West Cork Blog

Vallancey: the Collectanea, End of Vol I and Part of II

Remember I told you that Vallancey was not above publishing the work of others, and omitting the name of the author, thus giving the impression that he had written it?  Was this deliberate or not? Were the standards of plagiarism the same then as they are now?  He does give a kind of attribution in Vol II, below, but it’s not precise.

The second part of Vol I begins with just such a treatise: Dissertations on the National Customs and State laws of the Ancient Irish. However, although no author is given, implying this was Vallancey’s work, in fact it was written by John O’Brien, Catholic Bishop of Cloyne and Ross from 1747 to 1767, and originally titled A Critico-Historical Dissertation concerning the Antient Irish Laws, or National Customs, called Gavel-Kind, and Thanistry, or Senior Government. O’Brien was a considerable scholar, author of one of the earliest Irish-English Dictionaries (below). [Most of the illustrations in this blog post are not from the Collectanea.]

Although this is all about gavelkind – the Irish custom that dictated how land was divided between male heirs, the first section is devoted to how succession works in various countries (much talk about the Franks) and to the exclusion of daughters from succession and inheritance. Yes – those of you who think that women had more agency and autonomy in ancient Ireland than in other cultures, should bear in mind that this was a deeply patriarchal society. Here’s what O’Brien has to say about succession and property rights for women:

No inasmuch as I have treated the good old ladies of antient times with all the severity of the primitive maxims by excluding them from the enjoyment of all landed properties, it is fit and decent, that before I take my leave, I should provide for them otherwise in some becoming manner; their fortunes and natural establishments were not the less secure for such an exclusion, they were under no necessity of providing a marriage portion to attract courtiers, or satisfy husbands; on the contrary their husbands were obliged to portion and endow them according to the wise maxims of the primitive times, and without this condition they could obtain no female conforts. Women were therefore as earnestly courted and demanded in disinterested marriage in those days, as they are now haunted and in some countries run away with for their fortunes, more than for any conjugal affection. And hence we may assure ourselves the unfortuned good women of antient times found the marriage state much happier, then some of our modern ladies find it with all their thousands.

In short – the ladies, like the delightful one below*, should count themselves lucky!

He finally gets down to describing how gavel worked. Several forms existed but all consisted of dividing the property between sons or brothers. He asserts this was common in many countries – or antient lands – and also describes the practice of tanistry, whereby clan chiefs and their successors were chosen. Page after page is devoted to Scythians, Egyptians, Franks, Saxons, etc as precedents, showing it to be a common form of inheritance in the ancient world. This seems to be in service of counteracting the English prejudice agains it as barbarous and conflict-promoting. Clovis is mentioned, Gregory of Tours, the Visigoths and Vandals . . . O’Brien was obviously a man after Vallancey’s heart.

Chap 2 deals with all the tributes due to the king or chief (Above*) and his fiscal rights.  The king or chief was NOT king or chief until inaugurated. I was surprised to find that the traffic went both ways – the king bestowed gifts on the chiefs within his sphere of influence and received tribute from them in turn.

For example the King of Munster (or Cashel) paid to the Dal-Cassian king 

10 golden cups,  30 golden-hilted swords, 30 horses in rich furniture, 10 coats of mail, 2 cloaks richly adorned, 2 pairs of chess boards of curious workmanship

Another one mentions 

10 men slaves, 10 women slaves,10 golden cups, 10 horses in full furniture

The King of Cashel, in return, received from his subject chiefs large gifts of livestock – bullocks, milch cows, hogs, weathers and beehives, along with, for some reason, many cloaks, some specifically described as scarlet.

The King also paid visits to other kings, as a constitutional cement of mutual friendship and harmony between the princely chiefs of the Irish republic (sic), and as a mark of their political dependence on each other for the common interest and welfare. The photo above sets out some of those kingly visits and what was involved for the visitor and the host. Lots of mentions of cups – perhaps like this one from the Hunt Museum Collection?

The second part of this Treatise is essentially a history of the O’Brien’s of Munster, offered as an illustration  of the laws of Tanistry. It certainly offers many examples of conflict and treachery in the line of succession! And once again it wanders all over Europe and the ancient world as it traces the origin of the practice

The final, and most interesting part of Vol 1 is about the Brehon Laws. This part indeed may have been by Vallancey. It consists of a number of fragments (above and below), originally collected by Edward Lhwyd (1660-17090, below) one of the earliest antiquaries to visit Ireland, document ancient sites and collect textual material.

The section consists of individual laws, mostly pertaining to the value and goods and therefore the fines that were to be levied if something was stolen. 

My favourites of these has to do with the value of the clothing of a poetess or the wife of a bard – three milk cows, apparently. However, if the clothing is embroidered the value goes up. For work properly done and completely finished, the reward is an ounce of silver. More is to be paid for extraordinary work in proportion. However, beware – if she be divorced for adultery this law is reversed and the woman must pay two thirds of the said value.

Having spent so much time on Vol 1, I am going to gallop, if I can, through Vol II. It starts with an essay called Brehon Laws and Gavel Kind Explained. This is mainly a  defence agains the accusation by English of ‘barbarous’ customs’ and dwells on obscure points of orthography, such as when the letter P was introduced to Irish. It also deals with more of the practice of gavelkind, the exclusion of women, where else it was practiced and uses the marvellous term Strongbonian for the Anglo Norman settlers. 

An Inquiry Into the First Inhabitants of Ireland follows. This is where Vallancey introduces his claim that the first Irish Irish were Phoenicians. I have dealt with this in the first post so I will not cover this in detail. 

The next section was written by Edward Ledwich another of the early Irish antiquaries – see my post on the marvellous Monaincha for more about Ledwich. What’s fascinating about this is that Ledwich and Vallancey were subsequently at war with each other and Ledwich had views that were just as biased and erroneous as Vallancey’s.

For more on Ledwich see the The Dictionary of Irish Biography entry, which has this to say:

Ledwich afterwards openly and very strongly opposed Vallancey’s views on ancient Irish history, particularly his beliefs about the Phoenician origins of the Irish people. Ledwich was convinced that the ancient Irish had been as barbarous as the scanty Greek and Roman descriptions suggested; that they originated in Scandinavia; and that English colonisation had brought to the island such civilisation as it had subsequently enjoyed. Both Vallancey and Ledwich, along with Charles O’Conor (qv) of Belanagare and William Burton Conyngham (qv), were founder members (1779) of the Hibernian Antiquarian Society, which collapsed in 1783 in the bitter disagreements between Vallancey and Ledwich.

The piece on round towers was written by Ledwich, (although these illustrations are from his later Antiquities of Ireland) presumably before the great falling out between the two men. Whereas Vallancey saw round towers as observatories for an astral, or sun-worshipping, cult that had been brought to Ireland by the Phoenicians, Ledwich believed that the round towers were Danish works. In fact, he was as obsessed with the Danes as Vallancey was with the Phoenicians. They were built, he says as ‘watch towers against the natives’, thus neatly upending the most common belief in Ireland about round towers – that they were watch towers against Viking Raids. (In fact they were bell towers, but that’s another story.) Here, Ledwich obliquely refers to Vallancey’s work that towers were erected by Phoenicians and says ‘this description is plainly the work of fancy’.

Ledwich was convinced that nothing of any architectural value could have been constructed by the Irish themselves. Reading his argument (and Vallancey’s) I was struck by how it foreshadows the pseudo-archaeolologists who claimed that big impressive monuments must be the work of superior races – people like Von Daniken in his Chariots of the Gods in the 60s who assigned them to aliens, or more recently the conspiracy theorist, inexplicably given a platform by Netflix, Graham Hancock. Hancock’s series Ancient Apocalypse tries to find a race of Ice Age people who must have constructed many of the ancient monuments (or even odd geographical features) around the world. Hancock (‘I’m just asking questions’) is a true inheritor of the nuttiness and hubris of both Vallancey and Ledwich. Later, Ledwich felt sufficiently incensed by Vallancey’s theories to say this, in his Antiquities of Ireland:

No wonder they were at war! Can anyone translate the Latin? I suspect it’s a further insult. I do absolve Vallancey, by the way, of the baser motivations visible in Ledwich and Hancock – that is, a racist and colonial ideology that sees indigenous people as incapable of building impressive monuments. No – Vallancey had no difficulty at all in promoting the ancient Irish as one of the great and noble races.

I’ll leave you with this view of Cashel from Ledwich’s Antiquities of Ireland. Despite all my best intentions of getting through several volumes, I am still only half way through Vol 2 of 5. Any suggestions, dear readers, on how I can wrap this up so that I can get my life back?

*Kostüme der Männer und Frauen in Augsburg und Nürnberg, Deutschland, Europa, Orient und Afrika available here.

Vallancey: The Collectanea, Vol 1

Though often derided by his contemporaries and later critics for his more outlandish theories, Vallancey arguably did more than almost anyone else in the late 18th and early 19th century to stimulate interest in Irish archaeology and history. Much of this was accomplished through the essays and papers he published in his Collectanea, through which he reached an educated audience.

Let’s take a deeper dive into the Collectanea (pronounced, I have found, collecTAYnea) now. But be warned – these are  my own quirky interests on display here, not a scholarly analysis. I can’t always account for what catches my attention, but isn’t that the real delight of browsing a set of volumes like this – the treasures you will unearth? The other pleasure is just holding it – the feel and smell of such old books, and getting used to the typeface. 

There’s another reason too – the provenance of the set. Hidden inside Volume IV is a telling letter (above) that proves that this set originally belonged to Abraham Abell (1783 – 1851). A vital figure in the antiquarian community of Cork, Abell was  a true eccentric who amassed an enormous library, burnt it all in 1848, and then started again to amass thousands more. In his retirement, he rented a room in the Cork Institute (now the Crawford Art Gallery) where he lived out the rest of his days with his thousands of books stacked from floor to ceiling.

We know that this set of the Collectanea belonged to his first library since it was given to him in 1841 by John Bennett, and that somehow it was not consumed in the burning. I have read two accounts of the burning – one that he did it in a depressive episode, the other that he did it to make room so he could start afresh. However it happened, it’s a minor miracle that the set has survived that cataclysmic event.

Vol 1 begins with A Chorographical Description of the County of West-Meath,1682, by Sir Henry Piers, accompanied by a map of the county. Vallancey published this in 1770 and it is likely that the map dates to then rather than the 1680s, when map-making was far more rudimentary. Chorography, a word not much in use nowadays refers, according to Wikipedia, to the art of describing or mapping a region or district.

While some of the introduction especially refers to the geographical features of the country, much of it, in fact is made up of descriptions of customs, ancient battles, significant places (e.g. Cat’s Hole Cave), ruined monasteries and saints, ways of making a living, and accounts of the degenerate English and oppressive landlords.

Piers belongs in the ranks of those who believe the English civilised the Rude and Barbarous Irish, although he admits that some are not quite civilised to this day. By degenerate, Piers meant Englishmen who had ‘gone native’, married Irish women, spoke Irish and fostered their children with Irish families. From men this metamorphosed, he queries, What could be expected? He admits that English Kings neglected Ireland and that there was substantial corruption among officers of justice. The Irish, he says are given to learning and hospitality and the women are generally beautiful, and love highly to set themselves out in the most fashionable dress they can attain. However, the landlords of old, by which he presumably means the Irish clan heads, were and still are great oppressors of their tenants.

He describes agricultural practices (very dysfunctional and leading to many quarrels) and Bearded Owen’s Law, by which shares in bog-cutting are apportioned, and the practice of driving the cattle through water once a year. Marriages (above) are negotiated between parents and friends on each side. He writes about the May bush, bonfires on St John’s Eve, wakes more befitting heathens than Christians, and the practice of the Month’s Mind (below) which involved a great feast and many masses said in the house, after which every priest and friar is discharged with his largess.

I’ve only picked out a few details from the essay on Westmeath, but you can see from these examples what an incredibly valuable this resource is. We have very few descriptions like this of what life was like in 17th century Ireland, and the fact that Vallancey recognised its importance and published it says much about his appreciation for Irish customs and lore.

The second document is a Letter from Sir John Davis written to Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury (above) in 1607. This was shortly after the Battle of Kinsale (1601) which marked the end of the power of the old Gaelic families. In this letter, Davis describes the state of the counties of Monaghan, Fermanagh and Cavan, in preparation for a visit by the earl. 

In 1607 Hugh O’Neill (above) had been restored to his estates in Tyrone following the Treaty of Mellifont, but was to lead his followers into exile in 1607, an act known as The Flight of the Earls. This cleared the way for the English to plan a plantation – the Plantation of Ulster became in effect what established the modern jurisdiction of Northern Ireland. And that’s exactly what is described in the letter – who owns what land (including clerical lands) and what should be done with it. It’s crucial to understanding the development of modern Ulster. That’s a plantation map, below, but not from this volume. It lays out what land the haberdashers could have, or the skinners or the drapers.

And next – who have we here? It’s none other than Archbishop James Ussher (1581 – 1656), later the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland. This is the same man who established to his own satisfaction that the world was created on 6 pm on 22 October 4004 BC. Harmless speculation, you say? Alas not so – there are many people in the world today who still believe this, and it was certainly a commonplace belief up to the 20th century.

[Aside – what is extraordinary to me is that Trinity College still has his portrait proudly on display (below) in their Exam Hall. Meanwhile, George Berkeley is being erased from their history – correctly, perhaps – but for the same crime of being ‘a man of his time.’]

Ussher’s piece was written originally written in his own hand in 1609. It is titled Of the Origin and First Institution of Corbes, Erenachs, and Termon Lands. All these were common terms on the early Irish monastic system, to denote land holdings and those who held them. For example, a Termon was thought to be a sanctuary, hence the town of Termonfeckin was originally Tearmon Feichín, or St Feichín’s Sanctuary. Corbe was more usually given as Coarb. In the period following the dissolution of the monasteries, and the plantations that followed the Battle of Kinsale, there was a need to define these terms so that the land could be divided among English settlers. This is a very difficult treatise, written half in Latin, which lays out the meaning and origin of the terms and also the men who held the lands, to whom they paid rents or annuities, or owed labour. Ussher disingenuously disclaims any interest in this treatise besides having described without any partiality the meaning of the terms.

However, a little reading in the late lamented Peter Harbison’s Cooper’s Ireland yields the information that Ussher, in fact, had possession of Termonfeckin. Here’s what Harbison says: 

This ‘palace’, referred to as ‘Termonfechan’ by Austin Cooper, was named after a monastery that once stood on this site, founded by Saint Fechín of Fore in the seventh century.

But the reason why the primate – that is, the Archbishop of Armagh – should have a palace here at all was not out of homage for this early Irish saint. It had much more to do with the religious politics of the later mediaeval period, when the Archbishop – usually an Englishman by birth – was surrounded by native Irish whose language he did not understand. He felt much safer when he could get away from his See at Armagh and reside at Terminfeckin, the southernmost tip of his Archdioceses, and its nearest point to the centre of English power in Dublin some 35 miles away.

The siege mentality of those within is reflected in the small, defendable window slits inserted in the severe looking wall face, as seen in Coopers drawing…Its last inhabitant had been…Archbishop James Ussher.

A Short Account of Two Ancient Instruments, by Vallancey follows. Here we can see many references to Phoenicians and Egyptians. He had recourse to the writings of Homer to inform us that the weapons of the Trojan war were made of copper, thus, of course, implying a Classical date for them. He rambles on about Sabean priests, Arkite forms of worship and fire feasts of Baal, before finally getting to describe the instruments – neither of which appear relevant to the previous discourse. In this case, the instrument are of silver. There is no attempt to interpret their use, and they certainly don’t look like musical instruments but rather perhaps cloak fasteners. 

I had intended to cover all of Vol 1 in this post, but I am not even half-way through. I will have to get a lot better at skimming and summarising if I am ever to emerge from this mountain. But I am hoping that this gives you a flavour of not only the diversity but also the value of the Collectanea. In the first 250 pages alone we have had original documents, not by Vallancey (except for the ‘Instruments’) but collected and published by him, that are invaluable to the understanding of Irish history and culture. This – the collecting, preserving and publishing important documents, as well as listing where others can be found (see Part 1) – may in fact have been his greatest contribution to Irish scholarship. 

I’ll finish with an illustration from one of the Volumes – it is not identified and is certainly not by Vallancey. In fact it looks like one of Beranger’s. Perhaps one of our readers might know what ruin this is. [EDIT: identified! See comments below] The lead image, by the way – the portrait of Vallancey, is taken from VH Andrews’ essay on Charles Vallancey and the Map of Ireland (see previous post) and is described as from an oil painting by Solomon Williams.

Charles Vallancey: A Colossus and his Collectanea

General Charles Vallancey, in the words of one of his biographers, ‘bestrode the world of Irish antiquarians for almost half a century.’ *

His origins are shrouded in mystery – although he is believed to have been born in Flanders to a French family, moved to England as a child, and attended Eton, there is no absolute proof of any of these facts of his early life. Even the date of his birth is contested – any time between 1720 and 1726. What is certain is that he joined the army, was posted to Ireland before 1760 as a military engineer, and spent the rest of his life, until his death in 1812, engaged with many aspects of Ireland, the country that one writer has called the great love of his life. Given that he had three wives (or maybe four) and twelve children (or maybe only 10, or maybe 15), that’s quite an assessment.

Dublin’s oldest bridge still in use, photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. It was designed by Vallancey and originally called the Queen’s Bridge, but re-labelled the Queen Maeve Bridge after independence, and eventually the Mellows Bridge

As a military engineer, Vallancey made real contributions: mapping and surveying large tracts of Ireland including the bogs and the canal systems; proposing a major transport route for Cork which, had it been realised, would have greatly aided trade and commerce in Ireland; building strong defences, such as on Spike Island; designing elegant bridges, and supervising the construction of an earlier version of the famous Dun Laoghaire Pier.

His cartographic achievements have been praised by experts – the extract above from a map of Tipperary is from Charles Vallancey and the Map of Ireland** by JH Andrews, our foremost cartographic historian who notes that Vallancey’s cartographic achievements were far from negligible. He made copies, in Paris, of the Down Survey Maps that had been lost to Ireland when they were captured by the French in 1707 en route from London to Dublin (unfortunately, those copies were destroyed in the Four Courts Fire of 1922).

But it was as an antiquarian that Vallancey made his greatest, and most controversial mark. He was a member, sometimes a founding member, of the serious societies of the time – the Dublin Society, the Royal Irish Academy and its important Committee of Antiquities, and the short-lived Hibernian Society of Antiquarians. Nevin tells us that at least three academic honours were conferred on Vallancey in the 1780s. He received an LLD from Dublin University in 1781 and became a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1784: he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1786. Even the French Academy of Belles-Lettres and Inscriptions honoured him.

Unusually for the English and the landed classes living in Ireland at that time, he learned Irish. This allowed him to become familiar with the ancient manuscripts and annals which were being discovered and conserved at the time, and to translate some of them, including fragments of the Brehon Laws. It also led to his interest in Ogham, an alphabet used for inscriptions in stone in a form of Old Irish and he recorded examples of Ogham and reported on others.

His interest in antiquities, fostered by his extensive travels around the Island,  led him to record and draw many, including early plans of Newgrange, and to support the efforts of others, including Beranger, and perhaps Bigari, to record them. In some cases, Vallancey’s drawings are the only early records we have of some monuments.

Most importantly, Vallancey, even if he didn’t always get it right, strove to establish for Ireland and the Irish, a noble heritage, far from the view of most Englishmen at the time of a benighted people speaking a savage tongue. In this, he prefigured the work of Petrie, Wilde, Windel and others to show how the Irish past, and incredible heritage of archaeology, language and mythology, could stand against that of any civilisation. 

His least known but most important contribution to Irish scholarship was his Rerum Hibernicarum, Scripti, et Impressi. This is a handwritten

alphabetical list of material relating to Irish history divided into two sections; a list of manuscripts held in multiple archives and a supplementary list of printed works. The volume is undated, but as the most recent printed work cited is from 1777 the compilation was probably made shortly after this time.

Taking the long way home: the perambulations of Harvard MS Eng 662, Rerum Hibernicarum, Scripti et Impressi, by Charles Vallancey

Dr David Brown

The Rerum Hibernicarum disappeared – it had an interesting journey, entertainingly told by David Brown in his essay for the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland, in which a digital copy now resides. An incredibly valuable piece of research, it was the seminal book that initiated a more rigorous approach to Irish studies in the nineteenth century by providing sources for Irish manuscripts, folklore and language to the next generation of antiquarians. Brown says:

All four men, Larcom, Todd, O’Donovan and O’Curry, were committed members of the Royal Irish Academy, the institution Vallancey had co-founded in 1785. Together, this quartet placed Irish studies on a scientific basis and at the centre of Ireland’s main places of scholarship.

Vallancey’s best known work was his Collectanea de rebus hibernicis – Collection of Irish Matters. It is also his most complex and most characteristic – containing as it does a staggering variety of materials, much of it written by him. It contains work by others too, sometimes credited and sometimes presented as if written by Vallancey. He published it himself in limited editions, so that now it is very rare. 

I am honoured to have been entrusted with a set to examine and write about, by Inanna Rare Books and have spent many happy hours browsing through the volumes. Reading it thus, from cover to cover, I began to see how enormously clever he was – and how obsessed, as he returns again and again to his favourite theme: that the Irish were a noble race descended from the ancient Phoenicians.

In this pursuit, Vallancey was not merely riding a personal hobby horse. In fact, he was very much in the mainstream of European intellectual thought. Vallancey believed that the Irish people were descended from the Scythians, Phoenicians, and Indians, and he used linguistic analysis, comparative mythology, and archaeological evidence to support his claims. In his essay, Phoenician Ireland: Charles Vallancey (1725–1812) and the Oriental Roots of Celtic Culture, Bernd Roling posits that Vallancey’s work, while ultimately based on speculation, reveals the powerful influence of ‘orientalizing’ models of history that were popular in the 17th and 18th centuries. He argues that Vallancey’s work is not simply a collection of outlandish ideas but rather a reflection of the enduring influence of ‘baroque’ antiquarianism and its commitment to finding connections between cultures and languages, even if these connections were ultimately based on speculation and incomplete understanding of the past.

Perhaps it was his enthusiasm for technology and the continuous journeys through Ireland required by his work that led Vallancey to find there the great love of his life of his life, namely Ireland herself. . . 

In the eighteenth century Ireland was not the centre of the world. It was a land dominated and exploited by England, with a rural population who were regarded as barbarians at best by the gentlemen at home in the clubs and coffee houses of England’s cities. For them, the native language of the Irish was no more than an incomprehensible squawking that needn’t be accorded any further significance. Would it not, then, be a magnificent surprise, almost a humbling of Anglophile arrogance, if the Irish turned out to be the descendants of the ancient Chaldees, Phoenicians, Scythians and Indians, the crowning jewel in a chain of heroic acts reaching back into a prehistory, which was able to supersede any other chain of historical events? Would it not be a wonder if the Land of Saints and Scholars, with its ancient monuments, poetry and songs, were the final record of a primordial European people whose wisdom united the learning of the whole ancient East?

Yes, indeed, Vallancey, himself a bit of an outsider, was consumed with the need for that humbling of Anglophile arrogance. Unfortunately, as with anyone blindly obsessed with a cause, and simultaneously lacking self-doubt, this led him into many false conclusions and leaps of imagination in his interpretations of how Irish Gaelic related to ancient and oriental languages. His philological arguments were thoroughly debunked, starting almost immediately upon publication. 

And it wasn’t just language – he had equally startling views about round towers, proposing that they were built by Scythians. He suggested that they were part of the “Scytho-Phoenician settlement of Ireland” and linked to ancient Chaldean religion. He drew on the work of other scholars to support his argument, citing the discovery of similar towers, called misgir or “fire towers,” in the Volga region formerly inhabited by the Bulgars. Vallancey also referenced Geoffrey Keating’s account of a druid named Midghe, who supposedly taught the Irish the use of fire during the third invasion by the followers of Nemed (from the Book of Invasions, a mythological origin story for Irish History). This association with fire, combined with the architectural similarities to the towers in the Volga region, led Vallancey to believe that the round towers served as observatories for an astral, or sun-worshipping, cult that had been brought to Ireland by the Phoenicians.

Similarly, with ogham, an early Irish script mainly found carved into standing stones, he argued that the word ogham itself was derived from Sanskrit, meaning ‘sacred or mysterious writing or language’ and pointed to the visual similarities between ogham and the Old Persian cuneiform script found at Persepolis as further evidence of an oriental connection. This view aligned with his broader theories about the druids as practitioners of a sophisticated astral cult with origins in Chaldea and connections to the Indian Brahmans

His research on ogham was extensive, including the study of ogham inscriptions and the publication of scholarly articles and drawings of ogham stones in his Collectanea de Rebus Hibernicis. Next week, we will take a deep dive into that Collectanea. Meanwhile, I’ll try to figure out how to pronounce that word correctly.

*General Charles Vallancey 1725-1812 by Monica Nevin. The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland , 1993, Vol. 123, pp. 19-58

** Charles Vallancey and the Map of Ireland, JH Andrews. The Geographical Journal, March 1966. Available here. Highly recommended if you want to know more about Vallancey as a map maker, which is slightly outside the scope of this series.

Ballydehob Biodiversity Threatened by Shocking Government Neglect

Roaringwater Journal normally concentrates on being positive, and doesn’t get caught up in political issues. But we cannot stay uninvolved when we see the appalling prospect facing our beloved Ballydehob Bay and Estuary.

The active group that has been working on issues effecting Ballydehob Biodiversity is called Ballydonut (for an explanation, click here to read up on what a Doughnut Economy is all about). One of the members, local historian, writer and retired teacher, Cormac Levis, has put a huge effort, 250 hours to date, into researching the situation regarding waste water treatment in Ballydehob. His findings have profoundly shocked and depressed us all. Cormac, and his parents and grandparents before him, lived and worked in Ballydehob and the islands of Roaringwater Bay. He knows every inch, every story, every family, every creature, of this magnificent area and has written books and articles about it (like this one). We hung on his words on a recent trip with him, below.

Here is the executive summary of his report

Shocking Pollution caused by Ballydehob Waste Water Plant.

The gross neglect and mismanagement of Ballydehob Waste Water Treatment Plant  over a period of ten years has resulted in a shocking, ongoing pollution problem in Ballydehob Bay, especially in the vicinity of the quay and in the estuary adjacent to the village. A thick grey and brown coloured scum of sewage effluent can regularly be seen floating in on the coming tide from the primary discharge point, which is located just fifty meters downstream of the quay. Added to this, grey, filthy, foul smelling water, and often even faeces and toilet paper, can frequently been seen pouring out of the storm water overflow at the septic tank directly into the lagoon.

The so called Treatment Plant is nothing more than a basic septic tank and Ballydonut Waste Water Action Group, Ballydehob Tidy Towns Committee and Ballydehob Community Council are jointly spearheading a campaign to have the plant upgraded to provide proper sewage treatment for Ballydehob. To that end, a petition has been made available for the public to sign at the Post Office and most businesses in the village. It is also available at The Bank House on Mondays and Fridays.

 Also available are copies of a substantiated report, researched and compiled by Cormac Levis, which details the long history of neglect and mismanagement associated with the plant and the resulting threat to public health, community amenities and the environment. It can be picked up where ever the petition is available or email kilbronogue57@gmail.com to have it emailed to you.

Because this issue is so important, Cormac has allowed me to publish the complete text of his report and I have set up a page for it. Just click on this link to read it:

A Substantiated Account of the Neglect and Mismanagement of Ballydehob Waste Water Treatment Plant and the Resulting Ongoing Pollution of Ballydehob Bay and Estuary

Researched and Compiled by Cormac Levis on Behalf of the Ballydonut Wastewater Action Group.

A petition has been established and can be signed at the post office and at various businesses in Ballydehob. Here’s what it says:

To Uisce Éireann, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Environment Directorate of Cork County Council, our local Teachtaí Dála, Senators and County Councillors.

We, the undersigned, demand an immediate upgrade of the Ballydehob Waste Water Treatment Plant, as specified in Condition 5 of the Waste Water Discharge Licence D0467-01, pertaining to the plant, in order to end the shocking and ongoing pollution caused by the current inadequate and obsolete septic tank.

If you can’t get to Ballydehob and would like to add your name, please go to this link to sign it online. (For those who signed it below, before the online petition was established, we will add your names to one of our lists.) Thank you for your support, from Ballydonut Waste Water Action Group, Ballydehob Tidy Towns Committee and Ballydehob Community Council.

Ballydehob is our home, but it’s just one of many, many places in Ireland where the catastrophic failure of wastewater treatment is threatening our environment. See this report from RTE for an exposé that will curl your toes. The section on water pollution starts at 13 minutes in.

Mizen Magic 12: Autumn Colour (Reposted)

I’m reposting this, written six years ago, for the season that’s in it.

It’s not the trees that lend autumnal hues to the Mizen, as they do elsewhere. It’s the whole landscape – that combination of rock, heather, bracken, moor grass, brambles, filtered through the light and shade of our notoriously changeable climate – that creates the special colour palette we associate with autumn. It’s my favourite time of year.

Today, early, we drove up Mount Gabriel and looked over the whole of the Mizen, back to Mount Corrin and Mount Kidd, and across to the Sheep’s Head, the Beara, and away to the mountains of Kerry.

Upper: looking down to Dunmanus Bay from Mount Gabriel; Lower: looking across to Mount Corrin

But every day brings changes. What trees we have are not yet bare. The thorns, blackthorn and whitethorn are loaded with berries. The heather is hanging on here and there, providing a wonderful contrast to the yellow gorse.

Haws, Sloes, Heather and Gorse

The bog asphodel is fading now, but earlier in the month it had reached its peak orange state and looked spectacular consorting with the other bog and mountain flowers that were still blooming.

Upper: Bog Asphodel, Gorse, Scabious; Lower: Cappaghglass Bog

When you get a clear day, like today, there is nothing on earth like a walk on the West Cork hills, drinking in the colours and trying to store them in the memory. Or perhaps, in a blog!

Upper: Toormore; Lower: Derryconnell 

Upper: North Side of the Mizen; Lower: Crough Bay and Long Island

Scarecrow in an abandoned garden – quintessential autumn image!

Rock Island

The 1811 Grand Jury Map of Cork by Neville Bath: Part 3, Sheeps Head, Beara and Bantry

I”m going to try to be slightly less detailed this time (I find that hard!) or we will never explore the rest of Cork. This post will concentrate on the area north of the Mizen – our two other peninsulas, Sheeps Head and Beara.

Sheeps Head (and it has an apostrophe in some maps and not in others, so I’m leaving it out) is given here as the head at the westernmost extent of the peninsula. But of course, we now call the whole Peninsula Sheeps Head. Or, if you prefer, by its Irish name of Muintir Bheara (Mweenter Varra) which means, confusingly, the people of Beara.

Besides a single house at Gortavallig, the only words on the east end of the map refer to placenames. The road does not extend beyond Dooneen. Nowadays, of course, this is a well-walked, prize winning set of trails that will bring you off road for the most part into wild and scenic country.

KIlcrohane and Ahakista have churches and chapels but no real communities in the 1790s. The castle near Kilcrohane is the vestigial one built by the O’Daly clan, the famous bards, at Lake Farranamanagh. There are no roads on the north side, and none crossing the Peninsular.

At the head of Dunmanus Bay is Durrus, shown as a community with a steepled church. The small treed estate is Durrus Court, where the 17th century manor house is still standing. The remains of Rossmore Castle can also still be seen. But here’s an interesting thing – there are not one but two castles shown at Dunbeacon! Very mysterious – there is certainly no sign of a second one now, and nothing in the archaeological record.

Let’s leap now, as Fionn MacCuamhaill might have done, to the next peninsular up – Beara. The full extent of it is shown in my lead photograph, and above is the eastern end and specifically Dursey Island. The Calf Rock is offshore, with the Cow further put and the storied and spectacular Bull Rock further out again. I do plan to visit it one day! Dursey is the only place in Ireland that you get to by cable car and has a tragic history. An Abbey is shown on the eastern shore. National Monuments tell us that “According to the soldier-writer and native of Dursey, Philip O’Sullivan-Beare, writing in 1621, it was a ‘monastery, built by Bonaventura, a Spanish Bishop, but dismantled by pirates'”.

The western end of the Peninsula is mountainous. A road extend along the southern side but not the northern. This is one of the few places in Ireland we have a very old map to make comparisons. Take a look at my post Elizabethan Map of a Turbulent West Cork and Elizabethan Map of a Turbulent West Cork 2: The Story, for a lively take on mapping this part of Ireland 200 years earlier.

Bear Island is featureless apart from a chapel but Castletown (more properly known as Castletownbere or Castletown-Berehaven) is shown as having a town or village and several substanital houses, a mill, and a church with a steeple. Interestingly, the castle at Dunboy, the siege of which is chronicled in the older map, is not shown at all in this one.

Moving eastward, very little human activity is noted on the map, but Hungry Hill is there and Adrigole Harbour. The dotted line marks the division between Cork and Kerry.

Then, there seems to be a bit missing – Glengarriff (or here, Glengarruv) Harbour is surrounded, then as now, by substantial forests. The only road to Kenmare at that time was the Priest’s Leap, even now a death-defying and vertiginous climb.

I’ve blown up the Ballylickey section as it holds particular interest for me – here depicted is the home of Ellen Hutchins! There’s a large house, surrounded by trees, on the banks of the Ouvane River. This is especially exciting as Ellen was living here at exactly that time! Born in 1785, she was botanising and making all kinds of discoveries until her untimely death at only 29 in 1815. After the sparsely annotated Peninsulas, it’s interesting to see more houses noted as we near Bantry.

Bantry is shown as a large town – with Bantry House, built on the early 1700s, dominating the landscape just as it does today. The Abbey has disappeared (it was a Franciscan establishment) but has given its name to the Abbey Graveyard at the southern end of town. We’ll finish with Whiddy Island and a genuine mystery – note the Martello Tower (below). There were actually three circular fortifications constructed on Whiddy after the abortive invasion by the French in 1796. Known as the West, East and Centre Batteries (or ‘redoubts’); this is probably the Centre one. They were very solidly built and can still be seen.

We know this map was done in the 1790s, and these redoubts, like the Signal Towers dotted along the coast, were built to warn of another French incursion and to defend Bantry Bay. The signal towers were built around 1804 and abandoned by 1815 after the Battle of Waterloo. None of them is noted on the Bath map, consistent with our understanding that the Cork map was completed in the 1790s. Martello towers date to the same period – the first of them were built in 1804, mostly along the east coast. The only actual Martello tower in this area is on Garnish Island. It was built in 1804/5 and does not show up on the island in the Bath map – see Glengarriff Harbour, above. The Whiddy Batteries are shown on the National Monuments records as dating to 1804 to 1807. They are round – more like the shape of a martello than the tall rectangular signal towers that were built around West Cork. But was the term Martello common at this time? Might this be a later addition to the map? Although it was completed in the 1790s it was not published until 1811, allowing for the possibility of editing and changes. Anybody have any comments on this – it’s a head-scratcher!