If you are travelling through County Limerick, you shouldn’t miss a visit to Ireland’s largest stone circle: Grange, near the Lough Gur complex. There are 113 stones in this circle today, generally standing close by each other (‘contiguous’) and thus unlike the majority of the circle monuments in Ireland, where individual stones are separated.
The great circular arena which these stones define is also on a platform raised (in the present day) about 600mm above the surrounding land. Excavations which took place between 1939 and 1954 (S P Ó Ríordáin 1951) and subsequent radiocarbon dating indicate a construction date just short of 3,000 BC, which makes the circle one of the oldest in Ireland.
The internal diameter of this circle (a ring drawn around the inner faces of the stones) measures approximately 45.5 metres. Here is Ó Ríordáin’s drawings of the elevations of the stones:
Finola bravely stands against the largest stone in the circle, which is traditionally named Rannach Crom Dubh. The meaning is not clear; Crom suggests ‘bent, crooked, or stooped’, while Dubh means ‘black or dark one’. Rannach can mean ‘open-handed’, which could imply a trading connection. This stone is said to weigh over 40 tonnes and was brought to this spot from three kilometres away. Interestingly, some say that this stone marks the ceremonial entrance into the circle and is aligned with the sunrise on the 1st of August, known as Lughnasadh, the day that marks the beginning of the harvest in Ireland. In fact, there are many orientations that can be given to this circle. This article by Ken Williams explores some possibilities here.
This Beaker pottery sherd was found and recorded by Ó Ríordáin. It is one of a great number of such remains to be found at the site. One commentator made the suggestion that . . . The breaking of Beaker pots against the standing stones seems to have been part of a ceremony . . . Can we trace the more modern tradition of breaking wine glasses after a toast to such an early origin? It’s said to bring luck and happiness in some cultures. This would, of course, imply that the great circle was a celebratory feasting site.
There is evidence today that visitors feel compelled to leave offerings at the site: coins, small stones, beads, and other ephemera. The examples above are adjacent to Rannach Crom Dubh, while below is one of the standing stones in the circle that appears to have been deliberately cut, or slotted, at some time in its history. Today, coins are deposited within this slot.
My own feeling about this site is that it is an arena where people gathered to feast and celebrate. An ancient ‘circus’ perhaps? Ken Williams analyses the possibilities of archeo-astronomical alignments in his article, mentioning our West Cork friend Vice-Admiral Boyle Somerville, whose detailed work we have investigated, here.
The features of this site are fascinating and provide much food for thought, especially when seen through the eyes of archaeologists. Of course, we want to know who conceived this monument, and who was in charge of the human power and organisation that was required to erect it. There won’t be a simple answer to this: it’s likely that many generations were responsible and that there were numerous incarnations over time. That’s what is so fascinating about ancient history: if only we had a time machine!
There are traces of other, smaller, stone circles close by this one, but I was intrigued to read in one of the accounts of this site that there was previously a further – even larger – circle nearby, and this has vanished altogether. I have to ask: how could such a massive structure disappear completely? Legend gives us an answer: it was supposedly stolen by Merlin and brought over to England to create Stonehenge!
Great Blasket, one of the islands in the parish of Dún Chaoin (Dunquin) off the west coast of Kerry, was the home and life-blood of a tenacious population of Irish families for many hundred years. One of these families – the Ferriters – claim that they controlled the islands as far back as the 13th century and had established a castle there. Whoever lived there had to be tough: the terrain is wild and there is little shelter. Nevertheless, the islanders clung to their territory, and their numbers expanded in the early 19th century when Lord Ventry of Dingle evicted many of his tenants from their holdings and those who left found island life – hard though it was – preferable to persecution.
We are fortunate that, during the early twentieth century, Great Blasket was visited by curious tourists and anthropologists. Among them was Robin Flower, who became Deputy-Keeper of Manuscripts in the British Museum from 1929 to 1944. He had many credits to his name, including Member of the Royal Irish Academy, Doctor of Literature of the National University of Ireland and also of Dublin University. Flower became the historian of the Blaskets, which he ‘immortalised’ through his lectures and writings – and many visits. To the people of the Great Blasket he was playfully known as ‘Bláithin’ – Little Flower – which he considered a great honour. I will write more on Robin Flower in a future post, but concentrate here on some of the photographs of island life which were recorded by likeminded researchers in the first half of the twentieth century. After 1954 there was nothing to record: life on the island, three miles from the mainland and involving an often treacherous crossing, became untenable. The whole remaining population was evacuated in that year, leaving their cottages and settlements to the ruinous ravages of the wild Atlantic gales.
The header picture is a wonderful statement of youth and vigour: island children photographed outside their school in 1932 by Thomas Waddicor. I can’t find anything about this man, but a lot of his work appears in the Dúchas Photographic Collection which was established in the 1930s, so I am assuming he was an active collector and researcher himself. The second picture is by our old friend Tomás Ó Muircheartach, who also spent time on the Blaskets in the 1930s. You will find more about him here. It shows the Blasket men in their fishing curraughs below the craggy rocks of the island. The pic above is also by Muircheartach, and shows Cáit Ruiséal and Máire Ruiséal being interviewed by a follklore collector at their fireside in 1942. I am not sure where this interview took place.
This photograph is also by Thomas Waddicor and dates from 1932. The caption given in the Dúchas Photographic Collection is interesting, if not entirely enlightening: Man, Great Blasket Island: Buffer, note stuffed peaked cap – an island custom.
Another from Waddicor, also 1932: Cáit at the Well. I think what strikes me most of all is how real and alive these people are – they certainly don’t seem in any way downtrodden or in danger of extinction: perhaps it’s just because they are ‘posing’ for the camera. But it’s salutary to think that they were only on the island for another generation or so.
These two photographs (above) are also by Thomas Waddicor and also from 1932. The top one is the ‘Wife and child of Séan the King’, and the lower is ‘Children of Séan the King’. We have a bit of a conundrum here as the last ‘King’ of the Blasket Islands passed away in 1929 (according to this Irish Times article). As Waddicor left behind no photograph of the ‘King’ himself, we have to assume that the lady in the upper photograph was a widow.
More ‘family’ photographs: the upper of the three is titled ‘Eilis and Brighid’; the centre is just given as ‘Family’, while the lower is ‘Fiddler and Woman’. All are by Waddicor from 1932.
This wonderful lady is also anonymous: sadly we can only know her by the title – ‘Great Blasket Woman’. Again, Waddicor 1932 – and, once more, she seems so full of life!
This is a picture of the Great Blasket Island School. We have some further information: while the folklorists and recorders were visiting the island in 1932, the older schoolchildren decided to interview each other about local customs and lore to mimic the visitors!
Further unnamed portraits: upper ‘Two Women Great Blasket’ and lower ‘Two Women gathering Heather’. From the Waddicor collection, 1932.
We’ll finish off with a few classics. This is Tomas O Criomhthain and it’s a photo from Muircheartach. Better known to us as Tomas O’Crohan, author of the classic book about the Blaskets:
. . . Tomas O’Crohan was born on the Great Blasket Island in 1865 and died there in 1937, a great master of his native Irish. He shared to the full the perilous life of a primitive community, yet possessed a shrewd and humorous detachment that enabled him to observe and describe the world. His book is a valuable description of a new vanished way of life; his sole purpose in writing it was in his own words, ‘to set down the character of the people about me so that somerecord of us might live after us, for the like of us will never be again’ . . .
The Islandman Book Review
We can’t discuss the Blaskets without mentioning Peig. That’s her, above, with folklorist Kenneth Jackson, taken by Thomas Waddicor in 1932. Peig Sayers was by all accounts a formidable lady but was also described by folklorist Seán Ó Súilleabháin, archivist for the Irish Folklore Commission, as ‘one of the greatest woman storytellers of recent times’. Peig was born in 1873 and died in 1958. She therefore experienced the abandonment of the island, although she had moved away from it in 1942. She was also not born on the island, but in Dunquin, Kerry, She married Pádraig Ó Guithín, a native islander, in 1892 and had eleven children, six of whom survived into adulthood. Sayers is most famous for her autobiography Peig, but also for folklore and stories which have been collected from her.
Finally, this an image of the Loganim Achive entry for Great Blasket Island, written in 1954.
I am grateful to the National Folklore Collection UCD for the use of the Thomas Waddicor images. It’s an incredible resource: this is just a small selection of the hundreds of images which have been archived
Many thanks to Sara Nylund for her wonderful reconstruction drawing of an early ecclesiastical site
A couple of years ago, confined to explorations within 5km, Robert wrote about Croagh Bay (pronounced locally as Crew Bay). Recently our friends Donagh and Tamsin enticed us back to take a closer look at the eastern part of the Bay – Croagh Cove (Crew Cove).
What intrigued us about this place and why we were eager to visit (apart from Donagh’s world-class coffee) was a place marked on the map as an ‘ecclesiastical enclosure.’ There aren’t a lot of those on the Mizen, although there may be more early ecclesiastical sites than have been identified and recorded. Kilbrown (see my post Mizen Mud), Cove and Kilbronogue are the only others so far.
What establishes a site as a likely ‘early ecclesiastical enclosure?’
The Irish church was dominated by scattered rural monasteries from the sixth century onwards. These were surrounded by large enclosures (varying in diameter from 40 a.m. to 400 M), often circular or oval in plan, and usually far more extensive than the surviving graveyards. In some cases the original bank, fosse or stone wall survives but more often the line of the monastic enclosure (or vallum) is indicated by curving field boundaries, roadways or a laneways. As well as the church and graveyard, these enclosures contained the dwellings, outhouses and workshops of a community, sometimes approaching the size of a town. Because the buildings were constructed of wood nothing survives above ground today; the graveyard often contains the ruin of a mediaeval church. In some cases the surviving burial ground has no inscribed headstones but was used for the burial of unbaptised children during the last few centuries. Bullaun stones and cross-inscribed stones are often found on early church sites while holy wells may be situated close by and retain the name of the saint anciently associated with the site. Unfortunately little of the history of the early church in West Cork has survived and the earliest reference to many of these sites is as late as the 12th century.
The Archaeological Inventory of County Cork, Vol I, West Cork. P 271
So, as you can see, not much normally survives on the surface but a tell-tale sign is a circular or oval enclosure, or (often) two concentric enclosures, with the barely-discernible signs of buildings inside. (Readers may remember the above illustration from my post on Ardpatrick – no sign of a round tower at Croagh, though!).) The memory of these places as once-sacred seems to be retained locally, and led to their use as Cillíní, or Children’s burial grounds in the past. See my post Unknown Souls for more about Cillíní – ‘the loneliest places on earth.’ Thus – small uninscribed headstones peeking out through the grass is an indication that this may be a cillín, and in turn perhaps something more ancient yet.
The original site may have been carved out of the hillside – the flattening process leaving a sharp-edged bank on the sea-ward side (above and below). This reminded us of the similar bank we found at the possible ‘Scoil Mhuire’ site that Robert reported on in his post Schull – Delving into History.
What would such a site have looked like? They varied enormously in size – for example Glenadalough in Wicklow and Kells in Meath would both have been monastic cities. Most, however, and especially in remote places, would have been small religious foundations in which there would be a central church surrounded by an inner wall, and houses and gardens for the monks surrounded by an outer wall.
Nendrum in Co Down shows what a monastic settlement considerably larger than Croagh might have looked like. The Illustration is from The Modern Traveller to the Early Irish Church by Kathleen Hughes and Ann Hamlin
The word reilig (pronounced rellig) is the Irish word for graveyard and it comes from the word for relic. Early sites like this were assumed to have had a founding saint, who gave his or her name to the site. Kilbrown, for example, would be the church of Brón, and he would have been buried on the site – hence the ‘relic’ association. Kilcoe was named for a saintly nun, St Coch. The echoes of the cult of those saints would have remained alive through the centuries in the names of townlands and holy wells.
Possible remains of church at Croagh
The name Croagh, however, is based not on a saint’s name but on the Irish word for a ‘stack’ and may refer to the gentle hill that rises up from the water. It was, and remains, an almost perfect spot to establish a peaceful settlement based around hard work and prayer. There’s a lovely little beach below, so transport and travel was easy by water. It’s in a sheltered haven protected from storms by Long Island off the cost, and from it there’s a good view out to sea (below) so the monks could see Vikings or other raiders coming.
And right across the Cove there’s a ring fort – a cashel, in fact, since it looks like the walls were made of stone (below). It’s a classic – on elevated ground with commanding views all around, out to sea and to the low hills behind. Puzzlingly, this cashel is not recorded by National Monuments. It’s overgrown by bracken so may not have been obvious at the time of the survey.
This juxtaposition, across the cove from each other, of an early-medieval monastic settlement and a fortified residence, leads to speculation as to the relationship between the two. Was the monastery endowed by the local chief, committing the monks to say prayers for his eternal soul in exchange for land and protection? This is certainly a familiar pattern from the later medieval period.
View of the ecclesiastical site from the cashel
This is just a tiny corner of the Mizen. There is much more of interest in this small townland but for today I wanted to focus on these early-medieval sites. In their ruins lie clues to a distant but vibrant past.
There’s a lovely old Church of Ireland church in Rathclaren, between Timoleague and Kilbrittain in West Cork, surrounded by a graveyard. Nowadays, little disturbs the tranquil space, and it’s hard to imagine that a proposal to close this graveyard for reasons of sanitation and overcrowding once created an enormous controversy that pitched Catholics against Protestants, neighbour against neighbour. My attention was caught when the marvellous West Cork History posted about this recently – a huge thank you to Pat!
The lych-gate at the entry to the church is an unusual feature in Ireland, but adds to its overall picturesque appearance
It was all reported with gusto in the Examiner and the Southern Star (which I accessed through that indispensable resource, the Irish Newspaper Archives). The facts of the matter were that Canon Powell, the Church of Ireland Rector, wished to close the graveyard to further burials, claiming that there was a putrid smell and that people came and buried their deceased family members ‘willy nilly’ with little regard for the depth of the grave or the previous occupants. He was supported by Dr Shorten, a medical man and one of his parishioners, who conducted an inspection.
The clock face has an indent – we were told by a local resident that there was an IRA ambush here during the War of Independence and that this is a bullet hole
Now if there’s one thing we know in Ireland it’s that there is a reverence for graves and burial places. This is not new and when word reached the Catholics who had rights of burial in the graveyard, or whose family members were buried in it, there was uproar.
A little background – the graveyard was owned and managed by the Church of Ireland, as were many old graveyards in Ireland. When the Church of Ireland was established, after the Reformation, all church property passed into the hands of the Protestants, to be administered by the local Rector. Everyone, Protestant or Catholic, had to apply for approval for a grave to be dug. Catholics resented this hugely – these had been their churches and their sacred sites, and the memory of their loss and the outlawing of their religion was long and bitter.
The turn of the twentieth century, when the Rathclaren row erupted, was a time of growing nationalistic confidence. Speeches stoking long-held resentments were common. Having been downtrodden for centuries, many Catholics were now fervently embracing aspirations to Home Rule, flocking to Irish language classes, and reading stories of their glorious past as a Land of Saints and Scholars, as well as studying the long history of suppression and colonisation. Somehow, the threat to close Rathclaren graveyard encapsulated for them all that was wrong with the Ireland of 1899.
The church is hundreds of years old but was reconstructed several times. The attractive red brick detail was added in the mid nineteenth century
There were claims and counter claims, all gleefully reported by the newspapers: that the graveyard was full – that there was still lots of room in it; that it was unsanitary and smelly – that the smell was coming from a drain in the Canon’s garden outside the walls; that Catholics dug up old graves with scant regard for public health – that the Canon allowed Protestant burials but denied Catholic interments.
I want to give you a flavour, using select quotes, of a huge public meeting held at the Graveyard on July 31, 1900. The Irish Examiner reported it in full under the title Indignation Meeting. The crowd enthusiastically cheered all the speakers, but ‘groaned’ loudly when Canon Powell drove by in his trap.
The Chairman, who was received with cheers, said although their forefathers met for many a serious purpose they never had to meet for such a purpose as they were assembled there that day for (hear, hear). Although their forefathers were hunted and persecuted, yet the enemy never interfered with their burying places, as they were doing now. It was for the people gathered there to say that that ancient burial ground would not be closed without an effort being made to prevent it: and it would be kept open as long as they had power in their arms to do so (loud cheers). If their forefathers lived they would never allow it to be closed; they would see their own blood run down that hill first (cheers). There were good and true men yet, and they would show by their actions in connection with this matter that there were no unworthy descendants of these sires. There was no use in one or two trying to fight this cause: all the people should stand together. He was sure they would do their part, and they would not be beaten without a hard struggle (cheers).
He could make no better comparison between the state of the graveyard than the comparison between the populous and depopulated parts of the country. Travel through the country, and part of it would be found thickly inhabited, but again there would be found parts of it deserted, turned into cattle ranches and sheep walks, parts where the people had been driven forth to make room for the sheep and the bullocks (groans for the evictor). They would find in the Ireland of the past places where the people had been banished – places in which they had drawn the milk from a fond mother’s breast, and had been bred and reared; in those places, too, could be seen the ruins of the homesteads.
In the days of the past, when the people were oppressed, and when the country was ruined and depopulated; when the people were subject to the most cruel laws and torturous persecutions that any people could be subject to. . . when the people lived continuously in the midst of gloom and tyrannical rulers, it was not known that those who interfered with the land of the living had ever interfered with the land of the dead (loud cheers). The only consolation our fathers had in those oppressed times was that they could claim one spot, at all events, just as much as the biggest man in the land, and that was the spot where their friends and ancestors were buried in the graveyards of Ireland (cheers). If we went further back, when this country was put to the sword by Cromwell, and the people were driven from the four provinces. . .When the people were driven to hell or Connaught. . .but I am sure there are few of the Irish race who were driven into Connaught now in hell but I am not going to say what became of Cromwell (cheers). At any rate, we don’t hear at all that Cromwell ever interfered with the graves of the dead in Ireland.
Though Cromwell spared the graveyards of Ireland, as did other tyrants who oppressed the people, I say here to-day that they dare not face the people possessed of life – the living Irish.
There was much more in this vein at the meeting. Eventually there was a board of inquiry, a proposal was made to buy extra land for an extension of the graveyard and after some missteps this was eventually accomplished. In the meantime, local people carried on burying their dead in defiance of the court order not to, but the police seemed happy to drop charges if they could – see this report from as late as 1904, when the matter was finally declared resolved.
Besides the post on West Cork History, a friend has just now gifted us a set of old OS maps for this area (thank you Noel!). They are large scale and date from 1900 – and here is Rathclaren, clearly showing the church and graveyard as of that date.
However, today there is an addition to the map in the form of a new ‘cemetery’ just to the north of the church. On the Ordnance Survey and the Archaeological maps of Ireland the term ‘Graveyard is defined thus: The burial area around a church.These date from the medieval period (5th-16th centuries) onwards. However, the terms ‘Burial Ground’ and ‘Cemetery” are reserved for An area of ground, set apart for the burial of the dead, not associated with a church. In this case the word cemetery is used to denote a modern burial area which was not originally associated with the church.
Today, this peaceful and beautiful spot seems as if it could never have witnessed any kind of upheaval. Along the road stands the Trinity Holy Well (below, labelled as Tobarnatrinoda on the historic map), still cared for by the community. Both the graveyard and the cemetery are visited by those for whom the history of tumultuous resistance to ‘the oppressor’ has faded and indeed has been mostly forgotten. On the whole, that’s a good thing.
Over the years we have written a lot about stone. That’s not surprising, because our interests in Irish archaeology involve stones: standing stones, stone circles, rock art, gravestones . . . It’s what the surviving history of our earliest dwellers on this island is all about. So I thought it would be a good idea to sift through our Roaringwater Journal photographic library – which goes back a decade – and turn up some pictures and stories which I have never used before: all of them involving stones. That header pic, above, is a boulder burial at Rathruane, just outside our West Cork village of Ballydehob.
Here’s another boulder burial, a long way away in Co Cavan, now surrounded by trees which are probably relatively recent. Finola wrote about this monument type six years ago, and pointed out that they are not well named: when examined archaeologically, very few of these stones have been associated with buried human remains. They are said to have been positioned between 1,500 and 1,000 years BC, a time we refer to as the ‘Bronze Age’. So, by then, humans were already aware of the use of metal for tools, weapons and decorative adornments. But imagine the time before that – when people only had natural materials to hand – wood, vegetation and, of course – if you wanted to create something permanent – stone: we call these times Neolithic – and generally that covers the period of habitation of Ireland from 6,000 BC onwards.
Here is another West Cork site: Breeny More, to the north of Bantry. There’s a whole lot of stones here including, unusually, four ‘boulder burials’ arranged in a square. There are also further stones in this grouping which were once part of a stone circle. The site is magnificently located, with distant views west across to Bantry Bay (below).
We are all familiar with groups of stonesarranged in a circle. Here is the ‘stone circle’ at Ardgroom, County Cork: it’s on the Beara Peninsula. As with the Boulder Burials, these monument types are generally thought to date from the Bronze Age.
These modestly sized ‘five stone’ stone circles are also in County Cork. The National monuments Survey of Ireland lists 53 ‘five stone’ circles in the county, while a further 41 ‘multiple stone’ circles are noted. There are also some anomalies which defy definition, such as ‘The Fingers’ at Knockdrum, West Cork, just outside Castletownshend:
This appears to have been, originally, an alignment of five tall standing stones. One has fallen and broken, while the fifth is now missing. It is reasonable to assume, from the number of stone ‘monuments’ all around us in West Cork (and in many other parts of Ireland), that these sites were of great significance to the populations who constructed them. But we don’t know for sure why they are there – although theories abound.
I am fascinated by the number of single standing stones we come across in our travels. It’s impossible to say how many there are in Ireland – probably thousands. And they can range in size from the large stones – above – in West Cork, to individual examples in moorland or fields, or on roadsides – below.
The Irish word ‘carn’ means a heap or pile of stones, Cairn monuments are mounds of stones, often marking the summit of a significant hill or mountain. They may or may not be ancient, and we have seen them change significantly over time. On Mount Corrin, not far from us in West Cork, there were two cairns only a few years ago. Now there is a single, significant cairn (top pic below): this implies a deliberate ‘re-ordering’ of what was there before. Regardless of their history, they can be visually impressive.
The centre pic above is a small cairn on a Sheep’s Head summit, while the enormous one above is in The Burren, County Clare. The Burren is an extraordinary landscape of exposed limestone. The limestone formed as sediments in a tropical sea which covered most of Ireland approximately 350 million years ago. Today, the Burren supports a remarkable assortment of wild flowers: over 70% of Ireland’s species of flowers are found there, among the ubiquitous stone surfaces.
Ever since humans set foot on Irish soil, they have embraced the stones – both for practical uses such as shelter or enclosure, but also as a means of marking and communicating. Readers will be familiar with our particular interests in Prehistoric Rock Art:
This is an important example of Ireland’s Rock Art, from West Cork, perhaps dating from 5,000 years ago: it was discovered in comparatively recent times. The painting is by Keith Payne, and is an interpretation of this same rock outcrop. We have no evidence that the carvings were ever coloured – or pigmented.
Today we are very familiar with the use of stone as a building material: this practice is likely to have been current since very early times. In Ireland we have many examples of ancient – but undateable – stone buildings. The ‘Oratory’ at Gallurus is a good example of a built enclosure (walls and roof) made entirely from stone. A present day view of it, top, shows this remarkably preserved structure; archaeologists and historians have long debated its age and likely use. The print above dates from 1756.
This is Cork city in the 1940s. The subject of today’s post is a Cork man – the sculptor Séamus Murphy. Born in 1907 near Mallow, Murphy took classes at the Crawford School of Art before apprenticing as a stone carver at O’Connell’s Stone Yard in Blackpool, a parish in the city, for seven years. Murphy and his work could occupy several posts, but today we concentrate on his only architectural building project, the Church of the Annunciation in Blackpool. Séamus Murphy can fairly claim to be the ‘sculptural designer’ of this building – as he conceived the way it would appear – while the architect Edmond Patrick O’Flynn most likely carried out the technical drawings and specifications.
According to the Murphy family, Séamus found inspiration for Blackpool from pictures of churches in South America. In particular, the roughly textured render on the external walls is said to have derived from the adobe finish common in Spanish missionary churches there. The Cork church was commenced in January 1945, and the picture above (courtesy of Cork City Library) dates from around that time. The picture below – also courtesy Cork City Library – shows the dedication ceremony in the church on 7 October 1945.
This picture of Séamus, above, is from the RTE archives. The Blackpool project is a good area of study, as the church shows the sculptor’s ability to conceive large, three-dimensional spaces as well as his skills in producing his own figurative and relief works, a number of which are used in the church furnishings: they are of polished Portland stone.
While the church is a valuable repository of Séamus Murphy’s design and carving skills, the work of many other contemporary artists can also be found in the building. The stained glass windows are from the Harry Clarke Studios, designed by William Dowling.
Particularly striking is the crucifix window at the east end. Above is the original cartoon (courtesy of Trinity College Library Dublin) by Dowling, side-by-side with an image of the window today. All the windows are of fine quality.
A full view of the east end of the church. The interior has changed very little over 77 years and is, therefore, a great tribute to Séamus Murphy and the the commissioning family of William Dwyer, then head of the nearby Sunbeam Wolsey factory. Dwyer funded the whole project as a memorial to his daughter Maeve who had sadly passed away in 1943.
This fine font cover was carved by hand by Bart, a younger brother of Séamus.
Murphy’s Church of the Annunciation is certainly a landmark building – not just for Cork, but for the whole of Ireland. And Séamus himself must rank as one of the outstanding artists of the Free State. You will come across his distinctive work in many locations; I will be directing you to some of them in future posts.
Many thanks to Orla Murphy for giving me valuable insights on her father’s works
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