As I Rode by Granard Moat (2 page)

So there, or here, am I, in Sweet Omagh Town, at the beginning of my road of poems and ballads round Ireland. And it occurs to me now that the idea may have been put into my head by the men who taught me when I had the privilege of going to school on Mount St Columba. And not just by M.J. Curry. The teachers came from everywhere and you saw Ireland, and other places, through their eyes and memories and conversations.

Brother Hamill from Belfast had been as far away as China, spoke Chinese, and could talk most eloquently about the multitudinous peoples and great rivers of that vast land. His brother in the world was Mickey Hamill, the famous centre-half, whom I once met.

One Brother Burke came from Dublin and was a rugby football man. The other Brother Burke, a hurling man, hailed from Birdhill, Tipperary, from where you have the heavenly vision of Lough Derg and the stately Shannon spreading, as Spenser said, like a sea.

Brother Clarke, a quiet man, was from Wexford, and he was as proud of it as any rebel-pikeman.

One of my happiest memories is of walking with Brother Walker, long after I had left school, and talking about James Joyce – about whom Brother Rice was a learned authority. Indeed, the first reasonable statement I ever heard about Joyce came from Brother Rice in the middle of a class in
trigonometry. Mr Joyce would have been impressed, and grateful.

Anthony Shannon came from Derry, and his memories of student days in Dublin were vivid. The great M.J. Curry was a Clareman, but had been to university in England and could talk most eloquently on all authors, from Cicero to Bret Harte. Frank McLaughlin came from Cork and Leo Sullivan from Wexford, but both of them, one a classicist, the other a scientist, were totally devoted to the Tyrone countryside. And there were others. In the pulpit in the Sacred Heart Church was Dr John McShane, who had studied in Rome and talked in friendship with Gabriele D’Annunzio.

There was Father Lagan who was related to a famous family in the town, and Dr Gallagher, and Father MacBride and Father McGilligan. And in Killyclogher there was Father Paul McKenna, who could quote Robert Burns forever and who brought me one day to Mountfield to visit the aged priestess Alice Milligan.

Patrick Kavanagh in ‘The Great Hunger’ made a reference to Mullagharn as the hub of a cartwheel of mountains. As I remember, it was something Brother Rice said that set a group of us, one day early in the year, to conquer that mountain. We were Joe Gilroy, Gerry McCanny, Michael Mossy, Larry Loughran, and myself.

Then away with us, up the Killyclogher Burn to Glenhordial, then up and up to the mountain top. Snow still lay in some of the hollows of the mountainside. And when we stood up there together, and looked down on O’Neill’s country, and shouted and sang in Irish and English, we felt that we owned Ireland and the world. Perhaps at that moment we did.

That was a day that stays forever in my memory.

We begin the journey, then, if you will bear my company, in my home town of Omagh. Right in the heart of the town the Owenreagh, or Drumragh as we locals call it, accepts the silver Camowen and from that confluence, and north as far as Newtown-Stewart, the bright water is called the Strule. The great lauded names along the splendid river valley between Bessy Bell mountain and the odd-shaped hill of Mary Gray (and Mullagharn and the Gortin hills, outriders of the Sperrins) were Mountjoy and Blessington. And away back about the time of Bonaparte it is possible that the felling of trees in the Strule Valley helped to pay for the cavortings of Lord and Lady Blessington and the ineffable Count D’Orsay. In time of war there was a demand for timber.

After Waterloo that demand diminished and some of the hired woodcutters were forced to go west over the ocean to make a livelihood, most of them strong young men from the Sperrin Mountains. The local historian, the remarkable Robert Crawford, has described how, on a market-day, those woodsmen would walk the streets of Omagh with great axes on their shoulders and fearing no man. About 1821 this threnody was written for the passing of the woodsmen, Blessington’s Rangers – no author have I ever heard named.

In the part of Omagh town where I grew up there was born, and lived for a while, a man by the name of Francis Carlin. He wrote some poems, then went off to the USA, where that hard world was not overkind to him. He was contacted, or unearthed, in New York City by the poet Padraic Colum and his wife, Mary, who found him a job in Macy’s department store: an odd place, perhaps, for a poet who, downriver from Omagh at Douglas Bridge, had seen a vision of the last of the Rapparees. Carlin died in 1945.

A great friend in my home town was Captain William Maddin Scott, head of a notable family and, as owner of Scott’s Mills, a good and fair employer. Captain Scott had prepared an anthology,
A Hundred Years A-Milling,
relating his family to the town and the Tyrone countryside, which they had honoured and aided for so long by their presence. When Seán MacRéamoinn and myself featured the book on a Radio Éireann programme called (how hopefully!) ‘The Nine Counties of Ulster’, the Captain was mightily pleased and I was elevated to being a dinner-guest at the Scott mansion at Lisnamallard, where I was introduced to the Rev. Marshall of Sixmilecross.

Marshall was a most gracious and learned gentleman, and a prime authority on Ulster folk-dialect. When the Captain told me that ‘our friend Marshall’ was ‘a Doctor of Divinity’ we both laughed merrily. Now there was no reason why Marshall of Sixmilecross should not be a Doctor of Divinity, or a doctor of anything and everything; what set us laughing was that the learned doctor had also written in his
Tyrone
Ballads
(The Quota Press, Belfast 1951) of the sad plight of the man in Drumlister:

From that same time in the past dates a friendship with a priest, Father Paul McKenna, who brought me one day to the old rectory in the village of Mountfield, where the aged poet Alice Milligan then lived in a dusty grandeur recalling the home of Miss Haversham in
Great Expectations
. But the garden where she played in her girlhood could still be seen at the end of Omagh town where one road divides to make three: at a place called the Swinging Bars, where there once may have been a toll-gate.