounds, as in this portrait).
She had trained in Dusseldorf and Paris. The DIB entry says
In the second half of the 1880s she was active as a professional illustrator for the Lady’s Pictorial and the Graphic, later illustrating some of her own prose and that written in collaboration. She had exhibitions at the Goupil Gallery in London (1920), Walker’s Gallery, London (1923, 1927), and the Ackermann Galleries, New York (1929).
Edith’s favourite brother was Boyle, about whom I have written here and here. Boyle had gone to sea at the early age of 13, eventually rising up to become a Vice-Admiral. He had, in retirement, come back to live in Castletownshend in 1924.
He was an experienced surveyor and had become fascinated by archaeology, and particularly the investigations of the astronomer, Norman Lockyer, who had established the solar orientation of several ancient monuments around the world and had shown that the stone circles of Scotland were oriented towards celestial events such as solstices or towards bright stars. These stone circles were very similar to West Cork stone circles, in that they had recumbents and portals, establishing the alignment of the circle. Boyle had done the first accurate survey of the Callanish Stone Circle (below)*, before he turned his attention to West Cork.
Edith accompanied Boyle on many of their expeditions, as she had when they were children. While he was busy with his chains and theodolites, she set up her easel and sketched or painted. One of the paintings she produced was titled A Holy Place of the Druids or Grave of a Chieftain. This painting, which Michael used in his article for the Irish Arts Review, is in the possession of the Crawford Art Gallery, and I have been given permission to reproduce it for this blog post. It is my lead image, and below is a detail showing her signature.
In chatting with Michael about his article, I discovered that the monument she had painted had not been identified. Some were convinced it was Drombeg Stone Circle, while others thought it might be the one in Reenascreena. I was pretty sure I knew which one it was, but told him I wanted to visit the site to be sure to be sure, before I committed myself.
The site I had in mind was Bohonagh (above), one of the stone circles Boyle surveyed for his paper Five Stone Circles, in the 1930 edition of the Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society. The thing is, it doesn’t look now the way it did when Edith painted it, so unless you knew why this was, you were unlikely to see it as the subject of her painting. Here is Boyle’s plan of the monument as he surveyed it.
And here is the photograph that accompanies that article taken from behind the recumbent, looking towards the portals. Both the plan and the photograph show 6 erect stones.
Bohonagh Stone Circle was excavated by Edward Fahy in 1959. The report of his excavation was published asA Stone Circle Hut and Dolmen at Bohonagh, Co. Cork, in 1961, in the same journal in which Boyle had described the monument 30 years before. In that report, Fahy describes how he re-erected three orthostats for which the evidence was clear, in the form of the stones themselves, now fallen forwards, and their sockets (the cross-hatched stones in the plan below). So now, instead of six orthostats, as depicted in Boyle’s photograph, there are 9 tall stones.
He also, as he had at Drombeg, placed shorter ‘marker stones’ to indicated the positions of missing orthostats. Although he did not document it in the text of his report, we can see the marker stones clearly in his photograph below. The Bohonagh Stone Circle, therefore, now has the full complement of all 13 of its stones, with no signage at the site to help the visitor identify the differences between all those standing stones.
A few weeks ago I went out there with my friend Adrienne to see if we could clarify the situation. Using both Boyle and Fahy’s site surveys, Fahy’s report, and our own observations regarding the marker stones, we made a short video.
Note the height of the bracken – it made photographing the circle impossible and I wished I had brought a machete.
Next we stumbled around the site outside the circle, beating our way through the bracken, until we located the exact spot where Edith had sat to paint the scene. Remind yourself of the painting and then watch this short video.
Note particularly how accurately she captured not just the stone circle but also the surrounding landscape.
So we have identified Edith’s Holy Place of the Druids. And perhaps, despite this being a cringe-y title, it’s not all that far off the truth. There is some evidence at Drombeg and at Bohonagh that the site was used for ritual purposes and that implies a priestly class. Edith used the word Druid, not unusual for her time, although that idea that Druids built stone circles is really an 18th century invention.
We know the word originally from classical writers: Caesar for example used it to describe learned men encountered through the Roman conquests who functioned as priests and judges. ‘Druid’ was revived in the 18th century by antiquarians: William Stukeley popularised it when he proposed that Stonehenge and Avebury were the religious products of an early ‘Celtic’ Druid culture. They were druidic temples, he said, and even though he was wrong (being out by a couple of thousand years), so persuasive was he that the romantic idea of druids has persisted ever since in the popular imagination. Our old friend Vallancey was also fond of druids.
So there was Boyle with his instruments, his rigorous measurements and his archaeological knowledge, using evidence-based methodology to come to conclusions about solar alignments. And there was Edith with her paints and her canvas, painting what she saw, but labelling it as the work of a putative priestly class. What is amazing, actually, is that none of that interfered with her ability to produce on canvas a hyper-accurate treatment of the Bohonagh Stone circle as it was before her eyes. And perhaps her second title, Grave of a Chieftain, is a more prescient one, since Fahy did find cremated bone in a pit within the stone circle.
Both Boyle and Fahy identified Bohonagh as an equinoctial circle – that is, on the spring and autumn equinoxes, if you stand between the portals you will see the sun set over the recumbent – just like at Drombeg except that Drombeg is a winter solstice alignment. Several years ago, we met with Ken Williams of Shadows and Stone at Bohonagh to photograph that phenomenon. Here is his photograph, from our original post and used with permission.
Many thanks to Michael Waldron, Angela Fahy, Billy O’Brien, Adrienne Harrington, Ken Williams, and to Nigel and Claire Vickery, on whose land Bohonagh stands.
*Edith Œ. Somerville, A Holy Place of the Druids or Grave of a Chieftain, undated. Collection Crawford Art Gallery, Cork
**The copyright on the image of Callanish is owned by Tom Richardson and is licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.
I love it when a stained glass window has a story and I think this one has the backstory to end all backstories. It’s in St Patrick’s Catholic Church in Bandon, Co Cork, on the west wall and it’s enormous.
My previous posts about windows with stories are One Window, Eight Stories, about the Bobbie Bole window in Drogheda Grammar School, and Watson’s Brian Boru: One Window, 7 Stories. They followed a pattern of one-story at a time so I will follow that again, and see how many stories this turns into.
Story 1: Joseph Sr
Let’s start with the person who commissioned the window, and the church into which it would be set. Joseph Brennan Sr was a Bandon businessman, distinguished and universally respected, and head of a large family. He died in 1948, having established several businesses in Bandon, including a bakery and mill.
According to his obituary:
for several years he provided the town with light until the service was taken over by the ESB. He was also a promoter of a woollen industry in Bantry which you later sold. As well as being the prime mover in all these undertakings he was a director of the West Cork bottling company and several other firms. (June 5 1948, Southern Star)
He was also a devoted family man, living in Kilbrogan House in Bandon (above). His wife, Mary, died in 1896 at the early age of 37. He never remarried and outlived her by more than 50 years. All of his children were clever and highly educated and he had a clatter of grandchildren of whom he was very fond. He was a stalwart member of the Catholic Community in Bandon and conceived the idea of a stained glass window for it, in or around 1940. Having determined on the window, he turned to his son, Joseph Jr, to manage the business.
Story 2: Joe Pound Note
Joseph was the oldest of his seven children and the most successful. Read his biography in the DIB (no, really, do read it – it’s fascinating). A graduate of Clongowes and Cambridge, he rose through the British civil service in Ireland, transferring, it appears, seamlessly into the Irish civil service after the treaty and working closely with Michael Collins to establish a department of finance and (in particular) set up an exchequer. His experience and advice was invaluable to the new state and eventually he was appointed Chairman of the Currency Commission (1927–43) and then Governor of the Central Bank – here’s their first meeting.
In that capacity, his signature was on our banknotes, and that sealed his fate to be known in his hometown ever after as Joe Pound Note.
The correspondence between the Josephs Sr and Jr and the Harry Clarke Studios has been preserved in the Joseph Brennan Papers in the National Library of Ireland. The extracts and photos from that collection that follow are used with their permission.
Story 3: William
After Harry Clarke died the Studio continued until the 1970s, and as of 1940 the Manager and Chief Designer was William Dowling, about whom I have written in the post The House Style: William Dowling and the Harry Clarke Studios. So it was William Dowling who negotiated with Joseph Jr (on behalf of his father) and it is also William Dowling who is credited with the design for the Bandon Window, the original of which is located in the Harry Clarke collection at Trinity College. Here is that design, but to have a really good look at it, go to the TCD source and enlarge it so you can see the lovely pencilled details.
Dowling’s letters make it clear that the studio was very anxious for this commission – it was large and prestigious. Joe Jr’s advice to his father includes the recommendation not to haggle for a cheaper price, as he was convinced they would get a better outcome by paying what was asked: Joe must have known his father’s propensity for driving a hard bargain.
One of the interesting aspects for me was the Studio letterhead which contains the footer: CLIENTS ARE RESPECTFULLY REQUESTED NOT TO ADDRESS CORRESPONDENCE TO INDIVIDUAL MEMBERS OF THE STUDIOS. I have been studying the fierce competition for business that went on among the stained glass studios, and the loyalty that was demanded of employees – the fear that they were doing side deals was real.
A price of £500 was agreed. Much wording was expended on whether or not the window should have ventilation (no) and/or a wire guard (yes, for an extra £8). Fr Scannel arranged to have a plan of the window frame sent and there was a mysterious reference to ensuring that photographs would be supplied.
Story 4: Helen
The photographs were of Joe Sr’s grandchildren, and also of himself and possibly his long deceased wife, Mary. He wanted them incorporated into the window as a long-lasting memorial to his family – a highly unusual, but wholly delightful idea and one that has fascinated Bandon people to this day. Enter one of Joe’s great-grandchildren, Helen Twomey, still resident in Bandon and a friend of my sister-in-law’s sister, Yvonne Coakley. Yvonne and Helen came to visit me, bearing gifts and treasure – the treasure being a family tree and Helen’s knowledge of who was who in the window.
An article in The Holly Bough of 1971 had named the grandchildren but not their position in the window.
Another article in the 2007 Holly Bough had gone further and asserted that although the 1971 article had claimed that the face of the Blessed Virgin was based on a photograph of a youthful Mary Brennan, in fact Mary was the seraph at the top right. The author says that this information came from Ruth Brennan, Joe Jr’s daughter. It went on to list other grandchildren and between us Helen and I made this sketch of who was who.
As you can see, it was not an easy task and it differs a little from the Holly Bough account. I’ve decided to leave it as is to show you how we pored over the images, identifying and correcting. Jerry has the exclamation mark as he was Jerry Calnan, Helen’s father. I do not think the Virgin Mary was Joe Sr’s wife, Mary as her face is very Clarke Studio and does not have the appearance of having been taken from a photograph.
However, take a close look at some of the cherubs, and the two angels, and you will see instantly that these were real people. In fact, the Baby Jesus looks like a real person as well, although not identified in any of the accounts.
The Studios were proud of this window and exhibited it prior to it being shipped off to Bandon.
Story 5: George Stephen
As is plain to see – there are differences between the design and the window. If William Dowling designed this window, did he also paint it? We can answer this question – no, he didn’t. In fact the artist behind this extraordinary window was George Stephen Walsh. George Stephen had apprenticed under Harry Clarke, starting in 1925 when he was fourteen. He had five years of Harry’s supervision, tutelage and encouragement, until Harry died in 1931 (Harry was away in the Davos sanitarium for the last year). He was known in the studio for his talent with faces, so he was the obvious person to whom to assign this window, in which faces were crucial.
But we have other evidence. In George Stephen’s archive, kept by his son, George Walsh, is this photograph. On the side it says ‘painted, Clarkes.’ It’s a photograph (George Stephen was a keen photographer) of the finished window, taken probably when it was on display in the Studios before being dispatched to Bandon.
It was one of the last windows George Stephen painted at Clarke’s since he left in the early 1940s, frustrated by the house rules that refused to allot credit to the real artists behind the windows. He went on to have a distinguished career and produce many brilliant windows. This is him in later life, with a set of designs destined for a large American church.
Next time you are in Bandon, drop in to see this window. Take a pair of binoculars so you can see the tiny faces and ask yourself – how would you like your family album to take the form of a magnificent stained glass window?
I have had two experiences in the last couple of weeks that have both been outstanding, instructive, beautiful and unsettling.
Let’s start with Esk Mountain. Long term readers will remember Finbarr, our Bug Hotel and lockdown mascot (not Finbarr the pheasant, that’s another story). This Finbarr was designed and built for us by Kloe and Adam, the Two Green Shoots. We visited them in 2020 and were hugely impressed by what they were accomplishing in their gardens and their passion for conservation.
Kloe is now immersed in an enormous and significant undertaking, having expanded her holdings and diversified into animals. What I saw on the walk-and-lunch I did recently is her transformative vision in progress. Her project is called Esk Mountain and you can find it and read all about it here: https://eskmountain.com/.
But you can do better than read about it – you can stay here in an utterly charming studio apartment with the best accessory to a B and B I have ever seen – a nest swing! This is typical Kloe – full of imagination and using materials that would otherwise go in the landfill.
Kloe has 270 acres and it was set up over 100 years ago with tree species to attract deer and provide good habitat for hunting. Then the rhododendrons arrived, smothering everything in their path. Her work now is restoration and it is very hard work indeed. She and her workers and volunteers have been clearing rhodos and felling trees and letting the light in so that the native species have a chance to grow – and they do! We saw all kinds of oak and holly seedling as we wended our way through the trees.
There are bridges and planks and stone steps and trails – the sense is of winding your way along magical little paths through the forest. Kloe is a great guide, stopping to tell us what we were looking at, pointing out plants, old walls, new shoots, old water courses. And then we reached the place where the mountain comes into view, green and dramatic – and being grazed by Dexter Cattle! It’s all part of the plan – the Dexters came from Derry Duff Farm, about which I wrote in my post Miracle in the Mountains.
We could see them far away – but Kloe showed us how you do this now with Technology. Each animal wears a collar, so it’s always findable on your phone and you can move them around from grazing spot to spot, using this technology. Amazing!
The walk ended with home made pizza in the outdoor pavilion, using a pizza oven and wood fire. We all made our own, using some of the materials we had foraged along the way, and very good local meats and cheeses. The most delicious pizza I have ever eaten!
Kloe’s aim is to restore Esk Mountain to a natural and healthy habitat. It’s a daunting task but if anyone is up to it, it is Kloe. Her passion for the forest and the land is obvious, as is her commitment to getting the job done.
After that inspiring visit, it was an interesting contrast to drop into Derreen Garden on the Beara, with my friends Peter and Amanda (the Holy Wells champion). This is the other side of gardening. The home page describes it thus: A network of winding paths passes through a mature woodland garden laid out 150 years ago with subtropical plants from around the world and incomparable views of the sea and mountains.
This is where the ‘unsettling’ part comes in – I am not sure I should have enjoyed Derreen as much as I did. After all, it is the antithesis of a place that seeks to regenerate and restore – Derreen is a celebration of the ambition of wealthy Victorians to create an exotic garden from imported and unusual plants. These kinds of garden were status markers, providing gentlefolk with a designed landscape full of meandering strolls and lovely vistas.
Rhododendron, the same plant that Kloe’s team is exhausting themselves felling is, at Derreen, doing the ornamental job it was planted for, and in the brochure we are encouraged to spot the Sika Deer. So – one century’s status symbol becomes the next century’s problem and my head tells me I should be reserved about this.
And yet, and yet . . . To walk among these towering trees, every now and then coming upon the sea lapping at the shore, with views across to the Kerry mountains offers a sort of transcendence. It reminds you of your place in the world, and that we are as humans driven to ‘improve’ our own part of it. It’s the kind of setting where you want to settle down with your back to one of those giant cedars, gaze across the water, and write poetry. And in among the foreign plants native ferns and wildflowers are also flourishing, like the Sea Asters and Sea Lavender below. Whatever about my head, my walk through Derreen did my heart good.
It strikes me that both places are someone’s answer to what do we do with land we love, as it is now? Esk’s answer is restoration and participation; Derreen’s is curation and contemplation. I am definitely still unsettled, with my head and my heart jostling for my attention.
PS I am hoping for a response from my friend Paddy Tobin, An Irish Gardener. I KNOW he will have opinions about this piece.
Every now and then I like to re-post one of our older pieces and this one qualifies – most of it is from 2014! Robert and I have walked the Butter Road many times since, so I am updating the post with newer photographs. The Butter Road is a mostly green road, and there aren’t a lot of those around, so that makes it a special experience.
The old Butter Road runs between Schull and Ballydehob
The rest of this post is a lightly edited version of our 2014 post, with some newer photographs.
For most of its history, roads were a hit-and-miss affair in Ireland. We didn’t get the great Roman road builders, and anyway, it was easier to get around on the water. Some routeways led to Dublin or Tara in the early medieval period, but a real road system didn’t develop until the 18th Century with the building of turnpike highways between major cities. In the 18th Century, Cork became the largest centre for the butter trade in the world and needed transportation corridors to ensure butter could get from remote rural areas to the Butter Exchange (now a museum) in the city. The Butter Roads were built from the 1740s on, and provided an efficient and speedy (for the time) route to market. Butter was packed in firkins (40 litre barrels), stacked onto carts, and transported from West Cork and Kerry to Cork City to be loaded onto ships for Australia and America.
The Old Mill
Here and there, traces of the old butter roads remain. One stretch runs between Ballydehob and Schull and in the last few years a project to open it as a walking route has been spearheaded by students of the Schull Community College. It starts at the Old Mill, now open as a gallery by our friend, the esteemed wildlife photographer, Sheena Jolley. Sheena has enhanced the mill stream and stabilised the workings, still intact in her basement. If it’s open, a visit to her gallery is a great way to start or end your walk.
Robert on the stepping stones
Setting out from the mill we were immediately on the old green road, soft underfoot, running between hedgerows alive with wildflowers, winding gently uphill. A plaque tells the story of the butter roads and of the current project. Gurgling and murmuring, the mill stream is on your right until you come to cross it. This is accomplished on stepping stones where we found it impossible not to linger and contemplate the gentle water.
The mill stream
Onward and upward, passing an abandoned farmhouse, and marvelling at the variety of flowers along the route. Having been presented with the superb Zoë Devlin’s The Wildflowers of Ireland (thank you, Amanda!) I can now identify most of them, so here is a selection – captioned, by dint of my new-found knowledge. (Mousing over the pictures will bring up the captions, clicking on them will take you to full size images.)
tutsanoxeye daisies and foxglovemeadowsweetmarsh woundwortmarsh thistlefuchsiabindweed or morning glory
As the road ascends, we could look back towards Schull and Long Island, or north to Mount Gabriel. The sense of peace, of being in a place of age-old tradition, is palpable.
Mount Gabriel
Near the top of the hill we met the Newman family, setting out from their farmhouse to walk down to Schull. John and Helen grew up in this house, walking to school in Rossbrin (about 4 km away) every day and John still lives in the house. He has a fascinating collection of old tractors and an obvious interest in farm machinery of every kind. They told us they had the butter road all to themselves in the old days, but now it’s quite popular and they are glad to see it used and enjoyed. A Mr Henry Ford once lived in the farmhouse, related to THE Henry Ford, whose father came from Ballinascarthy, near Clonakilty.
Three generations of the Newman Family
The Butter Road is an ancient right-of-way, but access depends on the goodwill of those, like John Newman, and like Paddy Hayes whom we met on the way down [now sadly deceased], whose farms and fields lie along the route. This is a marvellous resource for the people of Schull and Ballydehob and we are grateful to those whose vision and hard work and generosity of spirit have made it a reality.
Old friendThe AtlasKeeping it handyOld barn
If you want to experience the tranquility of the deep countryside, lovely views, and a sense of how the making of a road could connect far-flung communities to the wider world, we recommend an afternoon spent on the Butter Road.
We used to use this gallery format a lot in the old days, so here is a new set of images in the old gallery format.
And a second set of some of the wonderful old equipment we glimpsed along the way.
Walking back down: Long Island comes into view
PS: I can’t believe how little I knew about wildflowers in 2014. It has since become one of my abiding passions.
If you’ve read Part 1, you will know already how enchanted I was with Calf Island Middle, or Middle Calf as it is more familiarly known. In this post, I want to give you a flavour, via a slideshow, of what is it like to wander on this little paradise in Roaringwater Bay. The slides are fairly randomly ordered, but I hope they will transport you to the island. The music is by Enya, As Baile (Away from Home) from the Shepherd’s Moon album, used with permission.
Cormac and Áine are scientists and have systematically set about restoring the island to the habitat that it deserves. This has taken many years of experiment to find the right balance. If you do nothing, the bracken, gorse and brambles take over. If you overgraze, much of the biodiversity gets no chance to flourish. The trick is finding the right mix of herbivores to graze the island meadows. This they have accomplished with a judicious mix of horses (3), Kerry Bog Ponies (9) and sheep (40). Horses are heavy enough to trample the bracken and sheep devour the young ragwort that could harm the horses.
And the Kerry bog ponies? Well they are the magic in the mix. Light enough not to damage the meadows, sturdy enough to withstand island winters, and hungry and strong-jawed enough to devour the gorse and coarse heath grasses. Being a native Irish breed, they are uniquely adapted to Irish conditions and they are often used in conservation projects. The Calf Island herd has now expanded to other islands and habitats.
Cormac and Áine have shown us how to manage a delicate ecosystem and their careful stewardship of Middle Calf is something we can all be grateful for.
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Roaringwater Journal 