Lúnasa

A summer storm approaches Rossbrin Cove

Lúnasa – in Ireland it’s the name for the eighth month, and a festival.

August? So that would relate to Lammas in English – the first of August?

Yes, Lammas is supposedly from the Anglo-Saxon Hlafmaesse – meaning ‘Festival of the Loaf’. Here it was traditional to bake bread at Lúnasa – a round loaf, which was cut into four and each quarter was then set in the corners of the barn where the grain would be stored, to ensure a good harvest.

So is Lúnasa the harvest festival?

By some accounts, yes. Although the beginning of August is a bit early for harvesting. Having said that – our music session in Ballydehob last night was temporarily disrupted by the sight and sound of a fleet of huge tractors and a combine harvester thundering through the main street in the dark – yellow lights flashing dramatically: after a prolonged period of hot sunny weather there was a big rain storm forecast, so the farmers were working through the night to get in as much of the crop as possible before the deluge.

And did the rain come?

It did – just in time to dampen the Ballydehob Wooden Boat Festival. But it certainly didn’t put a dampener on the spirit of the event.

A damp Boat Festival in Ballydehob

Is Lúnasa celebrated in Ireland nowadays?

Well – it’s remembered: you may have heard of Brian Friel’s play Dancing at Lughnasa, turned into a film in 1998. It’s set in rural Donegal in the 1930s and poignantly tells of the lives of five women encapsulated through one summer month. It touches on ritual themes and the mixture of superstition and religion which still characterises life in Ireland today.

Now you’ve spelled it differently…

Well spotted! On the calendar it’s usually Lúnasa. It’s suggested that the word Lughnasa harks back to pagan times: there was a god – Lugh – who in Irish mythology led the Tuatha Dé Danann against the Fomorians. After the victory Lugh finds Bres, the half-Fomorian former king of the Tuatha Dé Danann, alone on the battlefield, and Bres begs for his life. If he is spared, he promises, he will ensure that the cows of Ireland always give milk. The Tuatha Dé Danann refuse the offer. He then promises four harvests a year, but the Tuatha Dé Danann say one harvest a year suits them. But Lugh spares his life on the condition that he teach the Tuatha Dé Danann how and when to plough, sow and reap.

That story rather neatly ties up the connection with the harvest… Any more traditions?

August is the holiday month and there are plenty of things happening in Ireland: my favourite is Puck Fair, held every year in Killorglin, County Kerry. I came across it by accident when I was travelling in Ireland some forty years ago; now it’s notorious.

Why?

King Puck (www.abitofireland.com)

Well, the central feature is an enormous Billy Goat, captured in the wilds of the Kerry Mountains. He gets treated royally – literally, as on the first day of the Fair he’s crowned King by a twelve year old girl. He’s then placed in a cage on top of a high platform which looks out over the street fair, which continues for three days.

Puck Fair, Killorglin 1900

That certainly does sound pagan! What happens to King Puck after the Fair?

He goes back to the mountains. It’s not uncommon to see wild Goats up in Kerry.

Sheena Jolley‘s superb study of Kerry Goats

Is there a story attached to King Puck?

Of course… During St Patrick’s travels he reaches the borders of Kerry. He has with him his herd of Goats which give him food and milk. During the night his goats are stolen and this means he can’t go any further (in fact he supposedly then never set foot in Kerry, which means that Kerry people were never converted from their old pagan ways!). ‘…He resolved to detour a community that was so utterly depraved and lacking in hospitality. However, a chieftain from the Barony of Dunkerran saved the day for Kerry. He presented as a gift for the Saint a magnificent Puck-Goat and a hundred of the finest Goats from his herds on the slopes of Glencar highlands. The Saint came no further west, but instead of a malediction he gave to Kerry that benediction that will live forever in the salutations of the Irish Race – “Go mbeannuigh Dia siar sibh”*. Killorglin being the natural centre of defence of the Barony at that time has ever since held the Puck-Goat in the highest esteem, and elevated him to the place of honour for three days each year…’ (Liam Foley – the Kerryman, 1945)

*May God bless you back

And are you celebrating Lúnasa yourself?

We’re off to the Blessing of the Boats this morning in Schull. Then we’re over to Hare Island later on for an evening meal with friends who’ve sailed down to West Cork for the weekend.

Enjoy it!

Ready for the Harvest

Posted on August 3, 2014August 3, 2014
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Sensory Upload

In the words of one of the organisers, Robert and I have been doing a marathon – an arts marathon. The Skibbereen Arts Festival has been running all week and we’ve taken in as many exhibitions, concerts, events and experiences as we could. Last year we missed most of this festival, as we had just arrived and were occupied with settling in. This year we wanted to remedy that.

In the bottling plant*

And what a sensory feast it was: music, art, dance, drama and various items that defied categorisation. There was something for everyone, no matter what your age and taste. We took two days to cover the art walks. There were several pop-up galleries – empty houses converted into pro tem exhibition spaces ideal for the kind of modern installations that leave you scratching your head and worrying that you’re not sophisticated enough. The Working Artist Studios, a building run by artists for artists, had opened all their rooms for the duration of the Festival. Some of the rooms functioned as galleries, while others provided a glimpse into the working process of an emerging canvas.

Works in progress

I want one!

Glimpsed in a studio

Working Artist Studios gallery

In one room we discovered Caoine by a young local woman, Michelle Collins, which explored the ancient practice of keening, the Irish funerary custom of women lamenting over the dead. In a darkened room, among scented candles, we listened to the sorrowful songs and sounds of an age-old tradition. To give you an idea of a keening song, listen to Iarla O Lionaird singing the Lament of the Three Marys, with its repetition of the phrase Óchón agus óchón ó – which can translate as alas and alas, or my grief, my grief.

Old bottling plant

Space transformed

Janet Murran with cacti

At the other end of town an old bottling plant had been cleared out to become a perfect space for showing artists’ work. Several of these exhibitors had graduated from an innovative visual arts degree program offered on Sherkin Island by the Dublin Institute of Technology. We talked to Janet Murran and Donagh Carey who were enthusiastic about their experiences in the Sherkin Program – their work clearly showed mature artists seeking meaning in a variety of media. In one corner an intriguing little installation by Tess Leak featured Haiku written by Sherkin Islanders and inspired by island life. And in an adjacent building photographs, by Yvette Monahan, of Bugarach in France – where a new arcadia was supposed to begin once the world ended on December 21st, 2012. Moody and elegaic, the colour reminded me of the Agfa prints of my youth.

Robert is writing about Canon Goodman – see his post for more on the concert in his honour (and in his church) that has become a staple of this Festival. Another highlight for us was the staging of The Playboy of the Western World by J M Synge, a classic of Irish theatre: one which caused riots when first performed. This was an amateur production but it was hard to tell – the Kilmeen Drama Group had won the All-Ireland Drama finals with this production, had performed it at the Abbey Theatre (Ireland’s National Theatre) and are taking it to New York next. It was superb – full of energy and humour with each line singing with poetic expression.

The Playboy of the Western World

To illustrate the sheer variety of what was on offer we also attended:

Men Without Names: a poignant exploration in poetry and music of the Irish diaspora.

Sunrise/3Epkano: a classic silent movie with soundtrack provided by the group 3Epkano. A surreal experience, different from what I was expecting but in the best way.

The Vespertine Quintet: in the beautiful setting of Lissard House, an afternoon of gentle, haunting, minimalist music from Iceland mixed with baroque.

Croi Glan Dance: I have written about this marvellous dance company before – these two dances looked at the challenges of finding our place in the world and once again brought lumps to our throats.

Croi Glan Dance

Men Without Names

Sunrise/3Epkano

Vespertine Quintet

We couldn’t go to everything and I was sorry to miss the dancing at the crossroads and the sean-nós evening. Sean-nós is a traditional style of highly ornamented unaccompanied singing – here is Nell Ní Chróinín showing how it’s done. There were events for families, a river day, a drama day, outdoor movie screenings…But most of all I was disappointed that Starlight Serenade sold out before I could get a ticket. Moonlight kayaking on beautiful Lough Hyne with musical accompaniment. For a taste of what I missed, take a look at this, and add music.

‘Paddling Through Stars’ on Lough Hyne

Next year! But I might have to call that one Sensory Overload.

*Sorry, I don’t know the name of this artist. Can anyone supply it?

Posted on August 3, 2014
6 Comments

Man of Music

A page from the manuscript of Canon Goodman – Trinity College Library

Long-term readers of our posts will have encountered Canon James Goodman already – in our first post after we moved in to Nead an Iolair we covered the 2013 Canon Goodman Concert, an annual affair which takes place in Abbeystrewry Church, Skibbereen. This means we have lived here for exactly one year now, as the 2014 Concert took place last Sunday. In the intervening 12 months I have researched this Skibbereen hero in greater detail, and he deserves a whole post to himself!

Uilleann Pipes Maestro Liam O’Flynn plays Skibbereen

The Annual Canon Goodman Concert is part of the Arts Festival which Skibbereen hosts every year: Finola has reported fully on this event, which has kept us on our toes for the whole week. Stars of the concert were Liam O’Flynn and Paddy Glackin. I first saw Liam in Exeter back in the 1970s – we’ve both aged a bit since then…

The Canon in Bronze

Canon Goodman’s memorial at Abbeystrewry Church

The Canon is remembered particularly for his expertise in playing the Uilleann Pipes – Ireland’s national instrument. If you’ve never seen this played, have a look and a listen to the extract from the Skibbereen concert below: it is a complex instrument, whose component parts include windbag, bellows, a chanter, drones and regulators – also the piper’s apron (sometimes known as a popping strap), which is a cloth placed on the knee of the player to form a seal with the open end of the chanter – as the lifting of the chanter from the knee is one action which can alter the sounding of the pipe between legato and staccato. It’s hard to simply explain the methodology of the pipes – just consider that the player has to keep the bellows moving with one elbow, maintain correct inflation of the bellows with the other (the Irish píobaí uilleann literally means ‘pipes of the elbows’), use the fingers of both hands to form the melody on the chanter, and to lift it from the knee, and use the wrist or fingers (or, as I have seen on occasion, the end of the chanter) to ‘play’ the regulators, forming chords and adding rhythm – not forgetting to make sure the drones are in tune.

James Goodman was born in 1828 in Ventry, County Kerry – then a Gaeltacht area: he was raised as a native Irish speaker, and this stood him in good stead as, in later life, he became Professor of Irish at Trinity. In his youth he was described as ‘…having an attractive personality and was well-liked and popular…’ He took a great interest in traditional life and, particularly, The Music. He learned to play the flute and the pipes while growing up. His father was Rector of Dingle and, after studying at Trinity, James was himself ordained into the Church of Ireland in 1853, moving with his wife Charlotte to the living of Creagh Parish, between Baltimore and Skibbereen.

The bridge at Creagh

Creagh: River Ilen

In 1860 the Goodman family (by now they had three sons) moved to Ardgroom, also in the Gaeltacht, where he took the post of Curate of Kilaconenagh. While there, he began his collection of Irish traditional melodies, learning hundreds from Tom Kennedy, a blind piper whom he had known back in Ventry. The Goodman Collection is the first great body of Irish traditional music ever to have been gathered: it numbers over 2,300 tunes and songs. For many years these lay dormant in the archives of Trinity College Library and they have only recently been studied and published. Every year at the Skibbereen concert some of the tunes are included in the programme, allowing us to hear the music of Ireland being played just as it was in town and townlands many generations ago.

A story is told of his time in Ardgroom: one weekend an impressive steam yacht anchored in Castletownbere Harbour; on the Sunday, James Goodman was aghast to be told that a distinguished company, including a well-known historian, was coming ashore to attend morning prayer in his church. He felt very nervous at the thought of having to preach to such important people so he delivered his sermon in Irish, knowing that they would not understand it. Shortly afterwards an article appeared in an English periodical stating that Irish was still so much in use in outlying districts in Ireland that it was Customary for clergymen in some Church of Ireland churches to conduct the service in English and to preach in Irish!

Enigma: the register in Abbestrewry Church, showing Canon Goodman as Rector in 1857; his inauguration there wasn’t until 1867

James Goodman returned to the environs of Roaringwater Bay when he was made Rector of Skibbereen and Canon of Ross. His church was Abbeystrewry, which now hosts his memorial concerts. He was responsible for the building we have today: he initiated a project to demolish all but the tower of the old building and provide a modern worship area, and he paid for much of it himself. It was in 1879 that Goodman was appointed Professor of Irish in Trinity College Dublin and combined this position with his clerical duties in Skibbereen, spending half of every year in each location.

Canon Goodman’s Church in Skibbereen

Abbeystrewry Church

The Canon died in 1896 and was buried, at his own request in Creagh – his first living. Finola and I searched out the burial ground and his grave. We had previously glimpsed the four pinnacles of the Church of Ireland tower rising mysteriously among the trees on the banks of the Ilen river: when we walked down the long green trackway that is the only access we were struck by how beautiful and yet how poignant the place is.

Side by side are Catholic and Protestant churches – both in ruins. The gravestones give away which is which: old Irish names define the former, and the church there has returned almost completely back to nature. The Protestant church still stands, but its windows are uselessly boarded up: there are holes in the roof and the crumbling building is prey to the weather. There is an inescapable air of desolation at the site, yet the nearby newer burial ground beside the water is idyllically located and wonderfully peaceful.

Creagh Church rises mysteriously above the trees

Canon Goodman wrote of his life: …ionnus nach raibh aon nidh dob annsa liomsa óm óige, ná bheith ag éisteacht le seaneachtraighthe agus sgéalta fiannuigheachta; ná ceól ba bhinne am chluais ná ceol sármhilis na hÉirionn. (…so that there was nothing dearer to me from my youth than to be listening to the old tales of adventure and the stories of Fionn, nor any music sweeter in my ears than the surpassingly sweet music of Ireland). The story goes that James Goodman was buried at Creagh along with his own Uilleann pipes: in the silence of the place we had a good listen…

Playboy…

While Goodman was Professor at Trinity he had a student who became renowned: John Millington Synge. Synge was also an Irish scholar and spent much time in the Gaeltacht – particularly in the Aran Islands. It was there he wrote his most famous work, The Playboy of the Western World. Finola has already mentioned that this was also performed – superbly – during the Skibbereen Arts Festival this year: a treat for us – and for the Canon, perhaps.

Posted on July 27, 2014
3 Comments

Fit-up

Summer Evening on Sherkin

Theatre is alive and well in Ireland. If we went to every play that’s put on within a twenty kilometre radius of Nead an Iolair all through the year we’d be exhausted. Every community seems to have its own acting group, while professional companies are always coming out to the wilds to perform in front of usually packed and enthusiastic audiences. Venues don’t get much wilder than the Community Hall on Sherkin Island, a small space beside an even smaller public library, both of which look out on to the idyllic view above.

Crossing over

Crowds outside the Hall

Sherkin Library

We went out on the late ferry to Sherkin recently to catch the West Cork Fit-up Theatre Festival’s production of Beowulf: The Blockbuster. The Beowulf story I know well: my good friends Michael and Wendy Dacre, back in Devon, have it in their repertoire and I have thoroughly enjoyed Michael’s renditions of some of the early English words accompanied by Wendy’s shadow pictures and songs. But this version was very different – written and performed by one man, Irish Times Theatre Award winning actor Bryan Burroughs and developed and directed by Edinburgh First Fringe winner David Horan. The story – commonly cited as one of the most important works of Anglo-Saxon literature – dates from before 1000 AD (there is a written version from that time in the British Museum). Bryan Burroughs sets it in a present day context: a father dying from cancer has a last chance to connect with his son, a boy with a fim-soaked imagination, and uses Beowulf to capture the boy’s attention.

Sherkin gave the performance a deserved double standing ovation. We were bowled over by it. Here on this little shard of land in the far west of Ireland we had seen an epic tale enacted without any scenery: we had witnessed the Scandinavian warrior Beowulf defeating Grendel, a horrific swamp demon and then killing an even more terrifying monster – Grendel’s mother. All this on the floor of the unadorned Community Hall, the only ‘props’ being coloured lights.

Bryan Burroughs

Minimalist Beowulf

It’s sobering, perhaps, to think that this same production received rave reviews in New York: ‘PHANTASMOGORIC…dazzling, poignant…’ announced the New York Times, while the Sunday Times gave it 5 stars and said ‘…an utterly compelling, comic and vibrant one-man stage phenomenon…’ and here we were in faraway West Cork, where the Fit-up Festival is an annual event: it’s based on an ancient tradition – travelling players calling in on small communities and transforming a yard, a pub or just someone’s back room into a world stage. Fit-up means exactly what it says – ‘fitting up’ the space whatever its limitations, and the term goes back a very long way.

An early reference to ‘Fit-up’ in England

Of the Edwardian era, the Cambridge History of British Theatre says: ‘…Towns too small for a theatre building might be visited by a portable theatre for a couple of weeks or even a season, or a fit-up company would play in a hall of some sort – two-night stands mostly; a melodrama one night, a farce the next, and then up and away…’

Outside of our own Fit-up, Beowulf has inspired a large corpus of literature, critique and media retellings. Most notable, probably, is Seamus Heaney’s translation, pretty faithful to the Anglo-Saxon original. The fairly recent film versions have some entertainment value but don’t expect too much from their interpretations of the old texts.

Original Beowulf manuscript

Illuminated Beowulf

21st Century Beowulf

It was a little surreal, leaving the island after such a memorable experience and returning in the dark across the water to Baltimore, where the holiday atmosphere was in full swing – rather untypical of our normal West Cork experiences…

Summer night in Baltimore

Just to finish, here’s a snippet worth listening to: an RTE sound documentary of reminiscences around the old ‘Roadshows’ in Bray, Co Wicklow in the middle of the last century – very much the spirit of the Fit-ups… Finola remembers them well!

Posted on July 27, 2014July 27, 2014
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Out and About with Visitors in West Cork

At Coppinger’s Court

Vi and Grant and Jan and Brian came to stay last week – good friends from Canada here to see the Real Ireland.

We had some challenges right away. First, the rental car Grant had booked was under repair and the substitute, although it nominally held all six of us, was too cramped and uncomfortable to venture too far afield. Second, muscle wear and tear issues among the group dictated that walks not be too long or arduous.

On the Sheep’s Head

Vi conquers the ridge

No problem! The weather was (mostly) fine, we got in one good hike on the Sheep’s Head, and then set about discovering the delights of flatter terrain, local amenities and cultural events. Robert and I hadn’t toured Bantry House before, although we had been there for concerts. The house will be a future post in itself, but for the moment it’s worth recording that this may be the last summer to see it with its original furniture, as much of it is on the auction block later this year.

Tea on the terrace

Image from Bantry House Website

The grounds

One day we spent exploring the area south east of Skibbereen. We started with lunch at Glandore overlooking the harbour, then on to the obligatory stop at the Drombeg Stone Circle, one of the better-know recumbent stone circles that dot West Cork. On to Coppinger’s Court (another subject for a full post), a 17th century fortified house and home to one of the fearsome characters in West Cork history. Back then to Castletownshend and dinner in Mary Anne’s, followed by a concert in the little church of St Barrahane’s. This was an evening of Beethoven, Debussy and Rachmaninov with Christopher Marwood of the Vanbrugh Quartet on the cello, and the brilliant young American Alexander Bernstein on the piano. It was truly a world-class performance, eliciting a standing ovation from the appreciative audience.

At Drombeg, Jan and Brian

Concert In St Barrahane’s, Castletownshend

Another day, we wandered around Schull, dipping into the shops and stopping for coffee. Later that evening we attended PlayActing Theatre’s two one-woman shows in the local parish hall. Karen Minihan brought us up to date with her character, Eileen, going through a midlife crisis – it was moving, sad and funny all at once. Then Terri Leiber took us into the experience of eight-year-old Stacey negotiating the dysfunctional lives of the adults around her in 1960s Britain – a tour de force in which she played every role, with a minimalist stage set, a soundtrack from the times, and a beautiful nuanced performance.

Terri Leiber in May the Force

Shopping at the local markets always makes food preparation easier and fresher and we all took turns.

He’s got a photo of his happy pig on his phone

It was delicious!

Selecting the ingredients

In Baltimore, we walked out to the Beacon, with its marvellous views of Sherkin Island and the faraway mountains of Kerry. We hope it’s a good memory to take away of this special part of Ireland.

At the Baltimore Beacon

Vi and Grant, Jan and Brian – Ferdia has been missing you already!

Ferdia

Posted on July 20, 2014September 11, 2014
10 Comments

Ogham

Captured! Ogham stones held in iron bands at UCC

The Scythian King Fénius Farsaid lived at the time of the building of the Tower of Babel – some stories suggest that he had a hand in its construction. He gathered around him a group of scholars and methodically researched the new languages which were being spoken by the dispersed builders of the tower. Their work produced four languages: Hebrew, Greek, Latin and – the most sophisticated – Ogham.

Thus was the story that the bards of old related to explain the carvings on Ogham Stones (sometimes spelled Ogam but always pronounced oh-am) which are found in northern Europe, the greatest number being in the South West of Ireland.

King Fénius named each of the letters of the Ogham alphabet after his best scholars – 25 in all. The ‘letters’ are in fact simple lines inscribed on stone, either on opposite sides of a vertical line or on each side of a sharp corner of stone – the position and angle of each line defining the letter. Words are read starting at the bottom, going up the left side of the line or corner and coming down on the other side, and are generally thought to represent names, suggesting that the inscribed stones are memorials.

Ballycrovane – the tallest Ogham Stone in the world is in West Cork

If you subscribe to the King Fénius theory of Ogham Stones (and why wouldn’t you?) you might wonder why historians place them in the early medieval period (4th to 9th centuries) and associate them with Christianity. Many of them appear to have been inscribed on older standing stones, including the gigantic megalith at Ballycrovane, overlooking Kenmare Bay and 5.3 metres tall.

An Ogham tray by Danny

Ogham is not a forgotten language: it is a saleable item of Irishness. But, consider – quite apart from the many examples of Ogham stones which remain in the wild there are those which are kept in captivity. Take a look in the Stone Corridor at University College Cork – there is a remarkable collection there, a collection that raises questions in my mind: why have the stones been removed from their original siting? Is that an archaeologically sound thing to do – to take them from their historic context and chain them up so unnaturally in a long, dark and urban corridor? If it’s time to give the Elgin Marbles back to Athens then it’s certainly got to be appropriate to redistribute the Ogham stones (and the other inscribed stones and Rock Art that are in the Corridor) back to their natural habitats – in the wilds of West Cork…

In its rightful place: Maulinward Ogham Stone near Durrus (front and back)

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