Round Ireland in Low Gear (24 page)

However, we did not lack an audience. Apart from the cows, which had been getting a lot of mileage out of us, across the Canal on the real towpath was a meagre line of semi-comatose fishermen, to whom we appeared to be the principal objects of interest. Surrounded by the incredible amount of gear coarse fishermen seemed to need (almost as much as we required to cycle across Ireland), including large green umbrellas to protect their complexions from the pernicious effects of the sun, they watched our exertions with all the animation of a band of fork-tongued lizards about to eat a dinner of flies, although occasionally one would raise himself to a sitting position and shout across to us, ‘You’se are on the wrong bank!’ What we really needed was a Flymo.

Altogether it took an hour to cover the two miles to the Lucan Road Bridge, by which time we were almost as knocked out, physically and emotionally, as if we had covered forty miles on the N18.

‘You’ve had some pretty crazy ideas in your life, Newby,’ Wanda said, rather unfairly I thought, while we were pouring water on our nettle stings, getting the herbage out of our transmissions, scraping cow shit off our trousers, swatting horseflies rendered torpid by over-indulgence in our blood, and generally smartening up, ‘but this towpath of yours is the craziest of the lot.’

Beyond this bridge and Lock No. 12 there was no doubt that the towpath continued on the north bank, and here the Canal entered a cutting, burrowing through a huge reef of limestone and passing under a picturesque, ivy-clad bridge that led to the Gollierstown quarries, which supplied most of the stone used in building the Canal. At this point, too, the Canal was completely blocked by a long metal canal boat which was lying waterlogged in the middle, its bows pointing in the direction of the Shannon.

Here, too, we overtook two boys and two girls on bikes who were like us making heavy weather of the abundant vegetation and as we came up beside them one of the girls chose this particular moment to ride off the bank, uttering a despairing shriek as she did so, and fall, still pedalling madly, into what was here quite deep water. For a brief moment she could be seen underwater still sitting on the machine before coming to the surface without it, to be hauled ashore. All of them except the unfortunate Shereen, who now sat shivering on the bank while the two boys wearing nothing but their underpants fished for the ‘boike’, thought this was wildly funny – ‘Just look at the expression on Sher’s face! Did you ever see anything loike it?’

Soon after this we abandoned the Canal and set off northwards for St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, the great Catholic seminary,
where we had been invited to stay the night by its Vice-President, Dr Matthew O’Donnell. En route we stopped at Celbridge, a small but lively place on the banks of the Liffey, in order to see Castletown, the first great Palladian house to be built in Ireland, and the largest. To reach it we rode up a long avenue flanked by enormous limes, through a pair of entrance gates guarded by sphinxes. Inside, a sign read ‘3-Bed Semi-Detacheds from £25,540’, which didn’t augur well for the future of the demesne.

More like an Italian urban palazzo than a country house, Castletown’s three-storey central block soared 60 feet into the air and, together with a pair of two-storey flanking wings, each linked to the main building by curved Ionic colonnades, made a colossal ensemble 350 feet long of white stone, now shimmering in the afternoon sunshine. These wings performed the function, subsequently much copied in Ireland but unknown in English versions of the Palladian, of being farm buildings in disguise, as they often are in the Palladian villas of the Veneto. Indeed the main building, with its grand staircase leading down to Irish
terra firma
, would have looked more appropriate on the banks of the Brenta Canal.

The house was built for Mr William Conolly who, at his own wish, remained a plain Mr until his death. The son of a publican (others say a blacksmith – though in Ireland he could quite easily have been both), he first became an attorney, in which capacity he soon enriched himself in dealings connected with those Catholic estates confiscated after the Battle of the Boyne. Subsequently he became an MP, first for Donegal, then for Londonderry, a member of the Privy Council and ‘ten times a Lord Justice of Ireland during the absence of successive viceroys’, according to his biographer, as well as being Chief Commissioner of the Irish revenues, an appointment which, according to Swift, he bought for £3000. But his most famous appointment was that of Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, a post he held from
1715 almost to the day of his death in 1729, which gave him the title by which he was generally known, ‘Speaker’ Conolly.

The original design for the exterior of Castletown was made by Alessandro Galilei, who amongst other great projects was responsible for redesigning the façade of the basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano in Rome (where Christ is reputed to have appeared to the Emperor Constantine and Pope St Sylvester on the day of its consecration).

The interior, at least in part, was the work of Sir Edward Lovett Pearce, designer of the Irish Parliament House on College Green, Dublin. Another who may have been involved was John Rothery, the master mason, who built that other but much smaller masterpiece, Mount Ievers Court in County Clare, which we had seen the previous December. Inside, the entrance hall, designed by Pearce, rose two storeys high above a black and white marble pavement, a rectangle pierced by tall, pedimented doorways flanked by niches containing busts of helmeted warriors. Above it Ionic columns and half columns supported a pair of galleries guarded by a wrought iron balustrade, from which tapered columns and half columns in turn rose up to support the roof.

One of the most extraordinary rooms in the house is the Print Room, created by the wife of William Conolly’s heir, Lady Louisa Lennox, the spirited and intelligent daughter of the second Duke of Richmond. Her sister, Lady Sarah Napier, who lived close by at Oakly Park, helped her to collect the material, and the two of them stuck the prints on the walls according to a pre-determined plan, a copy of which still exists. This room is now unique in Ireland, although at one time there were others, the most famous of which was at Carton House, Maynooth, another splendid house in the territory of the Fitzgeralds, Earls of Kildare.

From the tall windows of the Long Gallery, embellished with wall paintings in the Pompeian style but decorated in what Lady
Louisa described as the wrong shade of blue, a two-mile vista opens up to the north-west across wooded parkland to what is known as the Conolly Folly, and to the north-east to an equally extraordinary brick and stone construction, the Wonderful Barn, both inspired by Mrs Conolly, the Speaker’s widow. The Barn, built in 1743, is a multi-storeyed cone composed of four drums one above the other, with a staircase spiralling up the outside to a castellated look-out at the summit. The lowermost drums form a granary into which the grain poured through apertures in the floors of the upper rooms, all of which have domed brick ceilings. It bears a remarkable resemblance to the great Gola, a granary 96 feet high with walls 12½ feet thick which stands on the right bank of the Ganges at New Patna, completed in 1786 at the instigation of Warren Hastings as a safeguard against famine. The Gola’s capacity was said to have been 137,000 tons of grain; no one had ever succeeded in filling it, however, because the only way to do so was through a hole in the top, and as the doors at the foot of the building only opened inwards, they could never be opened once the floor was covered with grain.

A couple of miles further along the bungalow-infested road to Maynooth we took a right up a lesser road in search of Conolly’s Folly and suddenly there it was, defiled with graffiti, one of the two most splendid obelisks in Ireland (the other is at Stillorgan on the outskirts of Dublin). A hundred and forty feet high, and built of pale grey stone, it is mounted on a double row of deep arches which increase in height towards the centre, the small ones, which look like gazebos, topped with cupolas and pediments crowned by pineapples, the large ones with urns and eagles. Supported by the main arch is what looks like a small temple with a classical pediment which has yet more arches pierced in its sides. Designed probably by the German architect Richard Castle (Cassel or Cassels), assistant to Sir Edward Lovett Pearce at Castletown,
it was built in 1740 using local labourers who were each paid a halfpenny a day, with the idea of alleviating the sufferings they had endured in the famine winter of 1739/40.

Mrs Mary Jones, one of Mrs Conolly’s sisters, who took a rather deflationary view of her Folly, wrote in March 1740: ‘My sister is building an obelix to answer a vistow at the bake of Castletown House; it will cost here three or four hundred pounds at least, but I believe more – I really wonder how she can dow so much, and live as she duse.’ But she did. The admirable Mrs Mary Delany
née
Granville, indefatigable observer of the eighteenth-century scene and friend and correspondent of Swift, described how Mrs Conolly spent the so-called evening of her days:

The sun was sinking when we arrived at Maynooth. There, in Cassidy’s fine bar, with it pouring in on us, we had a drink with Loughlin J. Sweeney, an ex-banker who specialized in areas of credit policy, corporate finance and the ‘harmonization’ (splendid
word) of banking legislation in the EEC – in a few words the sort of banker people like ourselves never normally correspond with, let alone meet in a pub. He was now Director of Development of Maynooth College and had helped to raise untold sums of money for it. He immediately put us at our ease by saying that he wasn’t interested in the sort of money that we could produce, even if we were inclined to do so, since it was much less trouble to go to the founts of the stuff in the heartlands of Irish Catholic America.

The summer term was already at an end and the absence of any students lent an additional scale to the vastness of the College’s two great quadrangles: St Joseph’s Square, the older part, and St Mary’s Square, built during the years of the Great Famine by Pugin.

Later, we dined in the Professors’ Dining Room in St Patrick’s House, which overlooks both quadrangles and separates one from the other. The others present were the President, the Very Reverend Michael Ledwith, Professor in Dogmatic Theology, Secretary of the Episcopal Committee on Ecumenism and a member of the International Theological Commission in Rome; Dr O’Donnell, Vice-President and Professor of Philosophy, who had kindly invited us to stay the night; and Loughlin J. Sweeney. With this small but extremely potent squad of philosophical and financial talent lined up, it seemed that it might be difficult for the Newbys, with their peanut brains, to find much common ground; but fortunately the subject of the Spanish Armada came up, on which they were pretty clued up, and this kept everyone on the go for most of the dinner.

At the far end of Pugin’s dining room there was a spirited solid silver statue of St George slaying the Dragon which had been presented to the College by the astonishingly beautiful Empress Elizabeth of Austria, who strayed into one of the quadrangles while out with the local staghounds in 1879 during one of her
frequent visits to Ireland. Later, hearing that neither faculty nor seminarians were enthusiastic about having an effigy, even a solid silver one, of the patron saint of England (who was also patron of the hunt) on a premises dedicated to St Patrick, she donated a further gift of a magnificent set of cloth-of-gold vestments without asking for the statue back. There is also a portrait of the Empress herself, which one would have thought would have been a good deal more disturbing to professors and seminarians alike.

The original religious college at Maynooth was founded and endowed by Gerald Fitzgerald, ninth Earl of Kildare, in 1521, but in 1538 it was suppressed. The present College was founded and endowed in 1795 by an act of the Irish Parliament, its re-birth greatly assisted by the great Irish-born statesman, Edmund Burke, who died in 1797. It was Burke who corresponded at length about Irish religious toleration with Dr Hussey, afterwards Bishop of Waterford, who became first President of the College. This was at the time when the French Revolution was at its height, the French seminaries had been closed and it was feared that seminarians in other countries might already have become infected with dangerous heretical ideas. As a result, the majority of the ten professors who attended the first roll call in Stoyte House, the oldest of the College buildings, were refugee members of the
ancien régime.
To the disgust of the forty Irish students who had just been enrolled, they made a point of speaking in French, to which the seminarians retaliated by speaking Irish. Eventually, the
lingua franca
became English.

The College had, in fact, also been a lay College, for men only, from its inception until 1817, when the lay part was suppressed largely, it is said, due to the opposition and intrigue of ‘Black Jack’ Fitzgibbon, Earl of St Clare and Lord Chancellor of Ireland. In spite of being Irish by birth, he maintained ‘an uncompromising resistance to all popular movements and especially to all
attempts to improve the position of Roman Catholics’, in the words of his biographer, G. P. Macdonnell. ‘He died on 28 January 1802,’ his biographer continued. ‘His funeral was followed by a Public mob, whose curses violently expressed the hate with which a great part of his fellow countrymen regarded him.’ In 1826 and again in 1855 the College was the subject of inquiries by Royal Commissions investigating suggestions that it was too Popish, although in 1826 the Vatican itself refused the College the right to confer its own degrees because it suspected that the orthodoxy of its teaching was not all it should have been. After Vatican II, in the late 1960s, although it remained a seminary, the Trustees decided to re-open the College to lay students, but this time students of both sexes.