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The Sacred Geography of a Single Family
There is a particular kind of place in Ireland that will not appear on any tourist map. You'll find no signpost or visitor centre there, and no guide explaining its significance. To a coach tour passing on the main road, it looks like any other small field, or any other tumbledown gable wall of a cottage. But for one family, somewhere in the world, that field is the centre of everything.
I think of this often when I am over near Ballydehob, in West Cork. There is a townland there called Arduramore. You might see it on a map if you squint, but you will not find it in any guidebook. There is nothing to see, in the conventional sense. A few hilly and stony fields, the remains of old cottages, and a boreen that climbs toward a low hill. Sheep and cows graze through a wind that comes in off the Atlantic.
But this is the place that just one of my great-granduncles, Patrick Collins, walked from in October of 1883, towards the City of Chicago. He was a young man then, with a long road of America ahead of him. He never came back, and died in Illinois many years later and is buried thousands of miles from this small field above the bay.
But when I stand on that lane, I am standing where he last stood looking out at that same view he carried with him to his grave, the last image of home. I suppose that it is a thing that can't be explained to anyone outside the family. It looks like nothing, but feels like everything if you have the connection.
Why the Small Place Outweighs the Grand One
You are right to say that the Cliffs of Moher are spectacular and will take the breath out of you. So will the Giant's Causeway, and Skellig Michael, and the Burren in spring. Sure, aren't these the great set-pieces of Ireland? They deserve their reputation. But the thing is that they belong to everyone. Every visitor sees the same Cliffs of Moher. The image you carry away is, in a sense, a shared image, much the same as the next person's.
But the small places of Ireland are different, they belong to you alone, or to your family alone. The gable wall of your great-great-grandmother's cottage, the bend in the road where the lane meets the fields, the holy well where she went each Pattern Day. No one else in the coach tour is looking for that. Perhaps, no one else has stood there in a hundred years asking the questions you are asking.
So, you bring a meaning with you to this place that did not have it before you arrived, and it will lose it again when you leave. For a few hours, though, the meaning is alive there, but you are the one keeping it alive. That is why it stays with you, long after all the grand sights have faded. Those grand sights were a postcard, while your small place was a conversation between you and your ancestors.
How to Find Your Own Small Place
For readers planning an ancestral trip, or thinking about one, you may be asking - how do I find mine? Here are a few thoughts, drawn from Green Room members who have done it well.
Start with the townland, not the county. "County Cork" is too big, even the parish is often too big. The townland is the smallest civil division in Ireland, and it is almost always the level your ancestor would have given as their home. Griffith's Valuation and the 1901 or 1911 census are the usual ways in.
Do not expect a plaque. There may be a cottage still standing, or there may not. There may be just a gable wall, or even just a low pile of stones, a field whose name the local farmer remembers. There may be only the boreen and the hedgerow, but whatever remains there will often be enough.
Allow time here and make the effort to talk to one local person - the neighbouring farmer, the postman, the woman in the shop in the village. Ireland's local memory is held in these conversations, not in archives. A ten-minute chat at the right gate has unlocked more for our readers than many weeks spent online.
And give yourself time to just be there. Be it half an hour, or an hour. Walk the boreens and sit on the walls at the turn of the lane. Allow the place to settle around you. It will not put on a show for you, but if you give it time, it often gives something back.
The Place Is Sacred Because You Made It So
There is a deeper truth I have come to believe, after years of personal experience and conversations with our readers. The small place is not waiting for you in some pre-existing sacred state, ready to bless the descendant who finds it. In fact, it is, on the surface, just another quiet corner of Ireland. The sacredness is something you bring with you. It is the weight of three or four generations of unanswered questions, of stories half-told around kitchen tables in Brisbane and Boston, of names and stories shared down through the years.
You stand on that country lane or boreen and you carry all of that with you. For a moment, the field, the wall, or a simple crossroads becomes the meeting place between a generation that left and your generation that returned. Between Patrick walking out in 1883 and his great-grandson standing in the same place, all those years later. The Cliffs of Moher or the Giant's Causeway cannot quite give you that. Nothing on a guidebook list can.
Thanks to Eileen for the lovely question, it is one I often ponder myself.
Before I leave you this week, I’d love to ask you something.
Have you found your own small place in Ireland yet? Or are you still searching?
To answer, simply hit reply - just a line or two is perfect. Carina and I read every response, even if we cannot always answer personally.
That's it for this week.
Slán for now,
Mike. |