Read As I Rode by Granard Moat Online
Authors: Benedict Kiely
As I Rode by Granard Moat (13 page)
(By the way, is there a ballad about the Curragh Races? There must be, but I never heard one. There is a sweet song about a fellow who, because of a broken heart, enlisted in
the British Army, but this makes only one brief reference to the Curragh …)
The winter is past,
And the summer’s come at last
And the blackbirds sing on every tree;
The hearts of these are glad
But my poor heart is sad,
Since my true love is absent from me.
The rose upon the briar
By the water running clear
Gives joy to the linnet and the bee;
Their little hearts are blest
But mine is not at rest,
While my true love is absent from me.
A livery I’ll wear
And I’ll comb out my hair,
And in velvet so green I’ll appear
And straight I will repair
To the Curragh of Kildare
For it’s there I’ll find tidings of my dear.
I’ll wear a cap of black
With a frill around my neck,
Gold rings on my fingers I’ll wear:
All this I’ll undertake
For my true lover’s sake,
He resides at the Curragh of Kildare.
I would not think it strange
Thus the world for to range
If I only get tidings of my dear;
But here in Cupid’s chain
If I’m bound to remain,
I would spend my whole life in despair.
My love is like the sun
That in the firmament does run,
And always proves constant and true;
But he is like the moon
That wanders up and down,
And every month it is new.
All ye that are in love
And cannot it remove,
I pity the pains you endure;
For experience lets me know
That your hearts are full of woe,
And a woe that no mortal can cure.
No one knows who wrote that lovely song. Where are they now, the nameless authors of old sweet songs? Waiting for us in the shadows of eternity.
Nor, so far as I am aware, does anyone know who wrote the magnificent ballad about the Races of Bellewstown Hill, up above Laytown, where they horse-raced on the sands of the sea. It was written in 1860 by John Costello, editor of
The Drogheda Argus,
to celebrate the opening of ‘the new Monolithic Stand’, built by R.B. Daly of Drogheda to replace ‘a wooden, rickety structure’ which stood near the Duleek bend on the racecourse.
If respite you’d borrow from turmoil or sorrow,
I’ll tell you the secret of how it is done.
’Tis found in this statement of all the excitement
That Bellewstown knows when the Races come on.
Make one of a party whose spirits are hearty,
Get a seat on a trap that is safe not to spill.
In its well pack a hamper, then off for a scamper,
And Huroo for the Glories of Bellewstown Hill.
On the road how they dash on, Rank, Beauty and Fashion,
It Banagher bangs, by the table of war,
From the coach of the Quality down to the Jollity
Joggin’ along on an old low-backed car.
Though straw cushions are placed, two feet thick at the laste,
Its jigging and jogging to mollify, still
The cheeks of my Nelly are shakin’ like jelly
From the joltin’ she gets as she jogs to the Hill.
In the tents play the pipers, the fiddlers and fifers,
Those rollicking lilts such as Ireland best knows.
While Paddy is prancing, his colleen is dancing
Demure, with her eyes quite intent on her toes.
More power to you Micky, faith your foot isn’t sticky,
But bounds from the boards like a pen from the quill.
Oh, ’twould cure a rheumatic, he would jump up ecstatic
At Tatter Jack Walsh upon Bellewstown Hill.
Oh, ’tis there ’neath the haycocks all splendid like paycocks
In chattering groups that the Quality dine.
Sitting cross-legged like tailors the gentlemen dalers
In flattering spout and come out mighty fine.
And the gentry from Navan and Cavan are havin’
’Neath the shade of the trees an Arcadian quadrille.
All we read in the pages of pastoral ages
Tells of no scene like this upon Bellewstown Hill.
Arrived at the summit, the view that you come at
From etherealized Mourne to where Tara ascends,
There’s no scene in our sireland, dear Ireland, old Ireland,
To which Nature more exquisite loveliness lends.
And the soil ’neath your feet has a memory sweet
The patriot’s deeds they hallow it still
Eighty-two’s Volunteers (would today see their peers?)
Marched past in review upon Bellewstown Hill.
But hark there’s a shout, the horses are out
’Long the ropes on the strand what a hullabaloo.
To old Crockafotha the people that dot the
Broad plateau around are off for a view.
Come Ned, my tight fellow, I’ll bet on the Yellow,
Success to the Green, we will stand by it still.
The uplands and hollows they’re skimming like swallows
Till they flash by the post upon Bellewstown Hill.
A friend from Ardcath, County Meath, compiled a comprehensive account of old Bellewstown from many and varied sources. He had actual racecards from shortly after the
Battle of the Boyne, when the Cromwellian and Williamite planters revived the racing event, which had lapsed in the troubled centuries following the Anglo-Norman invasion. The Curragh had similarly gone into the darkness. There was evidence that Bellewstown was contemporary with, if not older than, the famous Kildare event and that racing and hunting went on there with Fionn and Na Fianna in the third century, when they also cavorted around the Curragh. As far back as the Bronze Age the Ard Ri came over from Tara to hunt and sport on Bellewstown Hill. The Bellews had not yet arrived.
But Bellewstown Hill was also, in more recent times, a Place of Assembly, as the ballad mentions in passing. Grattan’s Volunteers marched there in July 1781, and Charlemont, accompanied by his aides, the Duke of Leinster and Henry Grattan
MP
, reviewed three thousand troops – horse, foot and artillery. And in 1843 Bellewstown had its Great Repeal Demonstration with twenty thousand people present.
On the way into Dublin we passed that way and saw never a ghost.
Since we are here in Dublin let us try for something of the ancient flavour of the place, and recall the good man by the name of Larry who went to meet his Maker in full view of the populace of the city:
The night before Larry was stretched,
The boys they all paid him a visit;
A bait in their sacks, too, they fetched;
They sweated their duds till they riz it:
For Larry was ever the lad,
When a boy was condemned to the squeezer,
Would fence all the duds that he had
To help a poor friend to a sneezer,
And warm his gob ‘fore he died.
The boys they came crowding in fast,
They drew all their stools round about him,
Six glims round his trap-case were placed,
He couldn’t be well waked without ’em.
When one of us asked could he die
Without having duly repented?
Says Larry, That’s all in my eye;
And first by the clergy invented,
To get a fat bit for themselves.’
‘I’m sorry, dear Larry,’ says I
‘To see you in this situation;
And blister my limbs if I lie,
I’d as lieve it had been my own station.’
‘Ochone! it’s all over,’ says he,
‘For the neckcloth I’ll be forced to put on,
And by this time to-morrow you’ll see
Your poor Larry as dead as a mutton,
Because, why, his courage was good.
‘And I’ll be cut up like a pie,
And my nob from my body be parted.’
‘You’re in the wrong box, then,’ says I,
‘For blast me if they’re so hard-hearted:
A chalk on the back of your neck
Is all that Jack Ketch dares to give you;
Then mind not such trifles a feck,
For why should the likes of them grieve you?
And now, boys, come tip us the deck.’
The cards being called for, they played,
Till Larry found one of them cheated;
A dart at his napper he made
(The boy being easily heated):
‘O by the hokey, you thief,
I’ll scuttle your nob with my daddle!
You cheat me because I’m in grief,
But soon I’ll demolish your noddle,
And leave you your claret to drink.’
Then the clergy came in with his book,
He spoke him so smooth and so civil;
Larry tipped him a Kilmainham look,
And pitched his big wig to the devil;
Then sighing, he threw back his head
To get a sweet drop of the bottle,
And pitiful sighing, he said,
‘O the hemp will be soon round my throttle,
And choke my poor windpipe to death.
‘Though sure it’s the best way to die,
O the devil a better a-livin’!
For when the gallows is high
Your journey is shorter to heaven:
But what harasses Larry the most,
And makes his poor soul melancholy,
Is that he thinks of the time when his ghost
Will come in a sheet to sweet Molly;
O sure it will kill her alive!’
So moving these last words he spoke,
We all vented our tears in a shower;
For my part, I thought my heart broke,
To see him cut down like a flower.
On his travels we watched him next day;
O the throttler, I thought I could kill him;
But Larry not one word did say,
Nor changed till he come to King William,
Then, musha, his colour grew white.
When he came to the nobbling chit,
He was tucked up so neat and so pretty,
The rumbler jogged off from his feet,
And he died with his face to the city;
He kicked, too – but that was all pride,
For soon you might see ’twas all over;
Soon after the noose was untied,
And at darkee we waked him in clover,
And sent him to take a ground sweat.
That extraordinary Corkman Francis Sylvester Mahony took many liberties with people’s names, beginning with that of Father Prout, the quiet and inoffensive parish priest of
Watergrasshill on the road to Cork city. In one of his learned considerations in
Fraser’s Magazine,
London, and under the title of The Songs of France’, he attributed the above elegy, or threnody, to the Rev. Robt Burrowes, Dean of St Finbar’s Cathedral, Cork. But Mahony, or Father Prout, claimed that the Rev. Burrowes had borrowed the masterpiece from a French original entitled ‘La Mort de Socrate’ by ‘L’Abbé de Prout, Curé de Mont-aux-Cressons, près de Cork’. He went on to give the French version, the first verse of which reads:
A la veille d’être perdu,
Notre Laurent reçu dans son gîte,
Honneur qui lui était bien dú,
De nombreux amis la visite;
Car chacun scavait que Laurent
A son tour rendrait la pareille,
Chapeau montre, et veste engageant,
Pour que l’ami, put boire, bouteille
Ni faire, à gosier sec, le saut.
Sing that, if you dare. And there are six more verses.
Brinsley MacNamara, novelist and playwright, took a devilish delight in these translations – or, as Mahony called them, ‘Upsettings’ – and I recall him dissertating on Mahony as the two of us walked the old Boyne Navigation towingpath from Navan to Slane. Brinsley was in the habit of doing that walk with his dear friend F.R. Higgins, who made the walk and the Meath man Brinsley matter for his poem ‘The Boyne Walk’.
‘What’s all this rich land,’ said I to the Meath man,
‘Just mirrors bedazzled with blazing air!’
And like flies on mirrors my parched thoughts ran
As we walked, half-hidden, through where the reeds stand
Between the Boyne and its green canal;
And sweltering I kept to the pace he planned,
Yet he wouldn’t even wait in the reeds
To watch a red perch, like a Japanese hand,
Grope in the sun-shot water and weeds –
He merely called back: ‘O, go be damned!’
With break-neck looks at the withered end
Of a stupefied town, I paced his heel
By moat, dead wall and under an arch
That was all of a crouch with the weight of the years;
But where the road led I’d have seen – were I wise –
From one running look in the dark of his eyes:
For each seemed the bright astrological plan
Of a new Don Quixote and his man
Again on campaign; but lacking their steeds,
I’d sooner have seen a flick of grey ears
Or a blue lackadaisical eye in the reeds
To lead to a smoky bare back; then cheers!
We’d have ridden our road as the Kings of Meath.
We walked, as became two kings outcast
From plains walled in by a grass-raising lord,
Whose saint is the Joker, whose hope is the Past –
What victuals for bards could that lad afford?
O, none! So off went his dust from our boots,
But his dust that day was of buttercup gold
From a slope, with a sight that was, man alive, grand:
Just two servant girls spreading blue clothes
On grass too deep for a crow to land;
And though they waved to us we kept on our track,
And though to the bank their own clothes soon toppled
We sweltered along – while my thoughts floated back
Through shy beauty’s bathing-pool, like an old bottle!
Heat trembled in halos on grass and on cattle
And each rock blazed like a drunken face;
So I cried to the man of the speedy wattle
‘In the name of Lot’s wife will you wait a space?
For Adam’s red apple hops dry in my throttle,’
And yet instead of easing the pace,
I saw on the broad blackboard of his back
His muscles made signs of a far greater chase,
Until as I tried to keep up on his track
Each pore of my skin became a hot spring
And every bone swam in a blister of pains
While all my bent body seemed as an old crane’s
Lost in a great overcoat of wings.
Soon out from my sight off went the big Meath man
Dodging the reeds of his nine-mile road.
So I lolled, as a bard bereft of his dæmon
Or a Moses awaiting a light-burdened cloud;
But heaven lay low all naked and brazen
Within the mad calm on that desert of green,
Where nothing, not even the water, is lean,
Where the orderly touches of Thought aren’t seen –
And yet not a wild thought sang in my noddle;
Ah, how could it sing, while speed bit each heel,
While heat tugged a tight noose into my throttle
And while, on my spine, the hung head went nodding
As on it fierce light picked with a black bill.
Then where in soft Meath can one find ease?
When the sun, like a scare-crow, stands in those meadows
Guarding their glory, not even the breeze,
That ghostly rogue, can crop a shadow;
When even I asked for ‘A drink, if you please,’
A woman, as proud as a motherly sow,
Hoked out of my way and hid where a larch
Leant like a derrick across an old barge
Stocked in the reeds; and so I went parched!
Ah, but soon down the Boyne, there, O the surprise
From a leaping fish – that silver flicker –
Was nothing compared to what hit my eyes:
An innocent house, marked ‘Licensed for Liquor!’
Could anyone treat me to brighter green meadows
Than the Meath man who finished his thirsty plan when
Between every swig he mooned through those windows?
And yet, on my oath, it was easier then
To coop a mountainy cloud in a henhouse
Than to group the Meath light into lines for my pen;
And still I must bless him since beauty was caught
In ears that were drumming, in eyes all sweat,
In nostrils slimmed by indrawn breath;
For I made, as we lay in the grass by that road
This poem – a gem from the head of a toad;
So here, will you take it – hall-marked by a day
Over the hills and far away?