DID YOUR neighbourhood light a bonfire last night at sunset and watch it until the early hours of this morning? If so, you probably live west of the Shannon, or in Cork, or in one of the other dwindling pockets of an old pagan tradition that has survived discouragement from Christianity, the fire brigades, and – latterly – the Environmental Protection Agency.
June 23rd – St John’s Eve, from the supposed June 24th birthday of John the Baptist – is the Christianised version of midsummer night: when, for millenniums, people across Europe marked the turning of the year with ceremonies honouring the sun. Fiery circles were central to the celebrations. Torch-bearers walked around fields to ensure a good harvest; cart-wheels were set alight and rolled down hills; and so on.
And although such ideas are forgotten now, even where Bonfire Night is still celebrated, there were echoes of them into modern times. In particular, the tradition of incendiary circularity was maintained until very recently, via the burning of car-tyres, before the EPA clamped down.
The 19th-century folklorist Lady Wilde – Oscar’s mother – suggested the whole of Ireland was once ringed with fire on St John’s Eve, starting with the hill of Howth: “The sacred fire was lighted with great ceremony on Midsummer Eve; and on that night all the people of the adjacent country kept fixed watch on the western promontory of Howth [. . .] The moment the first flash was seen from that spot the fact of ignition was announced with wild cries and cheers repeated from village to village, when all the local fires began to blaze, and Ireland was circled by a cordon of flame rising up from every hill. Then the dance and song began [and] wild hurrahs filled the air with the most frantic revelry.”
The modern event is somewhat more modest. Indeed, the most formal celebration I could find yesterday was in an ad for the now-annual St John’s Eve special at O’Dowd’s Fire-Places and Stoves in Carrick-on-Shannon, Co Leitrim, where the proprietor was offering cut-price deals and free entertainment all day until sunset.
When I rang Mr O’Dowd for details, he explained that in his – admittedly commercial – approach to Bonfire Night, he was carrying on a tradition handed down by his parents, who for many years up until the late 1960s organised an annual carnival on June 23rd at Cox’s Crossroads, a few miles outside Carrick. This was a “mini-Slane festival” he said, to which people would travel from far around for music, dancing and, of course, a bonfire. Some of the country’s top show-bands rounded off the day’s festivities every year, performing in a marquee.
The carnival apart, O’Dowd recalls that Carrick-on-Shannon used to be ablaze on the evening of June 23rd, with every self-respecting neighbourhood lighting a bonfire.
“You’d be scanning the horizon to check out the competition,” he said. “There’d be the Parkies’ fire, in St Patrick’s Park, and the main Townies’ fire. The Summer Hill crowd would have one too. Ours was the Cortubber bonfire, on Liberty Hill.”
He still lights a fire – it’s his business after all – every June 23rd, and did so again yesterday; but it’s only a “very small, environmentally friendly one” now.
WRITING IN 1887, Lady Wilde suggested that St John’s Eve bonfires continued to be lit on “every hill in Ireland”: Howth presumably included. And she described some of the rituals associated with the night: “When the fire has burned down to a red glow the young men strip to the waist and leap over or through the flames; this is done backwards and forwards several times [. . .] he who braves the greatest blaze is considered the victor over the powers of evil [. . .] When the fire burns [. . .] lower the young girls leap the flame, and those who leap clean over three times back and forward will be certain of a speedy marriage [with] many children.
“The married women then walk through [. . .] the burning embers; and when the fire is nearly burnt and trampled down, the yearling cattle are driven through the hot ashes, and their [backs] singed with a lighted hazel twig. These rods are kept safely afterwards, being considered of immense
power to drive the cattle to and from the watering places [. . .]”.
In common with most of eastern Ireland, modern-day Howth seems to have lost its taste for St John’s Eve conflagrations. The north Dublin village has a good excuse, however, in that it can be liable to rampant gorse blazes – some of them started by the powers of evil – all year round.
Consequently there are many Howth fires mentioned in the Irish Times archive of the past century and a half. But the most recent example that coincided with St John’s Eve was in 1950, when the area was experiencing a heat-wave.
There were livestock involved then too, albeit accidentally. One local woman had grown so concerned about the threat of fire that she had notices printed warning picnickers against carelessness, and was going around nailing these to telegraph poles (the notices, that is, not the picknickers). “A friend of mine had her henhouse and 15 hens burned to death last week,” she explained to a reporter.
fmcnally@irishtimes.com