Finding Ireland: A Poet's Explorations of Irish Literature and Culture

Travels through Somerville and Ross’s Ireland

Travels through Somerville and Ross’s Ireland Readers of Somerville and Ross’s novels and Irish R.M. stories will have formed their own mental pictures of the characters and settings found in the writings of the two literary second cousins. Real people resembling their fictional characters, being creatures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, have long since vanished from the Irish scene. But many places associated with Edith Somerville of County Cork and Violet Martin, penname Martin Ross, of County Galway remain to be visited and savored. The imposing limestone mass of Ross House, which Martin Ross characterized in a memoir as “a tall, unlovely block, of great solidity,” is visible overlooking Ross Lake east of the road between Moycullen and Oughterard north of Galway City. Its owners, George and Elizabeth McLaughlin, have plastered over the bare stone and had it smartly painted. They call the place Ross Castle. The Martins, one of the legendary Tribes of Galway , came to Ireland with Strongbow during the reign of Henry II and became the greatest landowners in Connacht with an estate of some 200,000 acres. They retained their Roman Catholicism until Violet Martin’s great-grandfather converted, to 85 Tillinghast pt 2 8/20/08 3:25 PM Page 85 marry one of the local Protestant O’Haras. Ross House dates from 1590, but all that remains of the sixteenth-century structure are its groin-vaulted cellars. The three-story Georgian mansion that exists today was built in 1755 following a devastating fire in 1740. The older house is said to have had mahogany floors taken from ships that foundered in the rough seas off the Galway coast. The house was sold by its last Martin owners in 1925 and suffered another fire in 1930, which gutted the interior. It has been lovingly restored and may be visited for a small fee. The McLaughlins have made a striking mantelpiece in their dining room from an ancient marriage stone they found lying overgrown with weeds outside the stables. The stone joins the Martin coat of arms—a cross flanked on either side by the sun and the moon—with the Lynch crest, whose three shamrocks are a familiar adornment both at Lynch’s Castle and St. Nicholas’ Church in Galway. Anyone undertaking a Somerville and Ross pilgrimage might want to stay at nearby Currarevagh House, whereViolet Martin attended dances and parties, on Lough Corrib four miles from Oughterard. The proprietor, Mr. Harry Hodgson, has a collection of Somerville and Ross first editions as well as a set of Edith Somerville’s illustrations for Slipper’s ABC of Foxhunting .Violet and her sister Geraldine’s drive to the Hodgsons’ in August 1888, described in a letter, turned out to be more memorable than the party itself: “We started at nine in the pitch darkness just before moon rise, and as soon as we got into the road remembered with some apprehension that it was the night of the Oughterard races, and the roads would be full of carts with drunken drivers.” The hilarious and hair-raising account of the drive, of shouting back and forth to drunken revelers and dodging carts in the dark, became raw material for the carriage wreck in the story “Lisheen Races, Second-hand.” Somerville and Ross drew closely from life. Shreelane—the fictional house of “the Irish R.M.,” MajorYeates—“a tall, ugly Travels through Somerville and Ross’s Ireland Tillinghast pt 2 8/20/08 3:25 PM Page 86 house of three storeys high, its walls faced with weather-beaten slates, the windows staring, narrow, and vacant,” resembles nothing so much as Ross House before its refurbishment. Edith’s drawing of the front door of Shreelane, printed in illustrated editions of the Experiences of an Irish R.M., was clearly the front door of Ross. The most vivid impressions of these two great chroniclers of Anglo-Irish life are to be found not in Galway, however, but in Castletownshend, located in a remote part of County Cork. This seaside town, with its crowds of cousins, its parties, its comings and goings, was altogether more cheerful than Martin’s house in the remote Galway countryside. It is still cheerful today. The town’s main thoroughfare, which divides to go around “the two trees”—sycamores planted in the middle of the street in what Edith Somerville described as “a sort of giant flowerpot...