"Only connect!" advised E. M. Forster. There can be few places in Ireland which connect a seventh-century saint, a basilica in Bethlehem, a silena-gig, an Italian port town, an execution in Clonmel, a Nash castle, the parents of one of the signatories of the 1916 Proclamation and the great English country house of Knole. Yet here in a quiet country graveyard at Seanrahan in south Tipperary all these elements come together.
Knowing nothing of Seanrahan and searching only for the tower glimpsed from the high road near Clogheen I lose myself in the foothills of the Knockmealdown Mountains. The higher I go the more hidden are the hamlets of the plain but at last binoculars reveal the tower, the wall around it and ranks of headstones.
In the valley again I find that across from a four-arched bridge a stile in the wall allows access to a graveyard. The main gate is near a cluster of ruined outbuildings, but the cemetery itself is neatly kept, holding graves both old and new, and now, in spring, radiant with hyacinths, daffodils, tulips and primulas all flourishing above the mown grass and bordered tombs.
As I park the Kiev Patriarchal Choir is singing an Easter hymn of Enlightenment on Lyric FM. Serendipity, I reflect, as I inspect the carved tablets on the piers: "Within this graveyard lies (sic) the remains of Fr Nicholas Sheehy, P.P., Clogheen, executed in Clonmel March 15th, 1766." Erected by the people of Clogheen in 1991, the inscription is paired with that on the other pier: "St Cathaldus, Christ's Pilgrim and Saint Protector of Taranto, began his pilgrimage from here. Ireland and Italy gratefully invoke his blessing. Unveiled by S.E. Benigno Luigi Papa, Arcivescovo di Taranto and the Very Rev Sean Nugent, P.P. 28th October, 2000."
The martyred Father Sheehy is not unknown, but of St Cathaldus and his pilgrimage I have never heard. A walk through the ruins is no help, apart from showing that there were two foundations here, that Father Sheehy lies under a dignified table-top tomb, that the Hickeys of Lisfuncheon have been buried here since 1640 and that, high up on the bell-tower, a carving suspiciously like a sile na gig can be seen. But of St Cathaldus and Taranto there is no further mention at all.
Father Nugent of Clogheen sends me to local historian John Tuohy, but even he can't help about the pagan fertility symbol, except to admit that it is a sile na gig and that there may be two of them on the tower, possibly retained as symbols not of pre-Christian superstition but as a reminder of the fate of FatherSheehy, who had been hanged, drawn and quartered that March day in Clonmel. But St Cathaldus is as familiar to the people of the parish as is Father Sheehy.
A seventh-century saint from this district of old Rahan, he went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land; a commemorative mural in the early Basilica of St Catherine in Bethlehem describes him as the shining light of Ireland. On his journey home to Ireland, however, Cathaldus was shipwrecked on the coast of Taranto, and made welcome by the local people. He remained there until his death. Credited with protecting the town from the invading Saracens he became its patron saint - "saint protector".
On the rebuilding of his basilica in Taranto in the 12th century workmen opened his sarcophagus; little of the saint remained, but there was a small cross of Irish gold engraved so that the letters themselves formed a cross, the middle "H" being the bridge for the words Cahal, Rahan.
Cathaldus is merely the Latin of Cahal; Rahan is the precursor of Seanrahan. Or so at least John Tuohy believes, although he acknowledges there is a claim that the saint may have come from Rahan in Co Offaly. Whatever the truth in either claim, Father Frank Mackin S.J. of Boston College was so convinced of Seanrahan's ownership that he presented two stained glass windows (the work of his niece, the artist Susan Mackin), celebrating the saint's life to the local parish church of St Mary.
Here in Seanrahan on the banks of the River Duag the older of the two towers is that of a castle built by the Everards of Ballyboy and Burncourt. The parish now holds the two chalices given to the church by Luke Everard and his wife Eliza Daniels; another later chalice came from Sir Richard Everard, Bart., one of the 23 sentenced to be hanged at Limerick during the Cromwellian campaign, although he was later pardoned because of his great age.
More recent patrons of Seanrahan were the Earls of Lismore; it was because Lady Lismore disliked going to church in a graveyard that Seanrahan was abandoned in 1821. A new church was designed by Clonmel architect William Tinsley (later to have great success in America), at a location closer to the mountain and called, still, the Bella.
In 1846, this was taken down and re-erected in Clogheen itself, and it was in this church that the parents of Thomas Clarke were married. The Church of Ireland presented the church to Clogheen in 1986 and it is now in active use as a community centre.
John Tuohy reminds me that Seanrahan also holds the O'Callaghan mausoleum dating from 1741, built by the Cork sculptor David Sheehan, the teacher of John Hogan and creator also of the Barrymore monument at Castlyons. And it is Tuohy who explains why Edward Sackville-West, Fifth Baron Sackville, of Knole in Kent, is buried here in Seanrahan. A friend of Derek Hill and Graham Sutherland, the author and music critic had wanted to buy the exquisite Nash mansion of Shanbally in Clogheen, built circa 1812 for the First Viscount Lismore, which had been sold by the Pole-Carew family to the Irish Land Commission in 1954.
Unfortunately for Shanbally, Sackville-West wanted more than the 80 acres the Commission was prepared to sell. Disappointed, he bought Cooleville with 200 acres instead and the Commission, responsible for the largest of the four Nash castles in Ireland, demolished it - reputedly by allowing the Irish Army use it for dynamite practice.
Sackville-West died at Cooleville in 1965 and is buried here at Seanrahan, beside the river and under the mountains and close to the spot from which St Cathaldus began that journey to the Holy Land which ended at Taranto.