Dear mother
I still remember the excitement of my first visit to Bonmahon. You hired Martin Galvin’s hackney-car to take us there. Martin was to drop us off then come back for us a few hours later. It probably cost you a fortune – at least thirty shillings. I had seen you selling eggs to Jimmy Carey earlier on in the week, so I guess that funded it.
Martin was one of the few in the neighborhood who owned a car – a sure sign of wealth in my estimation. But I couldn’t fathom where this ‘wealth’ came from, because I had heard you say in the past the family didn’t have two pennies to rub together.
They were richer than us at least; they had the electric supply connected up, whereas we couldn’t afford to pay the charges for the three poles it required to take the supply across the intervening fields to us. And their water was supplied from a hand-operated pump in the field next door, while we had to draw ours from the well four hundred yards away.
I remember that we were all up early that Sunday morning, feeding the chickens, hens and other assorted animals, rushing through our chores at breakneck speed. I was serving at first Mass and was glad to see that Fr Synnott also seemed intent on breaking records. There was probably a hurling match on in Thurles!
Anyway, come ten-thirty we had breakfasted and changed back into our Sunday clothes, eagerly awaiting the big moment. By the time Martin arrived at one o clock I had spent two lifetimes imagining what Bonmahon would be like, and when we finally rounded the sharp bend at the top of Saleen hill and I saw the expanse of blue spread out before me, it was love at first sight.
I knew nothing about Bonmahon and its history in those far-off days. All I knew about was the evocative smell of sand and sea in my nostrils. I didn’t even know about dilisk
I certainly didn’t know that about 500millon years ago it was a spot on the ocean floor somewhere in the vicinity of the South Pole, until a volcanic explosion landed it in its present position along the ‘Copper Coast’.
And I didn’t know that copper mining there goes back to about 1740. Some of the mine shafts are over 1000 feet deep and extend out under the sea, and power to pump the water out and haul the ore up was originally provided by a giant 40foot waterwheel. However, in 1841 the first of several steam engines were built, which were much more efficient. Did you know that those ruins on the cliffs at Knockmahon are the remains of one engine house? Or that the ore was mined by hand, raised from the shafts by the steam engines then dispatched along the cliffs on a railway line down into Bonmahon, where the good ore was separated from the waste by women, children and older men not fit for work in the mines?
The mined ore was then shipped to Swansea in small boats, where it fetched good prices because of its high copper content. The mines ceased to be economic in 1878 and were closed down, although several attempts were made to re-open them, particularly in the early part of the twentieth century, when they were taken over by the Bonmahon Copper Mines Development Syndicate.All that is left now, a hundred years later, are some ruins and a number of deep holes in the ground.
insert Bonmahon around 1920
The Bonmahon I saw on that first Sunday was almost a ghost town, its lanky main street bereft of houses, the only evidence they ever existed the bricked-up openings in the head-high walls that must once have been doorways and windows.
It would have been hard to visualize (even had I known it) that around 1840 almost two thousand people lived in Bonmahon. Then it had 2 hotels, a pawn shop, a creamery, and 21 pubs. And in 1842 a Temperance Hall was built at a cost £1000, £400 of which was subscribed by the miners themselves.
Perhaps building the hall was foresight, perhaps it was divine intervention, because three years later it was being put to a much different use: to house and feed the victims of the Famine.
Bonmahon, like everywhere else in the vicinity, suffered the ravages mass starvation, and the Reverend David Doudney, who was sent to Bonmahon in 1847 as the new Church of Ireland curate, had this to say on his arrival; ‘One’s heart is perfectly sickened in walking through the village itself and beholding the filth, the wretchedness and the misery that presented itself on every hand.’.
In 1854, the hall was converted into the church now known as St Mary’s Church, Saleen.
I didn’t know anything about the diverse mixture of people that there down through the years. Not about Frank Dwan, Una Troy, or the Watts family, to name but a few.
Frank Dwan, a fisherman, was originally from Fourmilewater, Co. Waterford, but had moved to Bonmahon with his wife and family to earn a living. Years later, with his children all grown up, and all now to emigrated to America, Frank, at the age of 65, decided to visit them for a holiday.
On Thursday, 11th April, 1912, he boarded the Titanic at Queenstown (Cobh) as a third class passenger. His ticket number was 336139, and the cost was £7.15shillings.
Frank was one of the many hundreds who died in the sinking, and his body, if it was recovered, was never identified.
There was a story doing the rounds at the time that the real reason Frank was leaving was because he was connected with a series of thefts from the mines, but this was almost certainly malicious gossip, because the authorities would hardly have left him sail away to a foreign country if they had any suspicions of him.
I suppose that Frank was a relative of the Dwans who still live in the area, and who called at our house every Friday selling mackerel and whiting.
I wonder if you knew Una Troy? I know you liked her books and I remember a number of them, Mount Prospect in particular. I believe this was her first book, written in 1936, and it was banned in Ireland. That seems to have been the Irish government’s way of acknowledging good books.
Una was born in Fermoy, Co Cork in 1910, and when the Irish Free State was established her father was appointed a District Judge and the family moved to Clonmel. Here, she met her husband, Joseph Walsh, who was a doctor in Bonmahon. When he died she moved to Bonmahon to live, where she resided in Osborne Terrace, continuing to write, until her death in 1993. (As you can see, I have been busy researching, but I am sure you would like to know)
Una wrote 17 novels and 4 plays in all; in 1940 she adapted Mount Prospect for the stage. It was produced by The Abbey Theatre, where it won the Shaw 1st Prize. She continued to write for The Abbey and had three further plays produced by them; Swans and Geese, Apple a Day, and Dark Road.
You put one of her books in my Christmas stocking one year. It was called ‘We Are Seven’. It was later made into a film called ‘She Didn’t Say No’.. This film was England’s entry to the Brussels Film Festival in 1958, but had a rather different reception in Ireland, where it was banned as being ‘immoral’. Two bans for one writer – is that a record?
Richard Watts came from a prominent farming family in the area and was reputed to have owned most of the village during the mining heydays. He owned the farm, a shop, a bar, a forge, a creamery, and all the workers cottages on one side of the river. He also had an interest in the copper mines and owned a thriving bacon export business. He died in 1875 and was succeeded by his son, James, and when he died in 1897, by his brother Dick. By now there was a drapers shop, and in later years another creamery at Lemybrien.
The family also owned ‘The Glebe’, the former Church of Ireland vicarage, next to the now unused church, and this was where Dick’s younger sister Blanche moved when she married Tom Buckley
The following years were to see a decline in the Watts fortunes, culminating in the burning down of the creamery during the Troubles. One of the reasons given was that Tom Buckley was not liked by the locals because he was English.
How looks Bonmahon now, almost fifty years after you and father sat yourselves down on the dunes and watched while us youngsters frolicked on the beach below? It has hardly changed at all. It’s almost as if it exists in a time warp It’s a lonesome place; full of old ghosts, old values. But it’s got its own character, its own way of life.
The Fishermen’s Hall is still there, albeit now disused. In the sixties it reverberated to the sounds of ceile bands, and exponents of more modern music such as The Cossacks Showband and the Davitt Brothers, and even our own Royal Dukes
You can still buy dilisk there, wrapped in newspaper from one of the fishermen’s cottages up on the cliffs. Just like you bought it all those Sundays ago. This dried seaweed, the colour of copper, and saltier than a herring, hooked me then – and I am still hooked. I could eat it till the cows come home!
So when I think of home I think of Bonmahon before I think of anywhere else. And to be honest, if ever I live in Ireland again I can think of no better place to be. I think I would be quite content to die there.
Your loving son
Tom
Dear grandpa Tom,
I wonder if you are buried in the old graveyard at Newcastle. From what I have been told you lived quite near it before you married and moved to Ballyhussa. I believe that in the old days Newcastle was a parish on it own and the remains of the old church still survive in the graveyard. I don’t know what it was like in your day but it is now a monument to the passing of time.
There is a hill overlooking it, on which stand s a large timber cross, embedded in a huge block of stone. The graveyard itself is small and square, surrounded by stony fields, and sheltered by a few evergreens and one yew tree. Only the gable ends of the church are still standing and many of the headstones stand on what was once the floor of the church. I thought only the clergy could be buried inside the church itself so maybe they are all priests and bishops in there. Some are huge slabs of stone, smooth on the front and rough at the back, but others around the periphery are just pieces of rock stuck in the ground, with no indication of who lies buried beneath. The larger ones, though mostly faded, are beautifully engraved, and the ladder and hammer and nails motif appears quite frequently. What the stone-masons message was I am not sure; perhaps it was ‘you have to be crucified before you can get to heaven’. Or perhaps that was the only engraving he could do.
Do you recall the Pattern that was held every summer in the adjacent field? Or maybe that was an innovation that only started in my youth? It began with the priest celebrating open-air Mass on the hill, using the stone plinth as the altar.
There followed by an afternoon of sport and games. For us children there were running and jumping competitions, while the adults engaged in such diversions as the tug-o-war and throwing-the-weight competitions. Music and dancing also took place, with competitions held on a stage in one corner of the field. Afterwards there was prize giving
and the consumption of much lemonade and cakes and, I expect, the odd bottle or two of stout.
I realize now that you were long dead by then, but if you are buried there, and your spirit does roam unhindered by bodily ties, then you will have enjoyed the spectacle as much as I did.
Your grandson
Tom
I still remember the excitement of my first visit to Bonmahon. You hired Martin Galvin’s hackney-car to take us there. Martin was to drop us off then come back for us a few hours later. It probably cost you a fortune – at least thirty shillings. I had seen you selling eggs to Jimmy Carey earlier on in the week, so I guess that funded it.
Martin was one of the few in the neighborhood who owned a car – a sure sign of wealth in my estimation. But I couldn’t fathom where this ‘wealth’ came from, because I had heard you say in the past the family didn’t have two pennies to rub together.
They were richer than us at least; they had the electric supply connected up, whereas we couldn’t afford to pay the charges for the three poles it required to take the supply across the intervening fields to us. And their water was supplied from a hand-operated pump in the field next door, while we had to draw ours from the well four hundred yards away.
I remember that we were all up early that Sunday morning, feeding the chickens, hens and other assorted animals, rushing through our chores at breakneck speed. I was serving at first Mass and was glad to see that Fr Synnott also seemed intent on breaking records. There was probably a hurling match on in Thurles!
Anyway, come ten-thirty we had breakfasted and changed back into our Sunday clothes, eagerly awaiting the big moment. By the time Martin arrived at one o clock I had spent two lifetimes imagining what Bonmahon would be like, and when we finally rounded the sharp bend at the top of Saleen hill and I saw the expanse of blue spread out before me, it was love at first sight.
I knew nothing about Bonmahon and its history in those far-off days. All I knew about was the evocative smell of sand and sea in my nostrils. I didn’t even know about dilisk
I certainly didn’t know that about 500millon years ago it was a spot on the ocean floor somewhere in the vicinity of the South Pole, until a volcanic explosion landed it in its present position along the ‘Copper Coast’.
And I didn’t know that copper mining there goes back to about 1740. Some of the mine shafts are over 1000 feet deep and extend out under the sea, and power to pump the water out and haul the ore up was originally provided by a giant 40foot waterwheel. However, in 1841 the first of several steam engines were built, which were much more efficient. Did you know that those ruins on the cliffs at Knockmahon are the remains of one engine house? Or that the ore was mined by hand, raised from the shafts by the steam engines then dispatched along the cliffs on a railway line down into Bonmahon, where the good ore was separated from the waste by women, children and older men not fit for work in the mines?
The mined ore was then shipped to Swansea in small boats, where it fetched good prices because of its high copper content. The mines ceased to be economic in 1878 and were closed down, although several attempts were made to re-open them, particularly in the early part of the twentieth century, when they were taken over by the Bonmahon Copper Mines Development Syndicate.All that is left now, a hundred years later, are some ruins and a number of deep holes in the ground.
insert Bonmahon around 1920
The Bonmahon I saw on that first Sunday was almost a ghost town, its lanky main street bereft of houses, the only evidence they ever existed the bricked-up openings in the head-high walls that must once have been doorways and windows.
It would have been hard to visualize (even had I known it) that around 1840 almost two thousand people lived in Bonmahon. Then it had 2 hotels, a pawn shop, a creamery, and 21 pubs. And in 1842 a Temperance Hall was built at a cost £1000, £400 of which was subscribed by the miners themselves.
Perhaps building the hall was foresight, perhaps it was divine intervention, because three years later it was being put to a much different use: to house and feed the victims of the Famine.
Bonmahon, like everywhere else in the vicinity, suffered the ravages mass starvation, and the Reverend David Doudney, who was sent to Bonmahon in 1847 as the new Church of Ireland curate, had this to say on his arrival; ‘One’s heart is perfectly sickened in walking through the village itself and beholding the filth, the wretchedness and the misery that presented itself on every hand.’.
In 1854, the hall was converted into the church now known as St Mary’s Church, Saleen.
I didn’t know anything about the diverse mixture of people that there down through the years. Not about Frank Dwan, Una Troy, or the Watts family, to name but a few.
Frank Dwan, a fisherman, was originally from Fourmilewater, Co. Waterford, but had moved to Bonmahon with his wife and family to earn a living. Years later, with his children all grown up, and all now to emigrated to America, Frank, at the age of 65, decided to visit them for a holiday.
On Thursday, 11th April, 1912, he boarded the Titanic at Queenstown (Cobh) as a third class passenger. His ticket number was 336139, and the cost was £7.15shillings.
Frank was one of the many hundreds who died in the sinking, and his body, if it was recovered, was never identified.
There was a story doing the rounds at the time that the real reason Frank was leaving was because he was connected with a series of thefts from the mines, but this was almost certainly malicious gossip, because the authorities would hardly have left him sail away to a foreign country if they had any suspicions of him.
I suppose that Frank was a relative of the Dwans who still live in the area, and who called at our house every Friday selling mackerel and whiting.
I wonder if you knew Una Troy? I know you liked her books and I remember a number of them, Mount Prospect in particular. I believe this was her first book, written in 1936, and it was banned in Ireland. That seems to have been the Irish government’s way of acknowledging good books.
Una was born in Fermoy, Co Cork in 1910, and when the Irish Free State was established her father was appointed a District Judge and the family moved to Clonmel. Here, she met her husband, Joseph Walsh, who was a doctor in Bonmahon. When he died she moved to Bonmahon to live, where she resided in Osborne Terrace, continuing to write, until her death in 1993. (As you can see, I have been busy researching, but I am sure you would like to know)
Una wrote 17 novels and 4 plays in all; in 1940 she adapted Mount Prospect for the stage. It was produced by The Abbey Theatre, where it won the Shaw 1st Prize. She continued to write for The Abbey and had three further plays produced by them; Swans and Geese, Apple a Day, and Dark Road.
You put one of her books in my Christmas stocking one year. It was called ‘We Are Seven’. It was later made into a film called ‘She Didn’t Say No’.. This film was England’s entry to the Brussels Film Festival in 1958, but had a rather different reception in Ireland, where it was banned as being ‘immoral’. Two bans for one writer – is that a record?
Richard Watts came from a prominent farming family in the area and was reputed to have owned most of the village during the mining heydays. He owned the farm, a shop, a bar, a forge, a creamery, and all the workers cottages on one side of the river. He also had an interest in the copper mines and owned a thriving bacon export business. He died in 1875 and was succeeded by his son, James, and when he died in 1897, by his brother Dick. By now there was a drapers shop, and in later years another creamery at Lemybrien.
The family also owned ‘The Glebe’, the former Church of Ireland vicarage, next to the now unused church, and this was where Dick’s younger sister Blanche moved when she married Tom Buckley
The following years were to see a decline in the Watts fortunes, culminating in the burning down of the creamery during the Troubles. One of the reasons given was that Tom Buckley was not liked by the locals because he was English.
How looks Bonmahon now, almost fifty years after you and father sat yourselves down on the dunes and watched while us youngsters frolicked on the beach below? It has hardly changed at all. It’s almost as if it exists in a time warp It’s a lonesome place; full of old ghosts, old values. But it’s got its own character, its own way of life.
The Fishermen’s Hall is still there, albeit now disused. In the sixties it reverberated to the sounds of ceile bands, and exponents of more modern music such as The Cossacks Showband and the Davitt Brothers, and even our own Royal Dukes
You can still buy dilisk there, wrapped in newspaper from one of the fishermen’s cottages up on the cliffs. Just like you bought it all those Sundays ago. This dried seaweed, the colour of copper, and saltier than a herring, hooked me then – and I am still hooked. I could eat it till the cows come home!
So when I think of home I think of Bonmahon before I think of anywhere else. And to be honest, if ever I live in Ireland again I can think of no better place to be. I think I would be quite content to die there.
Your loving son
Tom
Dear grandpa Tom,
I wonder if you are buried in the old graveyard at Newcastle. From what I have been told you lived quite near it before you married and moved to Ballyhussa. I believe that in the old days Newcastle was a parish on it own and the remains of the old church still survive in the graveyard. I don’t know what it was like in your day but it is now a monument to the passing of time.
There is a hill overlooking it, on which stand s a large timber cross, embedded in a huge block of stone. The graveyard itself is small and square, surrounded by stony fields, and sheltered by a few evergreens and one yew tree. Only the gable ends of the church are still standing and many of the headstones stand on what was once the floor of the church. I thought only the clergy could be buried inside the church itself so maybe they are all priests and bishops in there. Some are huge slabs of stone, smooth on the front and rough at the back, but others around the periphery are just pieces of rock stuck in the ground, with no indication of who lies buried beneath. The larger ones, though mostly faded, are beautifully engraved, and the ladder and hammer and nails motif appears quite frequently. What the stone-masons message was I am not sure; perhaps it was ‘you have to be crucified before you can get to heaven’. Or perhaps that was the only engraving he could do.
Do you recall the Pattern that was held every summer in the adjacent field? Or maybe that was an innovation that only started in my youth? It began with the priest celebrating open-air Mass on the hill, using the stone plinth as the altar.
There followed by an afternoon of sport and games. For us children there were running and jumping competitions, while the adults engaged in such diversions as the tug-o-war and throwing-the-weight competitions. Music and dancing also took place, with competitions held on a stage in one corner of the field. Afterwards there was prize giving
and the consumption of much lemonade and cakes and, I expect, the odd bottle or two of stout.
I realize now that you were long dead by then, but if you are buried there, and your spirit does roam unhindered by bodily ties, then you will have enjoyed the spectacle as much as I did.
Your grandson
Tom
posted by tomobrien at 11:05 AM
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