County Cork, part 3 - of roots and ruins

On Thursday I went to my mom's home village of Ballyvourney. My mom's maiden name was O'Herlihy and her family used to be landowners of approximately 1500 acres of pasture lands in West Cork until the mid-1600's during the Cromwellian campaign to conquer Ireland. There's a bit of debate whether the lands were taken as part of Cromwell's conquest or whether the lands were lost in a bet to an Englishman. Either way, the O'Herlihy's were disenfranchised from their lands and became tenents and farmers. 

Family crest of the O'Herlihy's. This was cross-stitched by the wife of my mom's cousin. 

A note of interest, the family was in charge of maintaining the Abbey and a statue of the local patron Saint Gobnait until the mid-1800's when the church took over. There is a holy well that was founded by the saint that you can drink from, and a short walk up the steep hill takes you to the ruins of the 6th century CE church and graveyard. My uncle Donal, who is a bit of a local historian, took me up the hill and reminded me of all the interesting historical facts around the place. 

Statue of Saint Gobnait with deer, which are associated with her.

Donal and I got caught in a rain shower, and we hid in a hedge (well, I was kind of crouched under it). He related to me information and stories about the ruins of a building across from the hedge under which we were sheltered. Amongst the ruins of the church "round" (as it's referred to locally) is a famine soup kitchen/porridge house which was open from 1846-1848 as per the photo below.

During the 1840's, Ireland suffered mass famine and death by starvation was rampant. There were two causes of the famine: the potato blight that ruined most of the crops of the main staple of the Irish diet; and the hoarding of Irish barley and other agricultural products by the English landlords who refused to share the dividends of the land with the very people who grew the crops. There were mass graves where bodies were collected daily and thrown into. My uncle related a story of a child that was dumped in a mass grave, presumed dead...when suddenly the boy's fingers moved. They retrieved the boy from the grave and he managed to live on for many years after. It was a dark time in Ireland, and many people emigrated to Canada and the USA to escape poverty and starvation. The soup kitchen/porridge house offered one bowl of soup or porridge per day per family. According to my uncle Donal, women would often come back several times dressed in a different shawl and faking different accents in order to obtain more food to feed their families. My cousin Eibhlis also related a story about why some Irish surnames don't have the prefix " O' " - she said that people would drop the O to make their names to sound more English in order to get soup. And so when you meet someone who's last name is missing the O prefix, you say "oh, you took the soup." However, when the survival of your family is on the line, it's easy to understand why they would want to "take the soup." 

Up high on one wall of the 6th century ruins of the church, is a bust of the "Black Thief." My uncle recounted the story for me: during the building of the Abbey church, the stone masons would leave their tools (trowels, hammers, etc) in the church over night. In those days, tools were worth a lot of money, and one night a man snuck into the Abbey with his horse. He stole the tools and stuffed his saddle bags, hopped up on his steed and whipped his horse into a gallop. The night was pitch black, and the man rode on and on. When dawn broke, he realized that he was riding in circles around the churchyard. The local lore goes that because he stole from holy ground his horse was bewitched and the man was caught. The bust serves as a reminder to other potential thieves - you will be caught! Look carefully at the photo below and you'll see the head of the thief high on the centre of the wall, near the apex where the roof would be.

The local Irish name of the village of Ballyvourney is Carraig an adhmaid (pronounced cor'rig un eye'mwid). The name means "the rock of the wood;" and like most Irish nicknames for places, there is a story behind the name. During the Cromwellian campaign to conquer Ireland, the Irish were forbidden to practice their religion, speak their language or even educate their children. Today, this would have been considered cultural genocide. The Irish took the wooden roof off the Abbey church (as seen in the above photo) and hid it behind a large rock down in the village, hence the nickname of the village. 

Further, the Irish would have their Catholic mass in the woods at different days and times with people posted at three look-out points on the road to avoid detection by the English. The English had rewards of £40 for a priest's head and £60 for a bishop's head. Back in those days (mid-1600's), that would have been an exorbitant amount of money. The Irish also buried all of the churches' gold chalices and crosses to protect them from the plundering English. Some of the buried church gold has never been recovered, and some has been found only in the last 50 years. To have their illicit Catholic mass, the people used a large stone that had a flat top to act as an alter. They scratched a cross into the front of it and this "Mass Rock" was actually found by my mom and her siblings when they were playing in the woods as children. The Irish also secretly taught their children their language and culture in what was known as "hedge schools" in the woods. 

On a personal note, I spent some of the happiest times of my childhood at the house my grandfather built and it's grounds, which backs onto the river Sulan. As kids, my siblings and cousins and I would spend hours playing down by the river each summer. The bridge that spans the river was built in the 1750's. While I was there this time, I skipped some stones (including one stone that skipped over ten times and reached the opposite bank), and took in the ever evolving gardens belonging to my uncle. He built the gate, stone "floor" and pillar seen in the photo above. It's always a pleasure for me to go back and relive those happy memories from my formative years. I hope I can go back again soon - eight years is too long to be away from my roots and family. A rainbow blessed my aunt Siobhan and I on our drive out of Ballyvourney. Slíante!