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I've never understood why her house was destroyed. I'm assuming part of the hostility to Lady Gregory was the prudish outrage about Synge and O'Casey? The woman did as you say a huge amount of work to nurture and preserve Irish arts and foster irish nationalism.


Still liking the B+W!

I can't help but have mixed feeling. The Great Houses and their owners, the system of colonial appropriation they represent, are why my wife and I were born in the US; why our poverty stricken ancestors came over to do dangerous low wage jobs. On the other hand I've got no real complaints and I hate to see a grove of trees cut down.

There's a famous argument about "Slavery and Social Death," which points out that the descendants of slaves have their families erased. They can trace them back only to the point where the legal system thought black people's lives individual lives were worth considering. Nobody wrote down if "sambo" got married and had children: slaves could not marry and their children were property. The families "die."

A degree of " social death" happens with immigration. My father has done a lot of genealogy and very quickly in ireland the trail stops, because the church or the english didn't bother to keep records or because records got destroyed. Note I'm not really complaining about this and in ordinary life it hardly matters. But the mounds kind of signify that lost past.

There's a strange ambivalence in the thinking of some people when it comes to these places. It's not dissimilar to the mindset that let Georgian Dublin decay until there was enough reason to tear it down.

During the nineties I was at the Kiltannon estate, between Clooney and Tulla. There was a big square house there, that, as it turned out, was one of the outbuildings that remained after the main house was razed. The estate had many mature trees and a river meandering through it that dipped in and out of a tremendous set of caves. Between the trees there were holes in the ground that allowed you to look down at the river, in other places you could enter caves, some of which were used as shelter during the famine and its aftermath, another cave wa like a big hall, one side of it had fallen in so it was sort of half open. Concerts had been given in there, apparently. And Paddy Canny lived across the river in the old gate lodge with magnificent metal gates. He composed the jig 'The Caves at Kiltannon'. During Victorian times it has been a tourist hot spot and it was easy to see why: there was a strange magic sort of atmosphere.

A local man who was showing us around said there had been an Arboretum with many rare species. He ended with 'but ofcourse the locals used those as firewood as soon as the house was razed'. There was an undertone of glee, almost triumph in that. Shortly after that visit the land was sold, the tiger was roaring, and a developer plonked a set of 'executive villas' on it. Plus ca change..

And in some cases you can sort of understand why resentment still simmers, the Vandeleur name in Kilrush can still stir up anger in some people. The estate, what's left of it (again mainly just the stables and the walled garden has been restored) is open to the public, another one for a lost afternoon.

Coole really is a great place to wander and spend the odd lost afternoon, despite long neglect many of the old trees remain although I sometimes feel the woods are decaying. They are now trying, doing their best, to manage it. But there remains a sense of history. Of the house only the outline remains but the garden and the signature tree are well:



Lady Augusta's bench is still there:



Only downside is the new Limerick-Galway motorway that runs very closely to it now and generates noise where there used to be none. The price of having the place within much easier reach.

[cross posted]

because the church or the english didn't bother to keep records or because records got destroyed.

I don't know about that, the bombing and burning of the Public Records Office surely can't have helped and is usually seen as one of the great crimes of the Civil War. And storing munitions and explosives there wasn't a good move by the Anti Treaty forces either. The census records of 1821, 1831, 1841 and 1851, an entire demographic record of pre-Famine Ireland drifted in fragments over the city. Like a huge swarm of birds, as some accounts have it.

Mr.Gumby wrote: I don't know about that, the bombing and burning of the Public Records Office surely can't have helped and is usually seen as one of the great crimes of the Civil War. And storing munitions and explosives there wasn't a good move by the Anti Treaty forces either. The census records of 1821, 1831, 1841 and 1851, an entire demographic record of pre-Famine Ireland drifted in fragments over the city. Like a huge swarm of birds, as some accounts have it.

I know thats the destruction i was referring to

Mr.Gumby wrote:And in some cases you can sort of understand why resentment still simmers, the Vandeleur name in Kilrush can still stir up anger in some people.

Given the history that surely inspired it, the joyful and nonchalant beauty of the jig The Battering Ram always struck me as profoundly strange.

Nanohedron wrote:

Mr.Gumby wrote:And in some cases you can sort of understand why resentment still simmers, the Vandeleur name in Kilrush can still stir up anger in some people.

Given the history that surely inspired it, the joyful and nonchalant beauty of the jig The Battering Ram always struck me as profoundly strange.

I know this is going to sound terribly ignorant of me, but I had always associated the name with either the medieval siege weapon, or the modern use by the police to force open doors when they need to gain entry. Oh, how sweetly innocent of me ...

benhall.1 wrote:

Nanohedron wrote:

Mr.Gumby wrote:And in some cases you can sort of understand why resentment still simmers, the Vandeleur name in Kilrush can still stir up anger in some people.

Given the history that surely inspired it, the joyful and nonchalant beauty of the jig The Battering Ram always struck me as profoundly strange.

I know this is going to sound terribly ignorant of me, but I had always associated the name with either the medieval siege weapon, or the modern use by the police to force open doors when they need to gain entry. Oh, how sweetly innocent of me ...

Well, I could be wrong. IIRC the topic was never broached, and IIRC I never asked, but I always associated the title with the Vandeleur evictions. Whatever the case, any battering ram you could ask for and such innocent joyfulness still presents an odd combination for me.

I also associate the Battering Ram with evictions. The greatest bulk of which were famine evictions well before the infamous Vandeleur evictions incidence in Gladstone´s time. A contemporary account found in the Clare Library, referring to 1848-49, refers to using ´crow-bars´ and ´other tools of destruction´, so there is that. It could also be a sly reference to the joyfull activities of a ram in springtime

Bob

an seanduine wrote:It could also be a sly reference to the joyfull activities of a ram in springtime

Aha! Why, so it could. That earns you a tuppence.

I wondered if it had something to do with dancers “battering”

PB+J wrote:I wondered if it had something to do with dancers “battering”

Which leads one to ask where the ram comes into it. A sheep clattering on cobbles? But that's stretching things, seems like.

Nanohedron wrote:

an seanduine wrote:It could also be a sly reference to the joyfull activities of a ram in springtime

Aha! Why, so it could. That earns you a tuppence.

I see what you did there!

Bob

I've been wanting to do something like that for years. Opportunities to use the word were never quite right until just now, so am I going to pass it up? Not a chance.

Excellent. Act 1,Scene 1, lines 87-88 in Othello. I held a spear in the background of this scene.

Bob

To make this easier, Iago is taunting Brabantio that his daughter, Desdemona, is having sex with Othello. ¨Even now, now, very now, an old black ram is tupping your white ewe.¨

Clearly I took enough English Lit classes to make me unemployable.

Bob