THE REGION known as Entre Deux Mers, south-east of the city of Bordeaux, is a vast undulating limestone plateau between two great tidal rivers, the Garonne and the Dordogne. I've been spending a lot of time there recently, researching and writing a novel.
There are vineyards as far as the eye can see. Three-quarters of the wine sold under the AOC Bordeaux or Bordeaux Superior appellations is produced here, and about three-quarters of the houses, even modest farmhouses and bungalows with vineyards attached, are called chateau something-or-other.
This assertion of grandeur is most clearly seen in 18th- and 19th-century houses with classical, ivy-clad façades. From the front they look imposing, but they are often only one room deep.
Most of the truly magnificent chateaux are north of Bordeaux, on the opposite side of the Garonne, in the area known as the Medoc, and many of them were built by Irishmen.
The Irish presence in the area is well documented, not least by Renagh Holohan in her book The Irish Chateaux: In Search of the Descendants of the Wild Geese. The Irish have been an influence in Bordeaux since defeat at the Boyne and Limerick drove the Irish Jacobites abroad. Their names live on in streets and chateaux, even when the latter have changed ownership.
The name Clarke is still attached to an 18th-century chateau bought and restored by Baron Edmond de Rothschild. Chateau Clarke was founded by an ancestor of Patrick Clarke de Dromantin, a resident of Bordeaux, who, since his retirement from the aeronautical industry, has been researching and writing the history of the Clarke family in France and their place in the wider historical context of the Irish in Europe.
His house in a quiet residential area of Bordeaux is filled with ancestral portraits, genealogical charts and photographs of the present generation of Clarkes. "I am a Jacobite," Patrick told me. "The Dromantin is from Dromantine, near Newry." The name was familiar to me as the former headquarters of the Society of African Missions. Patrick had visited it as part of his research for Les Oies Sauvages: Mémoires du'une famille irlandaise réfugiée en France (1691-1914) and Les réfugiés jacobites dans la France du XVIIIe siècle (both published by Bordeaux University Press). Patrick, who subtitled his second book L'exode de toute une noblesse pour cause de religion, found it a delicious irony that Dromantine had ended up in the possession of the Society of African Missions, whose founder was, of course, a Frenchman.
The first Clarkes to arrive in France were three sons of James Clarke and Anne O'Sheill sent by their parents to live with their maternal uncle, Luc O'Sheill, a gun merchant who had settled in Nantes. Thoby (aged 21) stayed in Nantes; James (aged 14) went to Martinique. The youngest, 12-year-old John - Patrick's direct ancestor - went to Bordeaux. His son, Tobie Clarke, bought a wine estate in Listrac in the Medoc in 1771, but died the same year.
Jean's grandson, Luc Tobie Clarke, a Bordeaux magistrate, built a house on the estate in 1810 and called it Chateau Clarke. The wine retains the name, although the estate was sold and Luc Tobie's house was demolished in 1955.
"De Dromantin" was added to the family name by Patrick's grandfather - "for reasons of vanity," Patrick says. "It sounds more noble." As to the origins of the name Clarke and its connection to Dromantine, Patrick's correspondence with archivists in Dublin and Belfast turned up a will, dated May 13th, 1672, of Thomas Clarke of Drementian (sic) in which he bequeaths to his wife the townlands named as Lisadeane and Dromhirre in Co Armagh, and a third of his land in Drementian. In later documents it is spelled Dromantine.
Thomas was the father of James Clarke, who became a freeman of the city of Dublin and a municipal councillor under James II. It seems James Clarke also lost everything after the Battle of the Boyne. The letter presented to the French authorities in Bordeaux, requesting French nationality for Jean (John) Clarke as "refugié en France à cause de la Religion", says his father was a cavalry captain who, having been imprisoned, and having lost all his property and good standing, died of grief - "et sa mère aussi." I thought it a sad little footnote.
A line from a poem drifted into my head - "you feathered with the wild geese our
despair. . ." but I couldn't remember the rest of the poem or who wrote it. I think it was about Patrick Sarsfield. Maybe some reader will recognise it.
James Clarke's sons prospered in France. Patrick, his great, great, great grandson is proud of him.
Róisín McAuley's third novel, Finding Home, will be published by Sphere on January 15th.