The nymphs of Mulla tending "the silver scaly trouts" and greedy pikes are long gone from Kilcolman. Only the rushy lake breathes Spenser now. The ruin of the fortified house which was the poet's home from 1587 to 1599 stands above a mere which spreads among these quiet, low-lying fields near Doneraile. Quite how much of this isolated tower is the Geraldine fort of Cathair Gabhainn, how much the dwelling-house of the Spenser family, seems not to matter in the cold twilight of spring.
Yet here the bridal nymphs sported on the banks of the Awbeg which Spenser renamed Mulla, just as the Ballyhoura hills and the Galtee Mountains became for him "old Mole". He knew this countryside intimately and wrote of it with a love which, for Sean O'Faolain, left the landscape of north Cork under the imprint of "that swooning, sensuous, silvery poem `The Faerie Queene' ". Much of this was written at Kilcolman, including the `Two Cantos on Mutabilitie'. It is like a game now to chart, as Alexander Judson does in Spenser in Southern Ireland (1933), the course of the rocky Bregogue, a tributary of the Awbeg which is itself a tributary of the mighty Blackwater (or Allo) or the story of the Behenagh (Molanna, sister to Mulla) and the Funcheon (Fanchin).
It was after a visit to Kilcolman by Sir Walter Raleigh that Spenser took `The Faerie Queene' to London - and acclaim. Back in his Irish castle, it was to that superb courtier and adventurer that he dedicated `Colin Clout's Come Home Againe', with its story of old Mole and his daughter Mulla. Although Mulla is meant to ??????
Blackwater she is won by the little Bregogue of Kilcolman, her true love. For something else was going on: Raleigh's vast estates in Munster lay along the Blackwater Valley and were centred at Youghal, where that river enters the sea. In trouble at court, Raleigh sold his estate to Richard Boyle, later first Earl of Cork, whose kinswoman Elizabeth lived at Youghal. Won by the `Amoretti' sonnets, she retreated from the Blackwater to become Spenser's bride, returning with him to the banks of the Awbeg at Kilcolman, welcomed by the nymphs of Mulla in `The Epithalamion' (1595).
That mid-summer radiance did not last: a resurgent Desmond faction attacked and burned the castle, the family fled to London where Edmund died in poverty in 1599. Only gaunt stones remain in north Cork to acknowledge the almost mystical imagery which has immortalised these springs and glens for as long as literature lasts. Perhaps this is because it is so difficult to align that transcendent ardour with the ferocity of Spenser's `A View of the Present State of Ireland'. A close friend of that other soldier-poet Sir Philip Sidney, whose father Henry had also been - twice - Lord Deputy of Ireland, Spenser had served with Lord Deputy Grey of Wilton on campaign against the rebellious Desmonds. He later became clerk of the council of the Munster Plantations. It was as a coloniser that he took over the Desmond's Kilcolman, and it was as a planter that he wrote his infamous `View'. One possible approach is suggested by Anne Fogarty, in her essay `The Colonisation of Language' (in Spenser in Ireland, ed. Patricia Coughlan, 1989): she argues that the false separation of aesthetics and politics in studies of this "Elizabethan functionary" obscures his passionate concern with writing as the medium through which the social world is explored and changed.
At Kilcolman, the site is surrounded by a National Nature and Wildlife Reserve, making access (which has to be by permission of the land-owner) a muddy tramp across a landscape almost totally devoid of those woods which echoed the wedding chorus of `Epithalamion'. The crew-cut hedges offer no sanctuary now where those "cheerefull birds do chaunt theyr laies/And carroll of loves praise!"