Although separated by 150 years, the writers T. C. McGinley and Lochlann McGill share more than their origins in south-west Co Donegal. Both are a store of social history, stories, folklore and archaeological detail about the beautiful region that formed them, writes Eileen Battersby
Whether as pilgrim or tourist, or a bit of both, the magnificent coastal scenery of south-west Co Donegal inspires the beholder. It is not a particularly soothing beauty. This is wild nature at its most intimidating, ever mindful of the power and damage created at the whim of a storm.
Natives of the region do not take the splendours of its dramatic cliffs for granted either. Thomas Colin McGinley (1830-1887), one of Ireland's many unsung heroes, was born and reared in Meenacross, Glencolumbkille.
On qualifying as a schoolmaster in Dublin, he taught in Belfast for a few years, before returning home to Co Donegal to educate and enlighten the young. Life was hard, and even in the pre-Famine years, McGinley, growing up in an isolated place as the only child of a widow, had always had to struggle. Later, as the father of 10 children, he saw several of them die from tuberculosis.
McGinley was a visionary, alert to poetry, story, myth, tradition "and the beauty of my naïve highlands". Above all he understood the role of the individual in his environment as well as the fact nature endures long before, and long after, man.
Blessed with a sense of wonder and natural curiosity, he never stopped learning and was clearly a gifted scholar, well versed in the classics. He set up his own "classical school", which he taught in the evenings on closing the classroom door of Croagh National School, near Dunkineely.
He was also something of an amateur geologist and proficient enough at biology to have written a general textbook, including 124 sketches, published in Britain in 1874 and widely used into the 20th century. Even in his great work as a 19th-century schoolmaster triumphing in the face of poverty, he suffered multiple petty injustices at the hands of a tyrannical school inspector.
Yet his difficulties failed to embitter him, judging by the lightness and grace of his writings. His subject was his area, the cliff scenery of his native parish, dominated by Bunglas and Sliabh Liag (or Slieve League.) The latter he described as "that awe-inspiring mountain; horrid, vast, sublime, whose sharp edge you see in bold outline against the ruddy glow of the evening sky. The feelings suggested by the appearance of Sliabh Liag on a clear evening, a little before sunset, are utterly indescribable. Behind the sinking sun, the sombre side, shadowed in gloom behind, shows his dark mass through the gauzy transparency."
One might wonder where he found the time. Teaching by day and most of the night, while also attending to his Gaelic League obligations, he wrote his notes. These jottings, featuring legends, historical asides and literary references from Shakespeare to Byron, Scott and Thomas More, took the form of articles written as a "Tour" under the pseudonym of Kinnfaela, which he sent to the editor of the Derry Journal.
They were accepted, appearing weekly in that publication. The journal had a large circulation in Co Donegal, large enough that these pieces, or notes, were read aloud in school classes and no doubt formed the basis of many a conversation. They were also carefully kept for despatch abroad to the emigrants gone to the US and Australia. McGinley's writings celebrate without idealising. He is aware of the tragedies and several of his anecdotes are dark, chronicling the ruthlessness of man and nature.
Among them are the sufferings of Famine victims, as well as an account of an eagle snatching a toddler and stories of a grateful wolf, a shy young girl, Bonnie Prince Charlie's secret visit to Malinmore while en route to France in 1746 and some sightings of the Pooka.
Such was the success of McGinley's articles that the Derry Journal went on to publish them in book form in 1867 as The Cliff Scenery of South-Western Donegal with additional footnotes. No doubt with its combination of local history, anecdote and descriptive passages of the landscape, it enjoyed high status in its day. McGinley, however, battled on for another 20 years, during which he suffered disputes with the vindictive school inspector, saw some of his children die and suffered poor health himself before dying in 1887, at the age of 57.
His work could almost have been forgotten at this point, but for the perseverance of another Co Donegal man, Eanna MacCuinneagain, from Carrick, an antiquarian book dealer and owner of any book lover's treasure chest, Cathach Books in Dublin's Duke Street.
MacCuinneagain spent years searching for a copy of McGinley' s famous, though by then long-neglected, book. In about 1955, he met one of McGinley's sons, a retired bishop in his 90s, returned from abroad, blind and confined to a wheelchair. The old man had only a typed manuscript of his father's book. MacCuinneagain borrowed this, read and returned it. However, when he tried to find it after the old man's death in 1969, the manuscript was not among the old bishop's small library. MacCuinneagain's subsequent investigations revealed only two copies: one in the British Library in London; the other, the last in Ireland, in Magee College in Derry.
Having obtained a photocopy of the original from the Magee library, MacCuinneagain continued his search for an original while also hoping to get the book republish- ed some day. This aim he finally accomplished a couple of years ago in an elegant edition befitting a labour of love, through his own Four Masters Press, which has also, to date, published three volumes of John O'Donovan's Ordnance Survey Letters chronicling his work in counties Donegal, Meath and Dublin (edited by Michael Herity).
McGinley on the page is a fine companion, gracious and enthusiastic: "I must invite my reader, then, to accompany me, in spirit or otherwise, in a tour which I propose to make along the rugged and broken coastline of this highly picturesque region. I shall ask him to wander with me by its rocky shores, traverse its brown moors, and climb its lofty steeps."
It all sounds rather genteel, almost the stuff of drawing-room reminiscence, but there is far more grit on offer. His version of a local legend featuring two rival clans battling it out on Rathlin O'Birne Island, a difficult place to visit as there is no landing area, is exciting fare. McGinley is a civilised realist and his observations are as sharp as they are kindly. And he never omits reference to any school he passes on his tour.
Lochlann McGill, son of a member of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, is a GP in Falcarragh, Co Donegal, and a native of Ardara. In the fine tradition of Irish local historians with a feel for the landscape, natural history, archaeology, local geography and the people who inhabit a place, McGill set out to explore his heritage in In Conall's Footsteps. Although separated by 150 years, McGill and McGinley share more than the glorious landscape of south-west Donegal. They have a sense not only of social history but of the layers of individual lives that make up that history. Both defer to John O'Donovan's definitive translation of Annals of the Four Masters. Both are concerned, neither are pedantic.
Professional archaeologists and historians have long known the value of the tenacious, gifted amateur. McGinley and particularly McGill - who displays an impressive knowledge of archaeology, linguistics, folklore and local history in a thorough, well-footnoted 400-page text that races along unfettered by the wealth of fascinating digressions, asides, memorials to those who have died, characters, stories and every ancient stone along the way - both store information as a squirrel does nuts. McGill makes use of local voices; often he quotes their words in recounting local lore.
Many of Ireland's pioneering antiquarians,such as Sir William Wilde, were gentlemen scholars. McGill is one of these and his engaging tour of his native area is shaped by tracing the path of the sixth-century St Conall through a marvellous landscape extending between Doochary and Glencolumbkille. Co Donegal is rich in the turas, or pilgrim routes, and Glencolumbkille is widely associated with another saint, the great Columbkille.
So strong was the area's association with pilgrimage that one visitor, a climber on Sliabh Liag 10 years after John O'Donovan's visit in 1835, recalled: "When near the top, we came on a man and a woman who were making stations, at a holy well that is here, for the man's health. The man spoke very little English. I was a good deal amused at his incredulity that we should have ascended the mountain for no other purpose than to see the view."
Prayers aside, it is like looking at heaven. Ha- ving foll- owed the turas from an archaelo-gical ra- ther than religious perspective, I can say that the place still retains a strong sense of spirituality. Yet as McGill confirms, the tidal, treeless, rather peaceful island of Inishkeel, lying off the coast between Narin and Portnoo, provides "the spiritual core of this book". His book is concerned with Conall, and Conall's turas island was Inishkeel.
In his early days, admittedly, Conall appears to have been a more likely candidate for a part in a Synge play than a place in a hermitage. As a youth, the saint was a maverick. In one local woman's words from 1948, quoted by McGill: "Conall had no sense when he was a young man. And he was spoiled; one day he struck his father over the head with a hammer. When he went to the priest, the penance he was given was that he would have to go out to an island and spend so long on the island that the birds of the air would nest in the palm of his hand and rear their young there.
"This was a very severe penance and Conall went off and walked along until he came to the island of Inishkeel, just off the coast. The old people say that he spent seven years there and lived on nothing but what he could get from the sea and the rocks. In the seventh year there was a very good summer and one day he was lying out in the middle of the island and he fell asleep; it is not known how long he slept, but when he awoke there was a nest in the palm of his hand and the little birds had hatched out in the nest. He knew then that he had done his penance and he did a turas around the island, praying at certain places that he knew well by now, and in fact he spent the rest of his life on Inishkeel doing the turas regularly."
Unlike Rathlin O'Birne, lying some three miles off the coast, and surrounded as it is by invariably angry seas, Inishkeel is almost restful. Both islands possess wide-ranging archaeology. McGill is stronger in the area of antiquities than the more philosophical McGinley, who concentrates on the landscape and the stories.
The two books complement each other well. McGill defers to his 19th-century predecessor and also, interestingly, often quotes an even earlier traveller, the 18th-century vicar, Richard Pococke (1704-65), archdeacon of Dublin and later bishop of Meath. Having visited Egypt and the Alps, Pococke, an obsessive traveller, then focused on Ireland and completed a circuit of its coastline in 1752. It was then that he encountered south-west Co Donegal and, as Pococke was a candid character with an eye for detail, McGill defers to his memory of bridges now gone.
In Conall's Footsteps is written in a style impressively balanced between R. L. Praeger and Frank Mitchell. The quality of McGill's research, range of references and use of sources ensure that the reader feels in the safe hands of a writer who views the recording of such a diverse history, based on fact and hearsay and the weight of oral tradition, as both privilege and responsibility.
Aside from Conall's story, there is the amusing saga of St Conall's Bell, a tale also told by McGinley, although McGill brings it up to date to the British Museum, where that artefact now resides. Aside from the field archaeology, such as McGill's examination of the Kilclooney portal tombs and the turas stones, there is his conversational wander through Ardara and its weaving industry.
In the midst of all this - the people, the history and the changes - is a dignified tribute to artist Evie Hone and one of her most beautiful works, the rose window Christ Among the Doctors, commissioned by Patrick Sweeney and completed in 1954. Dominating the choir loft in an otherwise plain, modern Catholic Church of the Holy Family, the window commemorates Daniel Sweeney (1839-1911). He was a National School teacher. McGinley may have known him, and he would certainly have approved this honouring of a fellow teacher.
In Conall's Footsteps follows the steps of many others besides those of St Conall and a rare thinker such as McGinley. It is also a loving and substantial cultural travelogue exploring the splendid heritage of a special place.
The Cliff Scenery of South-Western Donegal by Kinnfaela (T. C. McGinley) is published by Four Masters Press at £25.
In Conall's Footsteps by Lochlann McGill (Brandon Press, 1992) has been reissued by the author (e-mail: lochc2000@yahoo.com).