WEXFORD: The descendents of Norman invaders, the Gaels and the English planters: all live in harmony in Wexford, and all imbue the layered landscape with a civic spirit that is fundamental to the county's identity
ON THE new dual carriageway, driving south, when I see the exit for Inch and Gorey, I feel a lightness, a funny ease. This is Wexford, and it would be too simple, I think, to call it home, and it would probably be foolish to suggest that the inhabitants here have some very special qualities that do not exist in Wicklow, Carlow, Waterford or Kilkenny. Nonetheless, people here have a sort of dry wit, a way of being polite and distant at the same time, and a way of being curious without displaying it too much; they take an independent line on all matters while not making this more apparent than is necessary.
There is a sort of mildness in the landscape, in the way in which the sea and the land seem to mix and blend. There are no vast and dramatic conflicts in the way the waves break or the wind roars, and maybe this is reflected in how people respond to each other; they take in the scene around them as cautiously as they take in fresh news.
There are two things that are special about Wexford. One comes from history and the other from the nature of the landscape itself. Both things stem from the fact that the county is in a corner, and that the sea is on two sides. Thus Wexford has always been open for those who wanted to come in as traders or invaders, and those who wanted to go out. The south of the country, with its rich land, its Norman keeps and castles, with surnames such as Roche and Power, suggests that the Norman invasion of Wexford was a success. We came and took over in the 12th century, and we are still here. No one has ever asked us to go home.
Around us are not only the descendants of the original Gaels, with whom we have integrated, but the descendants of those who came as English planters in the early 16th century or in the time of Cromwell, with whom we live in harmony.
This mixture is what makes the spirit that gives the town of Wexford its great opera festival. If you did a proper sociological study of the committees that have run the Wexford Opera Festival and the volunteers who work for it, you would find a cross-section of the town who believe in good music, in serious singing, in putting on the best show possible, and who are ready to work for that. Just as the old Theatre Royal was an unlikely jewel in the narrow street of a port town, so too the new opera house, whose creation took dedicated work and serious planning, with its modest facade and its perfect acoustics, is a monument to a civic spirit, a sort of modest sophistication, which is a fundamental part of Wexford.
There is something beautiful about the town of Wexford at any time, but it is at its best in those weeks around the Opera Festival in late October and early November when the light over the harbour has a winter sharpness and, if the day becomes grey or overcast, then there is a very beautiful melancholy over the water, a sense of harbour that was once great, from where ships went to Buenos Aires, with now just a line of fishing boats.
Then there is the line of strand that stretches down the east of the county from Morriscastle, say, going south, through Knocknasillogue, Cush Gap, Ballyconnigar Lower, Ballyvaloo, Ballinesker to Curracloe. There is nothing dramatic about this landscape; there are no rocks or crashing waves. It varies and becomes softer as you move south, the marly cliffs become sand dunes. Even on a day when there is wind, there is a calm stability and beauty about the shoreline, with its line of pebbles, and then the washed yellow sand behind. There is erosion here, the soil is soft and ready to dissolve, just as the line between the sea itself and the horizon seems soft and ready to dissolve.
For most days of the year there is almost no one on these beaches; there are no big hotels, no large clusters of holidays houses. Much of Wexford has been left alone, and this seems to puzzle and amuse the lone seal, who is between Cush and Ballyconnigar Upper at the moment, who follows me to see if there is any news as I walk south.
The journey to this coastline from Gorey, say, or from Blackwater village into Enniscorthy gives a clue to why Wexford was sought after by the Vikings, the Normans and the English. There is a sense of richness in the land, in the size of fields, in the mild opulence of the contours and textures; there is an absence of bogland.
JUST AS THE narrow streets of Wexford town offer a full sense of the medieval, so too if you come into Enniscorthy from Blackwater, the curve around Templeshannon as you approach the Slaney, with the walls of the old monastery on your left, offer a sense that this is layered landscape rather than a single culture. As you come to the old bridge, the view is more immediate in its impact and more varied than the view as you cross the bridge at Wexford, or as you cross the Barrow at New Ross. This view shows the 16th-century castle, now restored and open once more to the public – there is a new lift to take you to the marvellous flat roof with its vistas over the town and the surrounding landscape – and, to the right, Pugin’s great cathedral, also lovingly restored, the colour put back into its interior.
On a Saturday morning in Enniscorthy, in the old Abbey Square, between the Slaney and Castle Hill, there is a farmer’s market. If you park on the other side of the bridge and walk across, the town seems at its most beautiful then, as people sit around and have coffee. There is food cooking and a sense, even in these hard times, that people have made an effort to produce organic food in the fertile fields of the Slaney valley.
Co Wexford is not a single place; much of it is hidden, even from the natives. I find the south of the county – places such as Slade and Duncannon , Arthurstown and Kilmore Quay – exotic and foreign. I don’t think I have ever seen light as beautifully washed and raked and shifting as the light over Hook Head in the south of the county. And then there is the journey out of Enniscorthy northwest towards Mount Leinster, the roads narrower, with many twists and turns as you approach Kiltealy; the fields are smaller here, and that sense of an old prosperity seems scarcer now as the landscape becomes more bare.
It is hard to think what the most beautiful place in Wexford is, a single spot where the spirit of place is at its most intense. I think, however, in the far future, were the devil, or his more benign counterpart, to offer me one more glimpse of the place, I would ask to turn left just beyond Edermine while driving from Wexford to Enniscorthy and find the single-lane bridge across the Slaney, almost hidden from view, and then look north as the town of Enniscorthy sits magisterially in the distance and then south to where the Slaney winds towards its wide estuary. Then I would cross the bridge and the railway line and decide quickly whether to go towards Bree Hill or make a dash for it into Enniscorthy by St John’s and the Carrig Graveyard before anyone could find me.
