An Irishwoman's Diary

‘IMMENSE TO meet you again,” says Tony Kirby, and you know that he means every letter. No quick nod, no lazy adjectives here, as he grips your hand – but it could be your mind – and enlists you on his latest quest for “pilgrims, penitents and purgatory”.

Location is Tolkien territory – the Burren – and Kirby is author of one of the finest guides to the 350 million-year-old limestone pavement, moulded by marine life from what was once a tropical sea.

Navigator in both the physical and literal sense, he has a rare ability to slip in such geological information, along with nuggets about Brehon laws, or votive offerings, or blue gentian, as if it were “breaking” news.

Yet no monosyllabic narrator he; indeed “Minister for Water Meters” Phil Hogan might have a job for him. During one of his recent Burren pilgrimages near Carran, Kirby explained that the cult of water could be traced back on this island to the Bronze Age, or further. Instead of paying charges, we made sacrificial deposits – the most generous on record having been those Iron Age bronze trumpets found in Loughnashade, Co Armagh.

Whether our shiny new meters will become altars of worship is another matter entirely. Our antecedents created shrines around their sacred wells, of which there are at least 3,000 on this island. As Kirby elaborates on his excellent heartofburrenwalks.comblog, holy wells can have three diagnostic features – the divine water, the blessed tree and the curiously shaped stone.

Penitence, healing and the need to socialise were the attractions, he explains, and there were surges in popularity during times of religious suppression. This may not have suited the likes of St Colman, who sought an ascetic existence near Eagle’s Rock, close to Slieve Carran in northwest Clare, only to find that his leaba and oratory close to a water source became a magnet for visitors seeking cures.

Foraging our way through ash and hazel and fern some months ago, we came across multiple offerings at St Colman’s – ribbons, badges, brooches, pins, paper prayers, even a Barbie doll. Similarly, patrún or pattern walks to areas such as Maumeen in Connemara have become large gatherings, meeting a spiritual need. Yet the wells themselves are deteriorating, Kirby notes, even as worship of same is still “robust”.

One writer who paid homage to this form of public worship was the late poet Seán Dunne, who died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 39 in 1995. In his poem West Cork, published in Gallery Press’s beautiful anthology of his work, Collected, Dunne described Gobnait’s bed: “Cluttered as a bedside table – the saint’s bed strewn with offerings from hairclips to the crutch of a man who walked out of the gate he’d stumbled through . . .”

Reciting the poem on a recent stroll by pilgrimage sites, Kirby told us about his recent visit to the monastic site in Ballyvourney in Cork, where Dunne, a Waterford native, was buried. It was only during Dunne’s funeral in Cork in August 1995 that many of his friends learned that this was to be his resting place, as Alannah Hopkin recorded in “An Irishwoman’s Diary” 10 years after the event.

St Gobnait was patron saint for bees. On her way to the shrine, Hopkin recalled noticing her fellow passenger saluting a dead pigeon on the road to acknowledge the life just taken. Often afterwards, this “spirit salute” reminded her of Dunne, she wrote, for it represented a “serendipity he would have enjoyed”. As writer Dermot Healy observed at the Cúirt literary festival in Galway, the year after Dunne’s passing, the poet’s return to the exploration of Christian spirituality in his latter years was an attempt to “rediscover the innocence that was there before the corruption”.

Early this spring, Kirby was one of three north Clare people to explore that rediscovery at Ballyvourney, along with Carles Casasin of Ballyvaughan and Mick O’Riordan of Doolin. The trio made a short five-minute film version of Dunne’s West Cork, with O’Riordan providing voice and original soundtrack. The aim was to remember a “sorely lamented voice” of Irish poetry, who had, as Brendan Kennelly once said, “constantly pitted his own values against the pain, suffering, violence and futility of the world”.

The film will have its world premiere at the Courthouse, Ennistymon, Co Clare, this coming Friday, May 18th, at 8pm, when a cast of north Clare voices will respond to the screening with “song, music and thoughts”. Master of ceremonies will be John Morgan of Kilfenora.

In fact, Ennistymon will be a happening place from May 18th to 20th, for it is hosting its inaugural Dylan Thomas Literary Festival and its first annual book fair, similar to that which takes place in Kilkenny’s Graiguenamanagh. Empty retail premises will become “pop-up” bookshops, along with the Courthouse Gallery, in the town centre, and Banner Books will host the Friday evening welcome.

Altogether, as Kirby might say, an immense and irresistible invitation.