It is a tradition in Ballinasloe and one that probably linked many fireside stories for centuries afterwards, that when Ballinasloe Castle was surrounded by Cromwell’s men the royalist governor, Antony Brabazon, dived out of a top window in the dead of night, into the moat, and, after much fumbling around the British Isles, made his way to Spain where he died in 1654. In the chronicles of the Brabazon family, written by a Mr Hercules Sharpe and published in Paris in 1825, it is mentioned that he has a spectacular baroque tombstone in a Spanish cathedral, in keeping with the daring of his escape from Ireland, but the cathedral or the city in which it is situated are not named, by dint of clannish discretion or unyielding sense of conspiracy. When I first travelled to Spain with the sideburns and the gaucheness of the early 1970s I imagined it to be one of the elephantine stone mounds in cathedrals in jacaranda-clouded southern cities.
Ballinasloe came into being as a trading village around a ford on the river Suck between County Roscommon and County Galway. It mainly lies in County Galway – east Galway. Not just the bridge over the Suck but Ballinasloe Castle – originally the seat of the O’Kellys – mark the break on the road between Roscommon and Galway, the castle swaddled in dark ivy. You are in flat countryside where the shade of green has a clandestine feel, where tributaries of the river Suck are everywhere – messages running through the sometimes unnervingly dark countryside. In the early eighteenth century the Trench family purchased the locale from Catholic descendants of Edmund Spenser and the village became a town – big, imposing limestone houses, generously wide streets. From the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century the annual horse fair was the largest in Europe. Traders frequently visited it from Moscow.
During this year’s fair English convoy people, shellshocked, wandered through the crowded streets. They felt there was no longer room for them in England. ‘We’ve got the right of firing here,’ one young man in a periodically slashed, valerian-coloured jersey told me, holding up his ringleted boy on Church Hill, tinkers racing traps on a track in the fair-green behind him. ‘Firing’ is firewood. Near by a girl from Westbury-on-Trym with a Marie Antoinette hair-do, leather toga on her, black stockings, played ‘Rocky Road to Dublin’ on a tin whistle while a youth with lemon and scarlet laces on his boots listened.
Two billygoats escaped on the convoy people while they were in Ballinasloe for the fair and in November the billygoats were arriving at people’s doorways, come evening, with the smell of sausages.
In a pub on Dunlo Street, Ballinasloe, during the fair, children were jammed on the knees of a Belfast family as they launched into ‘On the one road, carrying the one load, on the road to God knows where’ under a picture of Moscow Sportag – the Moscow soccer team who wear blue-and-white jerseys. Was the poster a salute to the days when horse traders came here all the way from Moscow and stayed at Gill’s Hotel?
In the fair-green, where horses weren’t brushing against one another, Wellingtons were laid out and rows of second-hand trousers. I purchased a pair of grey flannel trousers for £6 in a blue tent where the light made it seem like a blue grotto.
We were warned, growing up, that Ballinasloe had the largest mental hospital in Europe. The first building went up in 1833 and extensions and additions haven’t stopped since. But such knowledge doesn’t deter Ballinasloe people from incessantly going back.
The flavour of the saints depicted in its churches is exotic – St Rose of Lima in stained glass in St Michael’s Catholic Church, St Catherine of Alexandria beside a porous-patterned tree on a wall of the twelfth-century Clontuskert Priory four miles from Ballinasloe.
In November I came back to the town and, recreating childhood bicycle journeys, on a hired bicycle I made a tour of the medieval monastic ruins that form an exhilarating demi-necklace around Ballinasloe, stretching from County Galway into Offaly where it is adjacent to Roscommon. The landscape was to a great extent burgundy now with the wealth of rowan trees and bryony bushes.
I started with the fourteenth-century Kilconnell Priory seven miles west of Ballinasloe on the old Dublin-Gal way road. The O’Dalys successfully warded off Cromwell’s men from it in the 1640s but by an edict of King William and Queen Mary the friars had to leave by 3 January 1698. They dispersed to Lisbon, Corunna, Saint-Malo, some of the longest-surviving friars in Ireland.
Now the priory is a mysterious skeleton – a cluster of savagely isolated gables – graves strewn among it. Honorias, Anastasias. Marjories remembered; plastic lilies, red plastic carnations, a tiny gold Christ on a cross – all this under glass – over a name like Hozier. A narrative on the wall in one place telling you ‘Mathyas Barnewall Lord Barrow of Trimblestown who being transplanted into Connaught with others by orders of the usurper Cromwell died at Monivea’. Of a sudden you’ll see a country woman, a mourner, peering through a medieval window. Some of the graves are recent, the date of decease of a Ballinderry farmer not considered profane to put alongside 1667, the date of decease of an Irish aristocrat.
Lights are lit around the head of the Virgin Mary as you enter the village, a peach robe embracing Christ in a churchyard. Pairs of girls link arms. The library is wedded to the bank – in the same building. A plaque to a local MP – ‘noble citizen and true patriot’ – determines the point where you step from the street on to the priory grounds.
There was a rainbow behind the priory that day. The ruins elevated theatrically under a sky in which low, ungainly clouds scudded over in an orderly way. The rainbow followed me through the black bogs of Aughrim where the last decisive battle of Ireland was fought between the Williamites and the Jacobites almost exactly three hundred years ago, in 1691. It followed me past splendidly gabled country houses and isolated oaks to Clontuskert Priory which is lost and covert way down in the fields, surrounded by whitened stone walls which, from a distance, look like pearl seeds. A lark ascended slant-wise against this vista. During land drainage in the 1940s a path was discovered, a monks’ pass, running from Clontuskert Priory to the ruins of a medieval church nearer to Ballinasloe – Teampoillín – which has the dramatic corbel stones typical of east Galway, the grounds of the church, verging on the Suck, having become a burial place for miscarried infants in the seventeenth century. Clontuskert Priory was rendered defunct at the end of the sixteenth century but it was ostentatiously revived in the 1630s, a brief era when beautiful chalices were made there, when, according to Protestant prelates on ecclesiastical reconnaissance and with a view to rededicating it as Protestant property, Protestants were ‘unmercifully whipped and abused’ in full view of the idols of the Virgin Mary.
Cromwell’s men finally wrecked it. St Michael, St John the Evangelist, St Catherine of Alexandria, St Augustine stand over a doorway, accosted by a tearaway bush of furze, but otherwise it is a strange, dislocated presence against the quiet lands of the O’Kellys who planted members of their family as prebendaries and abbots there for three centuries.
Clonfert Cathedral, nine miles on, towards Offaly, was built on the site of a monastery founded by Brendan the Voyager. The saints over the Romanesque doorway have untoward grass growing in their private parts. Around it Catholic and Protestant graves have merged over the centuries but the Cathedral has been Protestant since the seventeenth century. It has always been closed when I’ve been there but you can peer in from one side and see the aristocratic azure of a stained-glass window.
A little boy played hurling by himself by the giant headstone of the Dowager Lady Dunboyne. A mourning family stood over a grave, boys in pastel shirts, a father. But the ancient statue of the Virgin Mary I’d seen on the ground in a corner of the graveyard last time I’d been here was missing, henna hair on her, white and gold robes, pronged crown, a Raphael-demure expression on her downcast face.
Up the road in the modern Catholic church in this land of shifting impressions of Mary is a wooden medieval statue of Madonna and child which, folklore has it, after the ravages of the seventeenth century was found up a tree, looking to its old home in Clonfert Cathedral. Mother and child have an arm missing but the child manages to hold a tress of his mother’s hair, her cheeks salmon-coloured, her robes brick-coloured and chalky blue against an encasement of little festoons. This is Our Lady of Ballinasloe, Our Lady of the country and western dance-halls and the scattered churches where novenas are enunciated by old ladies on November evenings. A boy with a Mikado orange glow of dyed hair, in Dutch trousers, tended sheep on a hillock just as I crossed the Shannon at Banagher. Teenage supporters of a boxing team, in army jackets, marched through town, ignoring the strangeness of the small Victorian billiard hall with pitched roof.
It was dark by the time I reached the ruins of the medieval monastic city of Clonmacnoise, old women in black straggling among the modern graves, the ancient crosses blasted by lichen, the round towers, the neat modern paths, the discreetly sidelined yew trees – the crucified Christs with owlish faces and plasticine arms almost lost in the dark.
When I was a child we were told the tale in Ballinasloe National School, under the buxom, Victorian Protestant church, of the builder who demanded more money for finishing off the round towers, thereby irritating a bishop who pulled away the ladder when the builder was beavering away with some touch on top of a tower, at which point he, the builder, began systematically taking the tower apart. ‘Sure isn’t it easier to take down two stones than put up one’ was the punch-line in the story and our minds imagined a bygone Clonmacnoise, turf boats with red tanned sails on the Shannon beside it. Life seems to have borne out this punch-line, as the history of Ballinasloe’s monastic ruins and fretted statues had done anyway.
Later that night there was music in a roadside pub over the border in Roscommon, the lights of Athlone, the Las Vegas bravura of some of them, not far away. I’d passed a pub in Ferbane, County Offaly, which had a placard in the window saying: ‘The world and his wife drinks Guinness’, the wife in this advertisement, under the Arc de Triomphe revelling by a Guinness-laden table with her husband, having an early 1960s bouffant hair-do. But the pub had been closed. Maybe, with its downfall of thatch, it had been closed since the early 1960s. A three-man showband played on a small stage in the rural pub near Athlone – a scattering of photographs on a wall in an inner sanctum enmeshing a night of particular celebration in the pub – women and men in paper hats, faces ballooned by over-proximity to the camera.
Catch me if you can
I’m your man
My name is Dan.
These are some of the words I picked up in the midst of a thumping guitar and a harmonica which followed it with whining but jubilant staccatos. Another song was: ‘Where the strawberry beds sweep down to the Liffey’.
A man with a plenitude of black forelocks, his French-flag-red tie askew, got up from the audience to sing a song about a man who married a woman of questionable age only to find she wore a wig when he got into bed with her. The advice of the song was to wed ‘a blooming nineteen-year-old damsel’. The man made an embarrassed and awkward but smiling excuse for the song before he faded from the stage, mumbling that it was for ‘his other half’. An old man leaned over and told me there were ninety-one bachelors in the parish and he was the ninety-first.
Most of the people in the pub were old. The young were gone to San Francisco, Chicago. But they still got up to dance, the old, women with novelty perms, silver high heels, men with violet sheens on their cheeks. It could have been the 1950s for a moment and despite the ghostly sense of diaspora there was serene enjoyment on the women’s faces, smiles which triggered off the imagination and followed you, with your headlight, through lonely bogland to the town of Ballinasloe.
Stone patterns of arched medieval windows against the sky, outlines of monasteries under pale lilac skies, the threat of suburbia, the watercolour of a buttercup running into the words of a song in a country and western stop-over pub – these were the import of this landscape.
In Ballinasloe, late at night, two convoy people, a girl and a boy, perhaps left over from the fair, walked along with a dog on a leash, the girl’s hair crimson lake, a narrative pattern on her high woollen stockings, the boy’s laces undone and a jumble of what looked like Christmas decorations around the dog’s neck.