Carrowmore cemetery: a passage tomb within a stone circle
Prehistory, history and mythology; glorious mountains and gentle rolling hills; literature and art, Ireland’s northwest has it all.
I went there searching for lost relatives and found a place that would have grabbed my heart, whether or not it had little Irish blood flowing through it.
I met up with my brother Stuart and his two sons in Dublin. We arrived from various parts of the globe to attend a family reunion with kin we’d never heard of, let alone met. Our destination was Ballyshannon, County Donegal.
After spending a few days in Dublin, we rented a car and drove through Galway and Westport and other picture-postcard towns, to Sligo Town in County Sligo, the entry to the northwest.
Sligo County’s history dates back 6000 years to the arrival of the Neolithic farmers who, with their stone axes, felled the forests to make room for tilled fields and villages and to build their massive megalithic monuments to the dead.
Sligo County is also known as Yeats country, in memory of one of Ireland’s most famous literary sons William Butler Yeats and his family. William was the 1923 winner of the Nobel Prize for literature and his brother Jack was an internationally renowned painter. Their father, John, was also a noted painter. Between them, they’ve captured the beauty of Sligo on canvas and in poetry.
The town of Sligo began as a settlement in the 9th century and grew to a small town in the 12th century when the Normans settled here. Today Sligo, with a population of 18,000, is more a commercial centre than a stop on the tourist map.
We stayed one night, just outside Sligo, close to the tiny community of Cliffony. We were in sight of Benbulben Mountain with its striking tabletop profile, and Knocknarea Mountain on whose summit sits a huge unexcavated grave mound said to be the tomb of Queen Maeve. Legend has it that this Celtic warrior queen is buried standing in full battle dress; spear in hand, facing her enemies even in death.
Nearby are the two cities of the dead: Carrowmore and Carowkeele. Between them, they had once contained more than 200 passage tombs, some of them dating back to 4000 BC. Carrowkeele sits on a mountaintop and is connected by sight to Queen Maeve’s tomb. Eerily isolated, it is quite mystical and outstandingly beautiful. Carrowmore is more easily accessible and has an interpretation centre.
Ballyshannon, where our reunion was held, sits on the banks of the River Erne and overlooks a landscape dotted with hills, lakes and forests. Created by Royal Charter in 1613, it is one of Ireland’s oldest inhabited towns.
The family reunion was primarily connected to a distant branch of the family so Stuart and I had our own mission – to find a connection to our grandfather who had immigrated to New Zealand in 1895 at age 17. Grandfather died in his 50s and, as far as we could find out, had very little or no contact with his family in Ireland. We travelled with two photographs taken in the 1960s by our father. On the back of one, he noted ‘Tommy Whitten outside his house in Ballyshannon’. On the back of the other photograph, it said ‘Tommy Whitten beside the Whitten Bridge’.
Numerous conversations, and many a pint of Guinness, in many a pub led us to Kinlough, a small village a few kilometres east of Ballyshannon. My father had it wrong – Tommy Whitten lived in Kinlough not Ballyshannon.
We found the house with the help of the local publican who was also the local funeral director. A neighbour told us that Tommy had died two years earlier and had been a bachelor all his life. Although the Kinlough graveyard was the resting place for several Whittens, we never found a living relative. And we never found the Whitten Bridge. We suspect that was just one of our father’s famous travel stories.
After the reunion, we drove north to Donegal town. This area is said to have been settled as early as 2000 BC with the Vikings establishing a base here in the 9th century and the Celtic chieftains, the O’Donnells, becoming the ruling dynasty from 13th until the 17th century when they were defeated in battle during the flight of the Irish earls, marking the end of the old Gaelic order.
Leaving Donegal town we headed to the northern coast of Donegal Bay. Narrow, switch back roads, sheer cliffs, panoramic mountain and sea views, road signs in Irish – or no signs at all – and asking directions made getting there half the fun.
“Aye laddie, if I were goin’ there, I wouldn’t be startin’ from here,” said one local farmer as we tried to find the road to Slieve League.
Slieve League are the highest sea cliffs in Europe, they stretch 48 kilometres into the Atlantic and are 19 kilometres across at the widest point.
The Glenveagh National Park, in the heart of County Donegal, is a 35,000-acre estate once owned by John George Adair, a much-despised landlord best know for his eviction of Irish tenant farmers in 1861.
We went as far north as Dunfanaghy, which has outstanding beaches and magnificent coastal scenery. Just west of the village is the Dunfanaghy Workhouse a grim reminder of the hardships of the Irish famine. At the height of the famine 10,000 desperate people throughout Ireland were forced to live in workhouses like Dunfanaghy. Once admitted they were forbidden to leave, families were separated and adults and children alike were made to do harsh physical labour on little food.
In the 10 days we spent in the northwest of Ireland we travelled through the mists of time – through the ancient burial grounds of the Neolithic people, the history pages of Vikings and Celtic chiefs like Hugh O’Donnell; through the land of William Yeats and his family and through the life of our forebears, the Whittens of Kinlough.