Rihla (The Journey) – was the short title of a 14th
Century (1355 CE) book written in Fez by the Islamic legal scholar Ibn Jazayy
al-Kalbi of Granada who recorded and then transcribed the dictated travelogue
of the Tangerian, Ibn Battuta. The book’s full title was A Gift to Those who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels
of Travelling and somehow the title of Ibn Jazayy's book captures the ethos
of many of the city and country journeys I have been lucky to take in past
years.
This
rihla is about ADARE, Co. Limerick, Ireland.
Adare village in Co. Limerick, Ireland,
is a vibrant, surviving urban phenomenon of an otherwise Famine-blighted, fogbound, stone-rot landscape
of Ireland of the 1840s with its wide boulevards, well built houses, pointed
walls, cared-for thatch, generous public spaces, muted providence, an august trinity
of friaries, and the brash haughtiness of a true manorial town that once serviced
the needs of Adare Manor (commissioned in 1832 by Windham Henry Quin, the 2nd
Earl of Dunraven and Mount-Earl with the spirited encouragement of his wife
Caroline and finished by his son Edwin Wyndham-Quin, the 3rd Earl in
1862 in the midst of a social and economic disaster that existed elsewhere) but
is now almost smug in its continuing exuberance that has seen it regularly
voted as Ireland’s most beautiful town.
The Quins of Adare were the hereditary
chiefs of the Hy Ifearnan (Heffernan) clan, of the Cineal Fearmaic sept of the
Dál gCais kingdom of Munster (c.1000CE), and were originally from Muintir
Ifernain in central County Clare (the later barony of Inchiquin). Windham
Quin’s father Valentine, one of the last titular Gaelic tribal chiefs elevated
to a peerage, was made an Earl in February 1822.
But Adare is much older a place
than the Quin’s manor and its original Irish name was Áth Dara meaning the Ford
of the Oak and this brings me to the connection to mistletoe. In the small, walled orchard garden of Adare Manor that now serves as the practice putting green for
the championship golf course there are 5 or 6 apple trees that produce a really
succulent fruit. But it is in December, when the apple fruit and foliage has
withered away that the trees are at their most majestic. For it is then that
they are covered in most wonderful green and white berry medley (like hollies
only the female mistletoe has berries) that is the mystical and magical mistletoe. There
are few, if any, places in Ireland that you can see, never mind touch, the plant
in all its glory.
Adare Manor Garden Orchard Mistletoe
Mistletoe, a hemi-parasite
plant that is transferred as a sticky seed excrement by the Mistle Thrush from
deciduous trees (oak, apple sometimes lime) to tree, is not a native Irish
plant yet does have an ancient Irish name: drualas. This is a derivation of
Druidh las, the Druid’s herb. Very little is written down concerning the Druids
but Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historie (c79CE) states,
"The Druids (so they call their Magi) hold
nothing in such sacred respect as the mistletoe, and the tree upon which it
grows, provided it be an oak. 'Omnia sanantem appellantes suo vocabulo.' (They
call it by a word signifying in their own language All-Heal.) And having
prepared sacrifices, and feast under the tree, they bring up two white bulls,
whose horns are then first bound; the priest, in a white robe, ascends the
tree, and cuts it off with a golden knife; it is received in a white sheet.
Then, and not till then, they sacrifice the victims, praying that God would
render His gift prosperous to those on whom He had bestowed it. When mistletoe
is given as a potion, they are of opinion that it can remove animal barrenness,
and that it is a remedy against all poisons."
Beyond
the pale of the manor Adare’s medieval ecclesiastical history is still visible
with the presence of three Abbeys: Augustinian, Trinitarian and Franciscan.
Mosaic from 1218 above door of Trinitarian Church of
San Tommaso in Formis in Rome.
The
Trinitarian establishment (now the Roman Catholic Parish church) for me holds
the most fascination, as the Trinitarian Order of Friars, who dedicated their
lives to raising ransom money to redeem Christian captives on the Barbary Coast
(as well as running hospitals in the slave banos of Algiers and Tunis),
featured strongly in my first novel, The Simurgh and the Nightingale about Barbary
Pirates in the 1600s. The Trinitarian Order, founded by St. John de Matha, was
approved of by a Bull of Pope Innocent III, Operante divine dispositionis
clementia, issued on the 17th December 1198. Other early Christian
captive redemptionist orders were the Spanish Military Order of Santiago
(1175), The Order of Montegaudio (1178), and the Order of the Merced (1218).
The
Adare abbey was the only Trinitarian establishment in Ireland and they had been
invited there around 1229 by a second-wave archtypical Anglo-Norman
robber-baron Geoffrey de Marisco. Geoffrey’s full name was Geoffroi de
Montmorency de Marisco, Lord of Thorney and Huntspill in Somerset (Marisco
being a derivation of Marsh). Geoffrey was well connected to Ireland as his
sister had married Thomas Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald the founder of the House of
Desmond. He became the Justicar or Lord Chief Justice of Ireland from 1226-28 and
in addition to his connections also inherited extensive lands in Ireland from
his uncle-in-law John Comyn, Archbishop of Dublin in 1192. He subsequently
expanded his holdings by marrying as his second wife, Eve de Bermingham, the
daughter and heir of Robert de Bermingham, Baron of Offaly.
In
addition to the Trinitarian Abbey Geoffrey also invited the Knights Hospitaller
to establish a commandery in 1215 in nearby Aney (now Hospital). The advantage
of settling military and religious orders by the Norman barons on their properties
was not entirely pious but guaranteed that associated (and tithe paying) lands
would be held safe and their value increased. Geoffrey was to take part in many
Norman attacks on the Irish in Connacht. This too was to leave a legacy as the
Morris family, one of the famous Tribes of Galway, owe their descent to him.
It was not to end well for Geoffrey however. In 1238 an attempt was made
to assassinate Henry III of England and suspicion fell on William (Geoffrey’s
son– executed by being drawn, hung and quartered in 1242 for piracy and murder)
and Geoffrey. Some time between then and 1242 he fled to Scotland where he was
sheltered by a kinsman, Walter Comyn. In 1244 he was forced to leave Scotland,
possibly as part of the agreement reached in that year between Henry III and
Alexander II and he died in France in the following year.
Mathew Paris in Vol iii of his Chronica Majora of
1250 (with a side drawing of the execution of William) said unlovingly of
Geoffrey that he was,
"a man who formerly been a noble and not
least amongst the magnates of Ireland, who had incurred an indelible stain by
the treacherous murder of Richard Earl Marshal, and who was now an exile, a
wretched and hunted man, having been expelled from Scotland deported from
England, and disinherited in Ireland, after the ignominious death of his son
and the loss of all his friends, banished from public view, finally ended so
many deaths with his own. (Obit Galfridus de Marisco, exul, pauper et
profugus).”
Mathew Paris self-portrait
As you turn your back on
Geoffrey’s Trinitarian edifice and walk back up the street and through the
imposing gates of Adare Manor, you stare up at the oaks, and think of druids
and ritual, pagans and sinners, slaves and free, normans and celts, exile and
homecoming, and the perpetual timeline of change.
Adare Manor Mistletoe (7th December 2012)
And
yet at the end of your journey, in a quiet walled-garden, you stand and wonder
at the exuberance, the magic and mystery, and timelessness of mistletoe. That
alone will always bring me back.
Druids cutting mistletoe with a golden sickle from an oak.
