Lismore Cathedral

A Map of the County of Cork, Part 3

This is the last part (links to Parts 1 and 2 at the end of the post) and I will use it to look at where most people seemed to be living – along the River Lee and the Blackwater/Bride Rivers. Cork is shown, as we know it was and still is, on an island, as a substantial walled town with four towers. Two of the towers guard bridges and are ports of entry, and two guard inlets of the river. There’s a cross in the middle and five buildings outside the walls. 

The buildings to the left of the city (remember, that’s North) are labelled Mogelle, F:barro and M:nellan, while to the right (south) the upper building is unlabelled and the lower one is C:Tanboy?

To see what this is all about, let’s take a look at the earliest map of Cork City, which I showed you in my post Mapping West Cork, Part 2: John Speed. I reproduce that map here. It dates from 1611/12. As I said in the John Speed post, while Speed seems to have based his land maps on earlier work by Mercator . . .

. . . the city maps were all new and it seems that Speed, with one of his sons, actually travelled to the cities he includes in his atlas and paced out the distances, drawing the maps based on these calculations. They are a unique and invaluable record of a time when Ireland had walled cities, especially given that so few intact stretches of those walls remain.

And there is the Market Cross! While that is the only feature inside the city on our map, Speed’s is beautifully detailed, and he provides a key to all important buildings. There are many churches, only two of which, Christ Church and St Francis’s Church, are within the walls. Assuming that Finbarr’s church is labelled F:barro on our Map (although the brown rectangle looks more like a tower house) and St Barrie’s Church on Speed’s, it is shown in different places. St Augustine’s or St Stephen’s may be the uppermost building to the right of the city, but what is the brown pyramid-shaped blob labelled C:Tanboy? Perhaps a true Cork historian can help us out here and figure out what’s what.

Interestingly, there is no sign, on our map, of the large star-shaped fort that Speed labels The New Fort and that subsequently became known as Elizabeth Fort. It was started in 1601 by George Carew (the original owner of this map collection) built of earth, stone and timber.  This supports a pre-1600 date for this map. Elizabeth Fort is still very much part of the Cork landscape, with its massive walls still dominating the south side of the river (above).

As we progress west along the Lee, the land is shown as wooded and there are several establishments by the river and its tributaries. I recognise Kilcrea Castle and Abbey (given here as Kileroye), but I’m sure others, more familiar with this landscape than I am, can add more.

Cork Harbour, as might be expected, has many towers, the main one among them still standing is Barry’s Court (barris courte), soon (we hope) to be re-opened for visitors and also Belvelly (B:vyle), magnificently restored by a private owner. Corkbeg Island and Castle are shown, as well as several other castles on either side of the delta. Cloyne is of course indicated, as it was an important ecclesiastical centre.

Moving now to the Blackwater/Bride River system, we see perhaps as populous and encastellated an area as around Cork, especially along the two rivers, which were navigable for many miles inland. Youghal is shown as a walled town, guarding the mouth of the harbour but also a large commercial and trading centre.

We have written about Youghal before, and specifically about its well-preserved stretches of wall – an unusual feature of Irish towns as very few medieval walls have survived.

I am reproducing below the map from Pacata Hibernia I used in my Youghal’s Walls post. As with Cork, it can help us to understand a bit more about Youghal. Note, for example, the South Abbey clearly shown outside the walls on both maps.

Upriver is Strancally Castle – not the more modern manor house, but the original tower house of which only a vestige remains down by the river. Also easily discernible is Pilltown in modern-day Waterford and Inchiquin, a townland east of Youghal. Inchiquin Castle is now the ruins of a round Anglo-Norman masonry tower which went through tortuous changes of ownership but was eventually occupied by in the fabled  Countess of Desmond who in 1604 died at the age of 140 by falling out of an apple tree. The castle was then seized by Richard Boyle, Great Earl of Cork, who, along with Walter Raleigh, is closely associated with Youghal and the Blackwater River. The drawing of Inchiquin below is by James Healy from his marvellous book The Castles of County Cork.

Boyle’s Castle (it’s still there) was in Lismore, but at this point lesse more is shown as a church on the banks of the Blackwater, not the centre of power it became with Boyle’s ascendance.

Castles, towns and churches line the Bride and the Blackwater, showing how important these rivers were at a time when the best way to traverse the country was by water.

I’m going to leave it there, although I just might come back to this map at some point in the future because, well, it’s so darn interesting and it’s fun to try and puzzle out the names. I hope I have supported my thesis that this map must date to before 1600. It is most likely another of those made for the purposes of identifying property in order to confiscate and carve it up during the Plantation of Munster. Please do visit it for yourself and see what you can find – additions always welcome in the comments section below.

OK – one last image – the source of the Blackwater is shown in this one. What do we call these mountains now?

A Map of the County of Cork, Part 1

A Map of the County of Cork, Part 2

Burne-Jones in Lismore Cathedral

Edward Coley Burne-Jones is perhaps best known as a painter, but he also designed stained glass. While he was a prolific designer, not many of his windows found their way to Ireland. Hence, it is a joy to see and appreciate his beautiful two-light window in Lismore Cathedral.

Burne-Jones was one of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood whose aim was to recreate a style of painting that they saw as most representative of the period before the Renaissance (which spoiled everything, apparently). Their paintings are distinguished by being highly romantic and emphasising beauty (male and female), the natural world (or at least the most benign aspects of it) and attention to detail.  The portrait of him below is used with gratitude and under license from the National Portrait Gallery.

Burne-Jones met William Morris when he left university to study art and they began a life-long partnership. Known as one of the founders of the Arts and Crafts Movement, Morris united a genius for business with a commitment to honouring both art and craft. One of the ‘crafts’ he recognised as needing a genuine artistic approach was stained glass. While Burne-Jones did some designing for the stained glass firm of Powell of Whitefriars, from 1861 on he designed exclusively for Morris. The two friends are shown below, once again, under license from the National Portrait Gallery. It’s not the wildly romantic and handsome image I had of them – perhaps it’s true that you should never meet your heroes.

It’s important to emphasise here that Burne-Jones was an artist and designer: he did not execute the windows he designed, although he often included notes about colour preference or the form of a figure or detail on his cartoons – the full-size drawings upon which the glass was laid to guide the artists who painted and cut the glass. The cartoons below were recently offered for sale at Sothebys for 40,000 – 60,000USD!

Ironically, this was a contradiction of the true philosophy of the arts and crafts movement, which held that a single artist/craftsperson should execute all aspects of the final artwork. This was the rule inculcated by AE Child when he inducted all his eager students into the processes of designing and making stained glass in the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art. It was the underlying ideology of An Túr Gloine and it was how Harry Clarke started out – both designing and actually painting his own windows. (That’s Lismore Cathedral below, where the window is located – you can read more about this historic and fascinating church in Robert’s post Off the M8 – Lismore Quest.)

But once you start a company, that company has to make money to survive, and Morris was canny enough to see that the artist-maker was not the business model he needed. Morris specialised in wonderful pattern-making, especially foliage of all kinds (his name is synonymous with certain kinds of wallpaper and fabric). Burne-Jones’ figures, along with Morris’s highly-patterned backgrounds, were handed over to the craftsmen (yes, all men, I think, although I stand to be corrected here) to take them from a cartoon to a finished window. Like Harry Clarke’s windows, Burne-Jones’ were instantly recognisable and popular and the demand for them was enormous. You can see why. The figures are languorous and romantic. The faces are intensely beautiful; the details of the robes, armour, helmets, musical instruments etc are exquisite; the colours are soft and harmonious. 

By the time Burne-Jones died in 1898 and Morris in 1896, there was a huge catalogue of gorgeous designs. Morris and Co continued under the leadership of John Dearle (himself a talented designer) and the firm continued to produce Burn-Jones windows, adapted as necessary to fit the size and position of windows. In fact, there is an almost-identical window in another C of I church, in Coolock.

This brings us to the Lismore window – Justice and Humility – installed in honour of Francis Edmund Currey upon Currey’s death in 1896. Who was Francis Edmund Currey? He was the Duke of Devonshire’s agent and a keen, and early, photographer. He, or his wife, was related to the Somervilles of Castletownshend, although I am not sure how. His photographs are in several archives (just Google).

That’s him, above*. A plaque refers to his ‘compassionate work during the famine.’ I have been unable to find much corroboration of this (and remember, as the largely-absent Duke’s agent, he got to write his own version of events for ‘his’ cathedral) – but I have found some accounts that say his emphasis was on keeping the tenantry contented and he was certainly not one of the cruel agents that proliferated at this time. If anyone out there knows more, please comment below!

The windows are beautifully and expertly done – Morris and Co had many very talented and able craftsmen, although we don’t know which of them was responsible for executing this one. Justice is represented by the figure of St Michael, although curiously there are no wings, despite the fact that Michael is an Archangel. He carries a sword in his right hand – he vanquished Satan with a sword – and in his left had he holds the scales he uses to weigh souls on Judgement Day. He wears chain mail and complicated robes and his steady gaze seems to size up the viewer with a mix of compassion and insight.

The figure of Humility is suitably, well, humble, with a downcast gaze and carrying a lamb. Like Michael, she has much drapery, all finely-worked (take a close look).

The predella (bottom panel) is the familiar Morris wallpaper, a complex intertwining of leaves and flowers, pleasingly repeated.  

The very top section of the tracery (which I didn’t capture in my photographs) is a sweet angel blowing two pipes – below is the exact same design from an English window.

This post was inspired by a book loaned from a friend – thank you, Richard,  for all the information on Wilden church, and the stories that went along with the book.

*Francis Edmund Currey by Kilburn, William Edward (1818-1891) – Sean Sexton, United Kingdom, Europe – Public Domain https://www.europeana.eu/en/item/2058401/_providedCHO_28d8210e_c8d5_0623_21cc_25bd9db12ede