Stones of Aran (56 page)

By chance we have an Englishman's view into the lifestyle of the western O'Flahertys of the post-Cromwellian generation, for in 1698 a John Dunton took a “ramble” around Ireland and was bold enough to visit Iar-Chonnacht, in which, he found, “the old barbarities of the Irish are so many and so common, that until I came hither, I looked for Ireland in itself to no purpose.” A
Galway
gentleman gave him a recommendation to Murchadh na
Mart's son Brian, “the most considerable man in this territorye.” Brian O'Flaherty, he found, “had converst among the English, had been at Dublin and was sensible enough of their one barbarous way in living, but sayd it was a thing soe habitual to them that it could not be suddenly removed.” The political upheavals had not upset the ancient pattern of the Celtic year, and O'Flaherty entertained Dunton in a temporary residence at a
buaile
or milking-pasture, to which he and his followers had removed with their cattle for the summer season; it must have been in north-east Connemara, because on the following day they took him to hunt the red deer in Gleann Glaise, a remote valley of the Maumturk Mountains.

Other O'Flahertys of this generation abandoned the old
Connemara
life and went to England; among them a son of Colonel Edmund's, also called Edmund, who became an army captain. He returned after the Restoration and took a lease of some land at Renvyle, that had been confiscated from his father and was now held by absentee landlords, the Blakes of Lehinch in Mayo. His son used to be famous as Éamonn Láidir, Edmund the strong; folklore celebrates his many horseback sword-fights with Richard Martin, then the principal landowner in Connemara, and his followers. One sees this “Nimble Dick” as the epitome of those who had eeled their way to fortune under the new
dispensation
, and Éamonn Láidir, hacking his way out of the circle of Richard's men, as the doomed but obdurate O'Flaherty spirit. He died in poverty in about 1749, and later on his gigantic bones were exhumed and exhibited as objects of curiosity in the old chapel of Ballynakill near Renvyle.

Éamonn's descendents continued as middlemen to the Blakes until about 1811, when Henry Blake first made the arduous journey by horse through the mountain pass of Maumturk and by
boat down the Killary to visit his estate. That the O'Flaherty way of life still preserved much of its antique flavour, after yet another century in the retracted Celtic margin of the kingdom, is shown by Blake's description of the state kept by Anthony O'Flaherty JP, “a middle-man, possessing an income of 1500l per annum, arising from his good management of profit rents, utterly unconscious of any other claims on the land”:

But Mr. Blake soon soured the jollity by announcing that he no longer intended to allow a middleman to stand between him and “the immediate cultivators of the soil.” Soon he was to take over the house as his family seat, thus ending the last substantial presence of the O'Flahertys in the west.

Antony O'Flaherty was not without reserves, however. For £7000 he bought a property that had been confiscated from his forebears, Knockbane near Moycullen. His son, another Antony,
became MP for Galway, and his house was much admired in
accounts
of the neighbourhood: “Nothing that modern taste and capital could effect in rendering this one of the most charming residences in the country has been omitted.” But on his
retirement
it passed to his sister's husband, a descendant of the
Fitzpatricks
of Aran, who eventually could not repay a mortgage, and so “the Congested Districts Board came in 1900 and swallowed him up, striped his land, pulled down Knockbane House, and left not a trace of Fitzpatrick or O'Flaherty at Moycullen.”

Some eastern O'Flahertys still hanging onto the tatters of
antique
glory by conforming to the established Protestant church also renewed their standing in a more urbane mode. In 1687 the Earl of Clanrickard had leased Aughnanure to a Brian O'Flaherty, son of its previous owner, who later bought the freehold with a borrowed £1600. Unable to repay, he lost the castle and most of its land, and retired to Lemonfield nearby. His grandson married Jane Bourke, daughter of Viscount Mayo, and their son Sir John, an army captain and deputy governor of the county of Galway, built a mansion; he even had a descendant of the O'Canavans, the medical ollaves of the old Maigh Seola days, as his personal physician. The Lemonfield O'Flahertys were large landlords down to the CDB era, and held onto the mansion until the 1930s. They also had property near Ballyconneely in the west, where the last of them is remembered still as “Bojo.” He was gay, and
handsome
—the name was from his
beaux
yeux
—and thought he was a filmstar, and was fleeced by a bogus company that set him up in front of an empty camera.

Such, then, was the dispersal of the seed of Éremón, into feuding warlords, politically unfortunate grandees, and foolish playboys. Just one line preserved something of the O'Flahertys'
quintessential
westernness down to not much more than a hundred years ago. From what I hear in Kilmurvey House it must have been in the late eighteenth century, when the rest of the Aughnanure O'Flahertys were turning Protestant, that a branch of the family took itself off with priest, chalice, vestments and missal, to Aran.
The ferocious heritage of myth, history and folklore they imported to the Aran story—perhaps unwittingly, like a lizard that had crept into a corner of their linen-chest—is summarized above.

I had hoped to present here a restoration of lapsed connections, an account of the Connemara origins of the Kilmurvey House O’Flahertys. On behalf of their memory I have run up an
inordinate
postage and phone bill and piled my desk with research notes and transcripts of old documents; yet, in a forest of criss-crossed branches, I cannot find the family tree. If the truth I seek were known, it would most probably be dull—Patrick O’Flaherty of Aran was the son of so-and-so, who was the cousin of so-and-so, of such-and-such an address in history. Unknown, it continues to preoccupy me, this absent fact, this handful of dust in an
unopened
chamber of my labyrinth.

O’Donovan, after summarizing the pedigree of the Lemonfield O’Flahertys in his letters to the Ordnance Survey, states that:

Documents I have seen show that there were close if
acrimonious
relationships between the Aran O’Flahertys and those of Lemonfield, but none of the obvious sources (such as Patrick O’Flaherty’s death notices in the newspapers) specify them or even mention who his father was. The reason for this null
testimony
may lie in the religious ill-feelings dividing the
eighteenth-century
generations, the conforming of most branches of the clan
to the established church and the cleaving of the Aran branch to Catholicism.

The O’Flahertys are said to have brought their own priest with them from Aughnanure, and if so it seems likely that he was the Fr. Francis O’Flaherty whose tomb, with the O’Flaherty crest and motto, in the graveyard at Cill Éinne I described in
Pilgrim
age.
He was born in about 1757 in Aran, where his father,
Beairtli-méad
, had a “half-quarter” of land near Cill Rónáin, of which the name, Leath-cheathrú Bheairtliméid, is still known to one or two antiquarian-minded islanders. Francis was educated in Spain, like so many young men of family in those days when Catholicism was only just emerging from proscription, and served as a curate somewhere in Connacht before being appointed Parish Priest of the islands some time before 1800. The census of 1821 shows him, aged sixty-four, living in Cill Rónáin with his widowed sister Mary Broughton (the Broughtons were Catholic landowners of Inis Leacan, an island near Roundstone) and her three young
children
, his curate, a pilgrim called Mary Coen, a house servant and a seventy-eight-year-old beggar. In the porch of the chapel in Cill Rónáin is a medieval plaque of the crucifixion which Fr. Francis is said to have brought from Rome; it was passed down in the Gill family—one of his sister’s daughters married a Gill—until Fr. Killeen carried it off for the church in a high-handed way that is still remembered with resentment. The Gills have a little shop in Cill Rónáin, two doors to the west of which, opposite the old rectory gates, is a long-empty two-storey cottage; this was Fr.
Francis’s
home, and his mounting-block used to be pointed out at its gable. George Petrie, visiting the Aran Islands for the first time in this same year of 1821, met the “venerable pastor,” and noted two traits strongly marked in his physiognomy: the courage requisite to his ministry in “a cluster of islands washed by the waves of the Atlantic,” and the purity of his mind, deriving from a total
ignorance
of the vices of humankind outside the innocency of Aran.

At the time of Petrie’s departure for Inis Oírr, Fr. Francis was suffering from a severe cough which was depriving him of sleep, and Petrie had exhorted him to keep to his house. Sailing past Cill Rónáin in Patrick O’Flaherty’s boat on a squally day, Petrie fondly pictured the priest reposing by his fire after his week’s
exertions
, and little supposed that he would ever see him again. When the boat arrived off Inis Oírr the breakers were too high for them to venture near the shore, but they saw a number of men descending the cliffs towards the beach, among them Fr. Francis O’Flaherty, come to attend to some sick person; “Thus it was that he was nursing himself!” Later in the day, when the weather abated, they brought the priest back to Cill Rónáin:

In fact Fr. Francis died just a few years later, in 1825.

To frame Petrie’s sanctimonious picture, here is a fascinating glimpse of the “Ferocious O’Flaherty” background to Fr. Francis’s priesthood, preserved by Fr. Killeen:

Apart from Fr. Francis, the earliest of the “respectable”
O’Flahertys
I can document in Aran are named on a big gravestone lying before the altar in the ruined church of St. Brecán in
Eoghanacht
. The coat of arms heading it distinguishes these O’Flahertys from the commonalty of the name, but the prime site occupied by their memorial means that it has been much knelt on and walked over, so that it is hard to read. (There is a parable on
For
tuna
here.) With some difficulty I make out:

Islanders tell me that the forbears of Patrick O’Flaherty lived in The Seven Churches or Creig an Chéirín, until they bought the lease of the land in Cill Mhuirbhigh from a Stephen King. The story is that Patrick’s father was an Aran farmer just like any other except that he was married to an outsider, and when news came that a wealthy relative of his had died, it was the wife, the more capable one of the couple, who went off to secure the
inheritance.
When she returned with the money, “O’Flaherty hit a bang of his spade off a big rock and said ‘I’m finished with you for ever!’” The Christian name of this O’Flaherty has not been preserved even in Kilmurvey House lore; filial piety lapsed when the genetic thread came to an end in the 1950s, and as Bridget often told me with regret, a new era was marked by a bonfire of old papers. So I was at a loss in trying to link Patrick O’Flaherty with the “unkle Anthy” of the inscription. However, on revisiting
the house recently, I found that a bundle of documents, carried off by a researcher into some other question of Galway history twenty years ago and long forgotten, had just been posted home from oblivion. The parcel was delivered into my arms, and I bore it off with mixed feelings, reminding myself of the man who
carries
a heavy packet of labyrinths on his back, in a poem by Tristan Tzara. Since then I have wormed out of these crabbed, yellowish screeds a few hints of Kilmurvey House history, which I
incorporate
in what follows.

Patrick O’Flaherty, one can deduce from his gravestone and the census returns, was born in 1781. The earliest of the
documents
concern a Catherine O’Flaherty, spinster, of Galway, who in 1796 obtained judgment against a Walter Lambert of Cregclare for £2200 on a bond of the previous year. The Lamberts were major Galway landowners, and of course at that time £2200 was great riches. Under Catherine’s will, dated 1799, small sums go to her brothers John and Anthony O’Flaherty and her sister Mary. A letter of 1804 from William, Archbishop of Armagh and
President
of the Court of Prerogatives Ecclesiastical, appoints Patrick O’Flaherty as administrator of this will, and, reading between the lines, one gathers that the original administrator and residual
legatee
had been John, who, having “intermeddled” with the matter for some time, died; also, that Patrick was Catherine’s nephew. Hence, most likely, Patrick was John’s son, nephew to Anthony, and brother to the youth of unfulfilled promise. Another clutch of old papers refers to a complex law-case which Patrick, as Anthony’s heir and administrator, pursued for some years after 1813, against Sir John O’Flaherty’s son Thomas Henry; it concerns money claimed to have been lent by an “Alise” O’Flaherty to Sir John for the completion of the mansion of Lemonfield. Whether this money was ever recovered, and what became of the money owed to
Catherine
by the Lamberts, does not appear, but here is the substance of the Aran legend of the O’Flahertys’ inherited fortune.

I cannot learn exactly when Patrick established himself in what was to become Kilmurvey House; the Digbys first leased
him one and a half quarters of Kilmurvey, for twenty-one years at £140 per annum, in 1812, “on surrender of his existing interest in the property.” In fact according to the inscription over its door his walled garden or orchard was made in 1809. Also, at the back of the orchard there is a natural recess in the cliff-face, to which a front wall and a little door has been added; perhaps originally this was a sweat-house as I have heard suggested, but it has served more recently as a potting-shed. Family legend says that a French officer, on the run after the invasion of Mayo in 1798, was given shelter, or was held to ransom, in it by the O’Flahertys, and that he married a young woman of the family, or at least had a child by her called Marcella, a (French-sounding, in Aran ears) name that has been handed down among her descendants. If this bit of romantic costume-drama is true—and to prove it, the Frenchman’s rusty sword lay on the hall table in Kilmurvey House until a guest stole it some years ago—then it seems that the O’Flahertys were already established in Kilmurvey when Patrick was a child. However, some details cannot be correct, for the Kilmurvey House documents show that Marcella O’Flaherty married
Francis
Macnamara of Doolin in 1810.

The census of 1821, taken by Patrick himself, states that he had five cartrons of land (most holdings in the village were of a half cartron). His household consisted of: