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Castle Townshend is a small village in the south-west of the County of Cork, unique in many ways among Irish villages, incomparable in the beauty of its surroundings, remarkable in its high level of civilisation, and in the number of its “quality houses.” “High ginthry does be jumpin’ mad for rooms in this village,” was how the matter was defined by a skilled authority, while another, equally versed in social matters, listened coldly to commendation of a rival village, and remarked, “It’s a nice place enough, but the ginthry is very light in it. It’s very light with them there entirely.”

I hasten to add that this criticism did not refer to the morals of the gentry, merely to their scarcity—as one says “a light crop.”

Castlehaven Harbour, to whose steep shores it adheres, defiant of the law of gravity, by whose rules it should long since have slipped into the sea, has its place in history. The Spanish Armada touched en passant (touched rather hard in some places), one of Queen Elizabeth’s admirals, Admiral Leveson, touched too, fairly hard, and left cannon-ball bruises on the walls of Castlehaven Castle. The next distinguished visitors were a force of Cromwell’s troopers. Brian’s Fort, built by Brian Townshend, the son of one of Cromwell’s officers, still stands firm, and Swift’s tower, near it, is distinguished as the place where “the gloomy Dean; (of autre fois) wrote a Latin poem, called “Carberiae Rupes.” A translation of this compliment to the Rocks of Carbery was printed one hundred and seventy years ago in Smith’s “History of the Co. Cork.” It was much admired by the historian. A quotation from it may be found in “A Record of Holiday,” in one of our books, “Some Irish Yesterdays,” but candour compels me to admit that four of its lines, descriptive of the coast of Carbery—

“Oft too, with hideous yawn, the cavern wide

Presents an orifice on either side;

A dismal orifice, from sea to sea

Extended, pervious to the god of day.”

—might be taken as equally descriptive of its readers.

The Titanic passed within a few miles of Castlehaven on her first and last voyage; I saw her racing to the West, into the glow of a fierce winter sunset. It was from Castle Townshend that the first warnings of the sharks that were waiting for the Lusitania were sent; and into Castlehaven Harbour came, by many succeeding tides, victims of that tragedy. Let it be remembered to the honour of the fishermen who harvested those sheaves of German reaping, that the money and the jewels, which most of the drowned

CASTLEHAVEN HARBOUR.

V. F. M.

CARBERIAE RUPES.

E. B. C.

people had brought with them, were left with them, untouched.

It must have been eighty or ninety years ago that the first member of “The Chief’s” family reached Castlehaven. This was his second son, the Rev. Charles Bushe, who was, as Miss Edgeworth says of her stepmamma’s brother, “fatly and fitly provided for” with the living of Castlehaven. Somervilles and Townshends had been living and intermarrying in Castlehaven Parish, with none to molest their ancient solitary reign, since Brian Townshend built himself the fort from which he could look forth upon one of the loveliest harbours in Ireland, and the Reverend Thomas Somerville, the first of his family to settle in Munster, took to himself (by purchase from the representatives of the Earl of Castlehaven) the old O’Driscoll Castle, and lies buried beside it, in St. Barrahane’s churchyard, under a slab that proclaims him to have been “A Worthy Magistrate, and a Safe and Affable Companion.” The two clans enjoyed in those days, I imagine, a splendid isolation, akin to that of the Samurai in Old Japan, and the Rev. Charles Bushe, an apostle of an alien cultivation, probably realised the feelings of Will Adams when he was cast ashore at Osaka, may, indeed, have felt his position to be as precarious as that of the first missionary at the Court of the King of the Cannibal Islands.

My great-uncle Charles was for forty years the Rector of Castlehaven Parish, and the result of his ministry that most directly affects me was the marriage of my father, Colonel Thomas Henry Somerville, of Drishane, to the Rev. Charles’s niece, Adelaide Coghill. (That she was also his step-sister-in-law is a fact too bewildering to anyone save a professional genealogist for me to dwell on it here. I will merely say that my mother’s father was Admiral Sir Josiah Coghill, and her mother was Anna Maria Bushe, daughter of the Chief Justice.)[6]

There is a picture extant, the work of that artist to whom I have already referred, in which is depicted the supposed indignation of the Aboriginal Red men, i.e., my grandfather Somerville and his household, at the apostasy of my father, a Prince of the (Red) Blood Royal, in departing from the family habit of marrying a Townshend, and in allying himself with a Paleface. In that picture the Red men and women are armed with clubs, the Palefaces with croquet mallets. It was with these that they entered in and possessed the land. My grandmother (née Townshend, of Castle Townshend), a small and eminently dignified lady, one of my great-aunts, and other female relatives, are profanely represented, capering with fury, clad in brief garments of rabbit skin. The Paleface females surge in vast crinolines; the young Red man is encircled by them, as was the swineherd in Andersen’s fairy tale, by the Court ladies. My grandfather swings a tomahawk, and is faced by my uncle, Sir Joscelyn Coghill, leader of the second wave of invasion, with a photographic camera (the first ever seen in West Carbery) and a tripod.

* * * * *

I think I must diverge somewhat farther from my main thesis in order to talk a little about the Ancient Order of Hibernians (if I may borrow the appellation) who were thus dispossessed. For, as is the way all the world over, the missionaries ate up the cannibals, and the Red men have left only their names and an unworthy granddaughter to commemorate their customs.

Few South Pacific Islands are now as isolated as was, in those days,—I speak of ninety or one hundred years ago—Castle Townshend. The roads were little better than bridle-paths; they straggled and struggled, as far as was possible, along the crests of the hills, and this was as a protection to the traveller, who could less easily be ambushed and waylaid by members of the large assortment of secret societies, Whiteboys, Ribbonmen, Molly Maguires, Outlaws in variety, whose spare moments between rebellions were lightened by highway robbery. I have heard that my great-grandmother’s “coach” was the only wheeled vehicle that came into Castle Townshend. My great-grandfather used to ride to Cork, fifty-two miles, and the tradition is that he had a fabulous black mare, named Bess, who trotted the journey in three hours (which I take leave to doubt). All the heavy traffic came and went by sea. The pews of the church came from Cork by ship. They have passed now, but I can remember them, and I should have thought that their large simplicity would not have been beyond the scope of the local carpenter. There was a triple erection for the pulpit; the clerk sat in the basement, the service was read au premier, and to the top story my great-uncle Charles was wont to mount, in a black gown and “bands,” and thence deliver classic discourses, worthy, as I have heard, of the son of “silver-tongued Bushe,” but memorable to me (at the age of, say, six) for the conviction, imparted by them anew each Sunday, that they were samples of eternity, and would never end. My eldest brother, who shared the large square pew with our grandfather and me, was much sustained by a feud with a coastguard child, with whom he competed in the emulous construction of grimaces, mainly based, like the sermons, on an excessive length of tongue, but I had no such solace. Feuds are, undoubtedly, a great solace to ennui, and in the elder times of a hundred years or so ago they seem to have been the mainstay of society in West Cork. Splendid feuds, thoroughly made, solid, and without a crack into which any importunate dove could insert so much as an olive-leaf.

Ireland was, in those days, a forcing bed for individuality. Men and women, of the upper classes, were what is usually described as “a law unto themselves,” which is another way of saying that they broke those of all other authorities. That the larger landowners were, as a class, honourable, reasonably fair-minded, and generous, as is not, on the whole, disputed, is a credit to their native kindliness and good breeding. They had neither public opinion nor legal restraint to interfere with them. Each estate was a kingdom, and, in the impossibility of locomotion, each neighbouring potentate acquired a relative importance quite out of proportion to his merits, for to love your neighbour—or, at all events, to marry her—was almost inevitable when matches were a matter of mileage, and marriages might be said to have been made by the map. Enormous families were the rule in all classes, such being reputed to be the will of God, and the olive branches about the paternal table often became of so dense a growth as to exclude from it all other fruits of the earth, save, possibly, the potato.

Equally vigorous, as I have said, was the growth of character. There was room in those spacious days for expansion, and the advantage was not wasted. There was an old lady who lived in West Carbery, and died some fifty years ago, about whom legend has accumulated. She lived in a gaunt grey house, that still exists, and is as suggestive of a cave as anything as high and narrow, and implacably symmetrical, can be. Tall elms enshroud it, and rooks at evening make a black cloud about it. It has now been civilised, but I can remember the awe it inspired in me as a child. She was of distinguished and ancient family (though she was born in such remote ages that one would say there could have been scarcely more than two generations between her and Adam and Eve). She was very rich, and she was a miser of the school of comic opera, showy and dramatic. Her only son, known, not without reason, as “Johnny Wild,” is said, after many failures, to have finally extracted money from her by the ingenious expedient of inveigling her into a shed in which was a wicked bull, and basing a claim for an advance on the probability that the bull would do the same. She lost ten shillings on a rent day, and raised it among her tenants by means of a round-robin. Her costume was that of a scarecrow that has lost all self-respect, yet—a solitary extravagance—when she went in a train she travelled first-class. It is said that on a journey to Dublin she was denounced to the guard as a beggar-woman who had mistaken the carriage. It happened that the denouncer was a lady with a courtesy-title derived from a peerage of recent and dubious origin. The beggar-woman threatened to recite their respective pedigrees on the platform, and the protest was withdrawn. Naturally she fought with most of her neighbours, specially her kinsfolk, and, as a result of a specially sanguinary engagement, announced that she would never again “set foot” in the village sacred to her clan (and it may be noted that the term “to set foot” invariably implies something sacrificial, a rite, but one always more honoured in the breach than in the observance) “until the day when she went into it with four horses and her two feet foremost,” which referred to her final transit to the family burying-ground. On her death-bed, a cousin, not unnaturally anxious as to her future welfare, offered to read to her suitable portions of the Bible, but the offer was declined.

“Faith, my dear, I’ll not trouble ye. I know it all by heart; but I’m obliged to ye, and I wish I had a pound that I might give it ye, but I haven’t so much as a ha’penny.”

She shortly afterwards died, and there was found in her bedroom, in a desk, £500, and a further £20 was discovered rolled up in an old bonnet, a black straw bonnet with bright green ribbons.