One Day in Carrick-On-Shannon, Co Leitrim
I can hear the wind howling outside my window and the rain threateningly hammering at it and my instincts tell me to stay in bed where it’s safe and warm. At times like this, the lyrics of Better People from the band Oasis dance through my head: “So come outside and feel alive, it’s cold outside but it’s lonely in your bed”. I think I may have taken a slight liberty with the lyrics, but the line makes more sense to me this way.
“My camera will get ruined in the shite weather” or “maybe I could go another day when the weather is less shite” or “there won’t be anybody around” or “my car will probably break down, which in this shite weather would be a disaster” are all thoughts that go through my head.
I’ve had an engine warning light on for around three years now, since a misadventure with a mechanic who installed dodgy ignition coils, and so the fear of breakdown is somewhat laudable even though I’ve gotten used to the warm orange glow of the light and might actually miss it and feel a bit worried if it were to spontaneously stop glowing. My situation with the warning light is perhaps a bit like being ill for a long time, or being in a toxic relationship, or maybe years of smoking cigarettes; after a while you stop yearning for that idyllic place over the rainbow where you feel healthy, you’re not driven demented, you can breathe a little more easily, or indeed your engine light stops glowing; after a while you feel comfort in a situation you should really try and resolve and the idea of change makes you positively anxious even though it may be a change that should, in theory, make your life better.
However, there are often positive things that go along with toxic things in our lives, and these things are the hooks which reel us along eternally. With smoking, the routine perhaps involves conversing with fellow smokers outside the pub or in the smoking area at work and when you quit, outside of the physical withdrawals, you miss the human connection. When a toxic relationship ends you miss the reassurance of knowing you have someone warm in the bed beside you. Financially perhaps, life is a lot more difficult, as is the rearing of kids if you happen to have any. When ill for a long time you take comfort in your illness as your lack of energy makes it oh-so-easy to withdraw from the world and slip deep into a world of lethargy and obscurity; it gives you an excuse to be unproductive; and when you start to feel well again it can cause anxiety as you suddenly have to figure out what you do with all the extra energy now that the comfort blanket of illness has been removed. I guess, comparative to all the above, an engine warning light isn’t that big a deal. One could always get the bus. And the truth is that I actually like taking the bus as on the bus one can read a book, watch a movie, have a sleep, or even occasionally have a delightful conversation with a complete stranger; though that is increasingly rare these days as most people, myself included, tend to be plugged into The Matrix. The problem with going to some places on the bus, however, is that Carrick-On-Shannon is one of those that take you two or three times as long to get to if you don’t happen to have a car as there is no direct route. There isn’t from Galway anyway. One has to take at least 3 buses or trains that go way off course and in some sense it’s actually more complicated to get there than to some far-off place like America, which is likely why I have never been there before in my life.
Meandering thoughts aside, I make my way to Carrick-On-Shannon for the first time in my life with a few select destinations in mind and a desire to simply wander around the town just to see what I can see. I arrive in Carrick-On-Shannon at around 12 on a rainy Tuesday and once I’m parked, I make my way to the St George’s Heritage Centre.
On the way I see this delightful mural and so I take a picture of it for you.
Bursting to go to the loo, I ask the lady inside the counter of St Georges some details about what the centre offers and tell her I’d like to take the €10 tour option, which involves watching a video, getting information on various artefacts in the centre, a tour of St George’s Church and also a tour around the loft of the former workhouse down the road. But first, “I must ask if you have a loo,” I say, and she points me in the direction of it and I make haste to do the necessaries.
On coming out the door doesn’t open and, having just watched the series Dahmer on Netflix, I feel a mild sense of trepidation about being trapped, which is short lived as a man who works in the centre, Dean, opens the door with a smile and explains that the mechanism on the door is a bit funny. (Dahmer is a horrible series, made moreso by the fact that it recounts gruesome things that actually happened in the 80s and 90s).
Dean shows me into a room where I watch a 12-minute video on the history of Leitrim. I learn that, according to Leitrim’s most well-known literary son, John McGahern, ‘The soil in Leitrim is poor, in places no more than an inch deep. Underneath is daub, a blue-grey modelling clay, or channel, a compacted gravel’ and so, because of this poor drainage, water collects in the lakes and rivers which are notable features of Leitrim’s landscape. The largest river, the Shannon, is apparently what brought many of the planters there in the 16th and 17th centuries from England, Scotland, and Wales. Interestingly, I also learn that St George’s Church takes its name from one of the planter families of the same name, who were granted ownership of Carrick-On-Shannon in 1650. The plantation led to a situation in Leitrim where by the 1770s Catholics only owned around 5% of the land even though they made up 75% of the population. Later, after the famine, the population of Leitrim halved through starvation, disease, and emigration. Of the emigrants were over 4,000 young Irish girls who were collected up from the workhouses of Ireland, including the one in Carrick, and shipped to Australia. On arrival they were separated from friends and siblings and sold as servants in a manner which sounds very much like they were effectively abducted and sold into slavery (1). After the video is over, Dean gives me a tour of the centre, St George’s Church and the Famine loft.
The centre is full of all sorts of historical memorabilia and documentation which details much of the history of the town, and some of notable local people. One such person is detailed in a framed newspaper article clipping from 1870 wall with the title “Fattest Fireman in the World” whose name was Ging Dingnan, who was thought to be roughly 30 stone. Interestingly, he owned a popular pub in the town which burned down years later. On the more tragic side of things, the museum remembers a Carrick man called Private Matthew Quinlan, who at the age of only 16, fought in the Congo (1961) in what came to be known as the Siege of Jadotville and who tragically took his own life in 1992 in Australia at the age of 47. 6 of the Irish soldiers who were present at this conflict died by their own hand, while many more suffered alcoholism and PTSD (2). There is a film about this on Netflix which I keep meaning to watch but the first two times I tried was put off by the sight of Jamie Dornan, who always reminds me of that awful book that spawned multiple awful films in the 50 Shades of Grey series. Urgh.
St George’s Church is rich with all sorts of silverware, grand paintings (such as the one above, called “Adoration of the Shepherds which was painted by Carl Gustav Plagemann in 1831), stained glass and an organ which my guide tells me the markings on which indicate it was made for the Freemasons but was subsequently donated to the church.
The last stop on my tour is a visit to the famine loft which is the only part of the Carrick workhouse that still remains in its original form, the rest having been converted to a hospital. Being inside these workhouses (the best surviving example of which is in Portumna in Galway, and is well worth a visit) I always imagine I can hear the wails of the malnourished destitute, many of whom perished in these places, the last straw of hope for the damned. Previously, I read that some landlords paid for their tenants’ passage to America which seemed at the time I first heard it seemed to be an act of generosity, but since then I have learned that, since landlords had to pay for their tenants while they were in the workhouse, it was actually cheaper for them to pay their passage out of Ireland on one of the coffin ships. Most Irish will know that they were called this because a high number of passengers died of starvation and disease before they ever got to their final destination. And, according to Cecil Woodham Smith’s account of the famine, The Great Hunger, of those misfortunates that arrived in the USA, 80% were dead within 5 years. On arriving there, many of them could not find work and were greeted with job postings such as “Help Wanted: No Irish Need Apply”. In addition to this, many Irish, on arrival, were compulsorily drafted to fight in the civil war, under The Enrolment Act of March 3, 1863, which was fought to end slavery (3).
Upon leaving the workhouse attic, the final thing Dean shows me is a cairn inside which is a time capsule. This was put there in 2013 to mark the 400th birthday of the town of Carrick. Inside is various memorabilia for future generations to discover. Raining again, I shake Dean’s hand and thank him for the tour, and from there make my way down to have a quick look at the famine graveyard. It’s sad to think about so many thousands of men, women, and children thrown into non-descript mass graves all over the country of Ireland, especially when there was enough food in, and being exported from, the country to feed everyone in the country multiple times over. The poor couldn’t afford it though, and so met with starvation, disease, and death. The young girls (as mentioned above) that were sold into servitude in Australia could be considered to be some of the luckier ones by comparison.
On leaving behind all things historical, I go for a wander around the town’s current incarnation and as I’m walking along, I see a very thin looking man, perhaps around 50, surveying me. He asks me for four euros for a sandwich and I tell him I don’t have any change, which I rarely do these days. As I turn a corner, I feel a pang of regret that I didn’t take a photo of him because he had a kind of interesting face. And I could have brought him to the shop and bought (on my card) him a sandwich for his impromptu modelling efforts. I do always wonder if it’s actually a sandwich such folks want though. Last time I gave someone a few euros for a sandwich, I saw him happily leaving an off licence a few minutes later with cans of cider.
After realising I’m hungry, and a little light headed, I pop into a shop for a sandwich, after which I head down by the river and along a boardwalk beside the Shannon. There are lots of fine boats around here and I happen to ask a man who it is that owns them. He tells me that a lot of them belong to a company and that you can rent them out during the summer. After this, we end up talking a bit about a shared sense of concern about the rising cost of living and how anyone is going to afford to live. I tell him that I recently saw an Irish couple in their fifties living in a tent near me and shortly thereafter we part company and I carry on about my business and my attention is caught by a statue of what looks like a father feeding his son from a bowl. I look around for a plaque to explain what I am looking at but there doesn’t seem to be one. And so, I take a picture of it and resolve to search the internet about it later on.
The Dock Art’s centre is around the corner, and while I hadn’t intended on visiting here, I go in for a quick look and find that there is an art exhibition on upstairs called “Kurnugia Now” by a lady called Celina Muldoon. I’m not entirely sure what I’m looking at but after a little investigation, I’m directed to a book by the lady in an onsite shop which describes the purpose of the art piece as being related to anxiety about the threat of climate change.
The next place I want to go and have a look at is what is one of the smallest chapels in the world. Known as the Costello Memorial, it was erected by one Edward Costello after his wife, Mary Josephine, died in 1877, at the age of 46. She is in a coffin on the left of the chapel. He died some 14 years later and is encased in a coffin on the right side of it. After enjoying the memorial for a few minutes, I pop into the pub beside it, which is called Flynn’s bar.
Tired and somewhat overloaded with a wealth of information, I decide my last port of call to be St Mary’s Roman Catholic Church. It was completed in 1879 as a Catholic middle class began to emerge in the post-famine years. The twin spires of St George’s Protestant Church and St Mary’s Roman Catholic Church mark the intertwining and integration of the planters and the planted over two centuries. I wanted to finish this post with an aerial shot of the two spires but unfortunately, when I went to do so, I realised that I had forgotten to put a memory card in my drone. Ooops. They’re rather useless without them unfortunately.
P.S: If you’d like to see more of my photos from the day you can find me on Facebook by searching for Galway COW (Richard Peyton Photoblog) or on Instagram using the handle @realrichardpeyton. The Facebook name will soon be Richard Peyton Photography, but it will take me a few weeks to change it to this on account of name changes being a none-too-straightforward process on Facebook.
References
3) https://blog.gale.com/the-irish-in-the-american-civil-war/
Very interesting! You know more about CoS than me now Richard. It's a lot prettier (and busier) in the summer months though.