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CARNEY |
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North of Drumcliff, the first left turn off the main road (signposted
"Lissadell") leads to CARNEY village, to the north of which is an area
known as COOLDRUMMAN , where the Battle of the Book took place. This
battle followed the refusal of St Columba to hand over a psalm book
copied from the original owned by St Finian of Moville, in defiance of
the High King, who ruled that just as a calf belongs to its cow so every
copy belongs to the owner of the book from which it is made. Columba won
the battle at a cost of three thousand lives. Repenting the bloodshed he
had caused, he then went into exile on the Scottish island of Iona.
In Carney a signpost to the left indicates the way to Lissadell House
(June-Sept Mon-Sat 10.30am-12.30pm & 2-4.30pm; £3/3.81), an austere
nineteenth-century Greek Revival mansion, the popularity of which is
mainly due to its Yeats associations. This was the home of the
Gore-Booth family, which produced several generations of artists,
travellers and fighters for Irish freedom. During the Famine, Sir Robert
Gore-Booth, who built Lissadell, mortgaged the place to feed the local
people and doled out rations from the hall. His grand-daughters, Eva
Gore-Booth and Constance Markiewicz , were friends of Yeats and took
part in the 1916 rising. Constance was condemned to death by the British
for her participation but was pardoned and went on to become the first
British female MP and then Minister of Labour in the Dáil's first
cabinet. Bathed in Sligo's luminous marine pastels, the house still has
an intimacy that makes it easy to imagine how it looked when Yeats used
to visit in 1894:
Light of evening Lissadell
Great windows, open to the south,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle
- From In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Constance Markiewicz
During that year, Yeats was in the throes of his unrequited love for
Maude Gonne, and much of his time at Lissadell was spent confessing his
problems to the "gazelle" Eva, to whom he also briefly considered
declaring his love.
It was not only Constance and Eva who espoused radical ideas; their
brother, Jocelyn , was drummed out of his club in Sligo for his
practical encouragement of the early cooperative movement. He was also
one of the first landlords to start selling off land to tenants,
retaining no more than 3000 acres of the original 31,000 to run a
thriving market garden. Among the more eccentric decorative features of
the interior are a series of elongated mural portraits of Jocelyn and
family retainers and a self-portrait in the dining room, all by
Constance's husband Count Casimir Markiewicz. They came into being only
because bad weather kept the count from shooting during Christmas 1908.
One of the rooms has Constance's name scratched on a window, and a
photograph shows her playing Joan of Arc in her husband's theatre
company: an appropriate role for a woman whose life was soon to turn so
completely to politics and propaganda.
The house went through a difficult period after World War II, when the
family lost control of the estate to the government: Sligo newspapers
were keenly aware of the irony of the Gore-Booth sisters, nieces of
Constance - one of the founders of the Irish Free State - being pursued
by the police as they protested against the state's inept administration
of the property. The experience has left the family with a distrust of
government intervention, even in the form of funding, and although plans
for restoration are afoot, Lissadell is likely to retain its air of
elegant decay for some time
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