Marina Saegerman (member of the Brussels Brontë Group) writes about her visit to Patrick Brontë's homeland:
Over the years I have
been able to visit many places related to the Brontës, both in the UK and in
Ireland, but there was one place that I had not yet visited and which is
essential to the Brontë history: the place where Rev. Patrick Brontë was born
and where he grew up. This was my missing link in the Brontë story. So this
year’s mission on our holidays in Ireland was to be a visit to the area where
Patrick Brontë was born and lived until he moved to Cambridge, the area around
Rathfriland in County Down, Northern Ireland. I have always been fascinated by
the Brontës’ Irish ancestry and have read all that I could find on this topic. So you
can imagine that I was very excited to see the area where Patrick Brontë spent
his early years and to visit the places related to his family.
The day of the visit
was to be Saturday 26 July 2014. On our way back home from Boyle to Dun
Laoghaire (Co. Dublin) a small detour was planned to Northern Ireland, where I
booked us into a B&B in Rathfriland for one night. In preparation of
this visit I had been rereading some books on the Brontës’ Irish background.
My main guidebook for the trip was to be The Road to Haworth – the Story of
the Brontës’ Irish Ancestry by John Cannon. It reads like a Brontë novel.
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| The Schoolhouse |
We set off in the
morning and planned to arrive in the
Rathfriland area around noon. A few days before our
departure I had phoned the secretary of the Irish section of the Brontë
Society, Miss Margaret K Livingston, to see whether we could meet her when we
were in the area. We decided to meet up at 1pm for a picnic lunch at Drumballyroney where the Brontë
Homeland Interpretative Centre is situated. The Drumballyroney Schoolhouse and
Church are also the start of the Brontë Homeland drive.
The Rathfriland area
breathes Brontë: a lot of houses or institutions have a Brontë-related name:
Brontë manor, the Brontë primary school, a Brontë nursery unit, there was even
a house called 'Villette'. We arrived at 12
o’clock on the dot, the time that the interpretative centre opened its doors.
No need to say that we were the first visitors of the day. Since we were well
before the time set to meet Margaret, I had some time to browse around in the
Schoolhouse to see the video on the Brontë family and read all the information
panels, giving information on the various members of the Brontë family,
including Patrick Brontë’s parents and their unusual 'country courtship'. The
small schoolroom also contained some exhibits related to Patrick Brontë and the
Brontë sisters, amongst others a replica of Charlotte Brontë’s wedding dress.
Margaret arrived well
on time and was accompanied by another member of the Irish section, Mr Finny O’
Sullivan. The weather gods were not on our side that day, it was pouring
outside. But a picnic was planned,
and a picnic we would have! Margaret decided to have a picnic in the
schoolroom: since we were the only visitors at that moment, this was not a
problem. We were treated to a real picnic feast: lovely fresh sandwiches,
biscuits, cake, strawberries and cream, tea, coffee and juice… too much
for our poor bellies!
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| Finny, Margaret and Marina |
During lunch we
received all the information about the Irish section of the Brontë Society, the
Irish ancestry and the Drumballyroney site - schoolhouse, church and Brontë burial
plot.
The schoolhouse at
Drumballyroney was the place where Patrick, at the age of twenty-one, taught for four years, before going to Cambridge. Next to the schoolhouse is the Anglican
Church where Patrick and his brother William were christened and where Patrick gave
his first sermon after graduating from Cambridge University. We
also visited the graveyard at the back of the schoolhouse and church, where the
Brontë family burial plot is situated and where Patrick’s parents and other
family members are buried.
Margaret and Finny had planned to
drive us around the Brontë homeland sites, so we set off in Margaret’s car. In
the meantime the weather had cleared up and the sun was shining again. The
drive was very well sign-posted , we just had to follow the brown signposts
with the book symbol. Next stop on the homeland drive was the Brontë
Homeland picnic site at Knockiveagh where we had wonderful views over the Mourne
Mountains and the area where Patrick grew up. The picnic site contains the
ruins of an old shebeen - an illicit drinking house.
We continued to
follow the 'Brontë road'. We passed the two-storey house near Lisnacreevy where Hugh and Alice
brought up their family of ten children, we passed the 'dancing glen' where they
secretly met according to local legend, and arrived at the next stop on the
drive, Alice McClory’s
cottage in Ballynaskeagh. This cottage was the childhood home of Patrick’s mother, and is still
owned by the McClory family. The cottage was very overgrown with bushes and
ivy, and it was very difficult to see how it would have looked like. Nothing
has been done to keep it in a reasonable condition, and it is in a very bad
state at the moment. What a shame!
The highlight of the
homeland drive was of course the Birthplace Cottage at Emdale, a small two-roomed cottage where
Patrick Brontë was born on St. Patrick’s Day 1777. Or to describe it in Patrick’s own words, from the poem 'The Irish cabin':
“A neat
Irish cabin, snow proof
Well
thatched, had a good earthen floor,
One
chimney in midst of the roof,
One
window, and one latched door.
Little remains now of
the original thatched cottage, but it gives a clear impression of how an Irish
family must have lived in those days.
However, to modern standards, it is difficult to imagine that a family
with two children could actually live in such a small space. A lot of work has
been done to restore the walls, the
site is now protected and in 1956 a commemorative plaque was unveiled at the
site.
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| Glascar Church |
We continued the
homeland drive to its final stop , Glascar Church and Schoolhouse, where Patrick had his first
teaching post in the 1790s. He was said to have used creative teaching methods
in order to bring out the best in his pupils. He was dismissed from this post
because he had formed a romantic attachment with one of his pupils. After this
incident he took up the teaching post at Drumballyroney schoolhouse and so the
Brontë homeland circle is
complete.
In the Glascar Church
graveyard we could see many headstones with the Brontë name. Descendants of the
Irish Brontës are still being buried here.
We returned to
the Drumballyroney Schoolhouse, still enjoying the wonderful views and the
countryside that Patrick Brontë knew as a child and a young man. It had been a very
interesting and informative
afternoon with Margaret and Finny. One can learn a lot about the Irish Brontë
story from books on the subject but having actually seen and visited the sites
and having received the information from Margaret and Finny who had so much
more to tell about the Irish Brontës and the stories behind the sites, made the
Brontë homeland drive so much more interesting to me and gave another dimension
to my knowledge on the Irish ancestry.
I was really glad
that we had the opportunity of doing the drive with people like Margaret and
Finny who knew the places so well. I’m convinced that if we would have had to
do the drive on our own, although it is signposted, we would have had great
difficulty in finding some of the spots eg Alice McClory’s cottage well hidden
behind bushes and ivy. We took our leave
from Margaret and Finny, thanking them for the time they had spent with us and the information we had received.
On our way to the
B&B in Rathfriland, very close to the Drumballyroney site, I reflected on the afternoon and enjoyed
the satisfaction that I had finally completed my own Brontë circle.
For further reading, the following
books can be recommended:
The Road to Haworth –
the story of the Brontës’ Irish ancestry (John Cannon)
The Brontës of
Ballynaskeagh ( W. Haughton Crowe)
The Brontës in
Ireland (Dr. William Wright)
“The Brontës’ Irish
background” (Edward Chitham)
Poet Simon Zonenblick (pictured) showed a preview of his new forty-five minute video about Branwell Brontë this afternoon, in Thornton. The upstairs room of the chic little vegetarian café in South Square was full of people who turned out to be terrifyingly knowledgeable about the young man who is often seen simply as a boozer who was fond of opium, but Zonenblick was not in any way daunted when he answered their questions afterwards. According to the video, which is mainly about his time as a railway clerk at Luddendenfoot, just up from recently-industrialised Sowerby Bridge, Branwell wrote plenty of tolerable verse when he was not busy with account books, and produced a number of reasonably good paintings. We saw some of these - a Jacob's ladder with angels, reminiscent of Blake, a landscape in which it was not clear whether the sun was rising or setting, a moonlit scene with a bridge over a canal, a figure which could be from a dream or nightmare entitled The Lamplighter... according to one of the people interviewed by Zonenblick, Branwell's landscapes are ethereal, all about "the spaces between places". The poets of today who meet regularly in Calderdale pubs consider themselves to be Branwell's descendants, to some extent, and some of his poems were read by them with great respect, especially the ones dealing with death and burial.
