2017 Ireland Ancient

Tuesday, October 10, 2017

     I wrote the first five blog entries about my September, 2017 Ireland trip in five successive days, but this sixth entry I write several days later.  The topic is 2017 Ireland Ancient, which got only a few days more ancient during my dawdling.
     It's about the land.  It has always been about the land, as the Irish, and other people, colonized or not, always knew.  The fifth blog entry, 2017 Ireland Modern, started with mention of the 1690 Battle of the Boyne, the start of Modern Ireland, I argued.  Protestants defeated Catholics.  Catholics continue to outnumber Protestants in Ireland, but the incipient capitalism that Protestantism strengthened eventually supplanted the feudalism that had buttressed Catholic rule for centuries. Feudalism ties peasants and lords to one another and to the land.  I choose to start with ancient geography we found in Ireland, then describe pre-Christian and Medieval religious sites, and finally note evidence we found of vain Protestant attempts to erase Catholicism from Ireland.
     Land is old, but rock is older.  On the Antrim Coast on the northeast part of the island, we found The Giant's Causeway:

http://www.giantscausewayofficialguide.com/

Undersea volcanic eruptions eons ago made these hundreds of tall, skinny, hexagonal rocks, "but the people don't believe that," I've heard or read more than once.  Finn MacCool, or Fionn mac Cumhaill in Irish, was a mythical giant warrior who accepted a challenge from Benandonner, a giant who lived  in what would become Scotland, across the sea from what would become Ireland.  Finn built The Giant's Causeway to bridge the gap, but learning that Benandonner was bigger, Finn returned to Ireland.  Benandonner pursued Finn, whom Finn's wife Oonagh dressed as a baby and put in a large cradle.  When she told Benandonner not to wake the baby, lest the father be mad, Benandonner feared that the father was too big a match for him.  Benandonner therefore fled back across the sea and destroyed most the the causeway behind him.
     I wonder what the Scots think of this myth.  Have they a myth to battle the Irish myth?  Could a mythical causeway exist?
     Moving ahead in time and south in direction, we found the Hill of Tara

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_of_Tara

The ancient people crowned kings here, and the rolling hills and round pits show where dwellings were.  I have seen similar "pit house" features west of my home city of Williams Lake, in the land of the Tsilhqot'in, one of the area's Indigenous peoples.  Pit houses are in many places:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit-house

     Tara is one of many places Saint Patrick came much later, in the 400s, preaching Christianity to the people.  Tara has a statue of Saint Patrick.  Here and elsewhere, he explained the Trinity by using the shamrock, an iconic plant.  As in the New World a  millenia later, Christianity found receptive spiritual soil in Ireland.  Pit houses abounded in the world.  So did beliefs in supernatural explanations for natural objects and processes whose origins people did not understand.  Where people once venerated Druidic kings, they would venerate Catholic bishops.  Kings and bishops erected explanations of worlds seen and unseen, and gave the people their places in both.
     Christian Ireland erected buildings as well as statues, and we saw plenty of both, sometimes by chance.
     For example, we drove past a sign that said "Bective Abbey," and a couple kilometres away we found the ruins of an abbey dating from the 1500s, the original stonework from the 1100s gone:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bective_Abbey

This was one film site for Braveheart., the film about William Wallace, who led Scots against English in the late-1100s.  By then, the Anglo-Normans had built the first abbey here, centuries after Saint Patrick lived and died.  Christianity therefore came to Ireland at least twice:  once from England with Saint Patrick, and once from France via England after the Norman Conquest of England in 1066.  I remember thinking how soon this abbey went up after the Anglo-Normans came.  I also liked how many arches, rooms, and levels were in this abbey.  A centuries-old stone house was preserved nearby.  What did dwellers in stone houses think of the incoming Anglo-Normans? 
     Another film site for Braveheart was Trim Castle, near where we had a picnic that included the last of the birthday cake my sister Maryanne made for me that week.  Again, the Anglo-Normans built this impressive structure in the 1200-1300s, I recall from the nearby tourist centre.  Indeed, the tourist centre had a copy of the coffin of Edward Longshanks, Edward II I think, and a stone casting of his body on top, in a back room.  Edward was the English king who ringed Wales with forts, and similarly built structures to watch and control the Irish.  The king gave a local lord taxing power, and the taxes built Trim Castle.
     One might object that peasant labor and blood and the theft of peasant land built this and other monuments, to church and state.  True.  "But they are beautiful," the mid-1600s Republican English poet John Milton answered a Puritan who so objected.  Is any Trump tower so beautiful, or lasting?   When I asked the tourism centre man how the locals saw this castle project, he said, "They probably were happy to get the work." I suppose the man knows the Monty Python sketch against feudalism:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2c-X8HiBng

Today on CBC Radio One I heard an English author muse that King Arthur might have been a Briton rebelling against the Anglo-Saxon invasion of England.  There were feudal battles for England before the winners ventured to bring English feudalism to Ireland, only to see industrialism replace it in each land.
     Still, feudalism hung on longer in Ireland than in Britain, whose Industrial Revolution touched Belfast and other urban areas long before gathering the starving remnants of Irish peasantry into wage work by the late-1800s.  This process had been nigh finished for a century in Britain by then.  The Irish faced the Enclosure Movement via starvation and exile, not expropriation, unlike earlier in England, Scotland, and Wales.
     A notable word about the building of the walled city of (London)Derry was that the city, like many British incursions into Ireland, was to be a "defensible" one.  Circling oneself by a wall, like circling the wagons in the Old West of America, proves that one is in hostile territory, in a place where one is unwanted.  Going to a place with an eye to defending oneself there proves that one suspects the locals are hostile to one's presence.
     In 1613, King James I granted a charter to build Derry into a city archly loyal to the crown of England.  This King James did more than authorize a new Bible, but even that book was an attempted improvement over the Catholic Bible, as Londonderry was an attempt to show the local Catholics an improved, Anglo-Protestant, way of life.  There was other mention of this king in a Coleraine historic building which displayed the history of the Plantations, that is, land taken from Irish peasants and Catholic lords by gentry, mostly English, all Protestant.  Oliver Cromwell deposed and decapitated James' son Charles I, but Cromwell continued with military force this plantation movement.  In an Enniskillen public library book in 2015, I found mention of a police constable named Wynne who came from Wales to Ireland in 1642 with Cromwell's army.
     Wynnes I know are more pro-Irish than pro-English, which fits a historical trend of incoming people adopting local ways.  Thus the Anglo-Normans of the 1200s spawned generations who, by Cromwell's time in the 1600s, were pro-Irish, not pro-English, and therefore Cromwell battled them.  Cromwell, was Republican, but he was pro-English, not pro-Irish.  By 1798, the Protestant-begun Plantation System had spawned Protestants who were pro-Irish, not pro-English, such as the lawyer Wolf Tone, who that year helped in a rebellion against English rule of Ireland.  Even Jonathan Swift of the early-1700s was an Irish person jaded by English rule.  Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw openly opposed English rule of their Ireland.  Swift, Wilde, and Shaw were Protestant.  The struggle started Irish-English, not Catholic-Protestant, the latter hitched on much later.  The Catholic Emancipation of 1829 conferred legal but not economic equality on Catholics,leading to generations of sectarian feuding that only calmed down since the late-1990s.  "All You Need is Love:"

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csyHN3LoRJ4

     Dad, a Wynne, said that his mother, an Irish-born Irvine, the Protestant name of a family probably assimilated generations earlier to Catholicism, would not have liked The Troubles that began in the 1960s, had she lived past 1960 to see them.  He also said he liked the British sense of justice and fair play.  They then, like I now, no doubt saw Ireland through the filter of acquired experiences, views, and knowledge of this or that scrap of history.
     Granny (Irvine) Wynne came to Canada in 1916, generations after Granny (Bender) Nasby's Mahurin ancestors left Scotland and soon after that Ireland, around 1690, the Battle of the Boyne year.  Dad said that Granny Wynne had a brother who was a cop, in what would have been Colonial Ireland.  Granny Nasby might have had an ancestor who was a Plantation whipman.  All these ancestors, and my two grannies, were economic migrants first, moving to make a living.  We who condemn their choices of employment have the luxuries of time, geography, material security, and most of all ignorance.
     Traveling in Ireland in 2015 and 2017 made me less ignorant, and therefore less arrogant.