Year: 2018
Type: article
Abstract: If you visit the National Library in Dublin, you will see stained-glass windows portraying the giants of European literature: Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dante … and Moore. That would be Thomas Moore, whose ballad, ‘The Meeting of the Waters’, is the subject of this special issue. While you could be charitable and interpret Moore's inclusion as a nod, by the British establishment of the day, to Ireland's ‘national poet’, a modern reader may suspect condescension. ‘Is this really the best you can do?’ you can hear them think, if not say.1 There is not in the wide world a valley so sweet As that vale in whose bosom the bright waters meet; Oh! the last rays of feeling and life must depart, Ere the bloom of that valley shall fade from my heart. Yet it was not that nature had shed o'er the scene Her purest of crystal and brightest of green; 'Twas not her soft magic of streamlet or hill, Oh! no, – it was something more exquisite still. 'Twas that friends, the belov’d of my bosom, were near, Who made every dear scene of enchantment more dear, And who felt how the best charms of nature improve, When we see them reflected from looks that we love. Sweet vale of Avoca! how calm could I rest In thy bosom of shade, with the friends I love best, Where the storms that we feel in this cold world should cease, And our hearts, like thy waters, be mingled in peace. And yet, as John Barrell shows in his fascinating essay, there is a remarkable amount that can be said about the song and its reception. Of particular interest to the economic historian is the way in which the meeting of waters is compared to the mingling of hearts, and how the metaphor was routinely used in the nineteenth century when celebrating the construction of major engineering projects, designed to link together distant markets by means of water transport. Thus, the Erie and Suez canals promised to promote not only trade, but the mingling of peoples: for commerce and peace go hand in hand. Whether or not that is true is another matter, and the subject of a previous column of mine.2 In this column I want to focus on County Wicklow, where the poem is set; for the Avoca, and the two rivers that flow into it, tell us a lot about the economic and political history of that county and perhaps of Ireland more generally. Interactions with the rest of the world did indeed promote trade, and access to foreign capital and technology. But they also involved violence: a lot of violence. And if there was eventually a mingling of hearts, it took a form that might have surprised those late Victorians and Edwardians who viewed Moore's song as the politically safe ‘national melody’ of one of the four constituent countries of the United Kingdom. A little geography is perhaps in order, for those of you unfortunate enough not to know Wicklow (fig. 13). The two rivers whose meeting Moore celebrated are the Avonmore (big river) and Avonbeg (little river). The former rises at Lough Dan, where a young Erskine Childers practised his sailing skills and John Boorman's Arthur chucked Excalibur to the Lady in the Lake, before flowing generally southwards through Annamoe (home of the Barton family), past Trooperstown Hill, to Laragh. Here it is joined by the Glendasan river, carrying water from the Glendasan and Glendalough valleys, as well as by the Glenmacnass river, before continuing south through Rathdrum and past Parnell's Avondale estate. The Avonbeg rises on Camenabologue. It flows south-east through the remote Glenmalure valley, and then through Greenan and Ballinaclash. Having descended from the Wicklow mountains, the two rivers join to form the Avoca river, which runs through the vale and village of the same name, is joined by the Aughrim river at Woodenbridge, and flows into the Irish Sea at Arklow.4 The first thing to say about Avoca is that it is a tribute to the Irish gift for spin, or if you prefer, marketing. The name itself is spin: the suggestion is that the river Avoca is the ‘Oboca’ referred to in Ptolemy's Geography, though there is no evidence for this, and the Liffey or Slaney are more logical candidates.5 Field describes the name as ‘modern’, and the borrowing as ‘without warrant’.6 The marketing of the meeting of the waters as a celebrated beauty spot is also spin: as Barrell points out, the site has left many visitors underwhelmed. As for the waters being ‘purest of crystal’: Avoca had been the site of extensive copper mining since the middle of the eighteenth century. At the time Moore was writing, all fish life in the Avoca river between his ‘valley so sweet’ and Arklow had been killed.7 It is true that the Avoca has seen a lot of mingling of peoples, but this has not always been peaceful. The words ‘Wicklow’ and ‘Arklow’ are of Viking origin, and there are strong grounds for thinking that the first Irish Viking base to be mentioned in the annals was located in Arklow. However, the reason that we know about ‘Inber Dée’ is that heathens from there raided Kildare in 836 and burned half the church settlement down.8 It is true that the Scandinavians eventually blended into the local population, as they did elsewhere in Europe, but the English who followed proved less easily digestible. During the thirteenth century, the occupying Anglo-Norman government referred to the Wicklow mountains as the terra guerre, or ‘land of war’, while the coastal plain was the terra pacis, or ‘land of peace’.9 The key distinction between the two regions, and the reason that they were referred to in this way, was that the coastal plain was firmly under the control of the English, while the mountains were still controlled by the Irish. In what can only be described as a very bad mistake, at some stage during the third quarter of the century Archbishop Fulk of Glendalough and Dublin granted Glenmalure to the O’Tooles, who had been driven from their native Kildare by the invading Normans and still harboured a grudge. Glenmalure provided them with a near impregnable base, and it wouldn’t be until the seventeenth century that the mountains were fully controlled by the English.10 But contact with the outside world had its upside as well. By the seventeenth century, English capital and technology were helping to develop new industries in Wicklow: an iron industry, for example, as well as the large-scale production of staves used to produce ‘pipes’, a type of cask.11 Both were predominantly based in the south of the county, particularly Shillelagh, but Arklow benefited to some extent from the resultant trade in exported timber and imported iron ore. And by the eighteenth century, as already mentioned, extensive copper mining operations were under way at Avoca. Two employees of the mining company operating east of the river, Abraham Mills and the English-born Thomas Weaver (who had studied under von Humboldt in Germany, and was associated with the Ascendancy-dominated Dublin Society), played a major role in developing mining in the county more generally:12 the nineteenth century saw the development of lead mines further up the Avonmore and Avonbeg rivers, in Glenmalure, Glendalough, and Glendasan.13 Later in the nineteenth century the mines to the east of the river were taken over by the Williams Brothers from Cornwall, who introduced steam power. Henry Hodgson, who mined in both Avoca and Glenmalure, was, among his many other accomplishments, responsible for the development of a chemical industry in Arklow. Not even industry, however, was impervious to political divisions. As Barrell points out, Moore wrote his song in 1808, just ten years after the bloody 1798 rebellion that saw atrocities on both sides. The rebellion only ended in County Wicklow in December 1803, when Michael Dwyer, who had retreated from Wexford to – where else? – Glenmalure five years previously, finally surrendered to the British authorities. And so it is perhaps a little strange that Moore should have portrayed Avoca as an oasis of tranquillity. In fact, it was as divided as the rest of the country. The Hibernian Mining Company, which mined west of the Avoca river, was owned by the Kyans, an Irish family who produced one of the rebellion's leaders, Esmond. The mines to the east had also been worked by the Kyans, but from the 1780s onwards they were controlled by a Macclesfield family, the Roes, who brought over workers from Wales. In 1791 the Roes and their collaborators set up the Associated Irish Mine Company (AIMC), and the two companies soon became bitter rivals. At first they issued competing copper tokens, to serve as a means of payment in an age when low denomination coins were scarce.14 The AIMC tokens featured a rather stern-looking and mitred St Patrick, while the Hibernian tokens were more patriotic, portraying Hibernia seated beside a harp (fig. 2). The two companies later went on to set up their own yeomanry, which took opposite sides in the conflict. The AIMC's Mills and Weaver were in charge of loyalist forces in Rathdrum, while Esmond Kyan was one of the leaders of the failed attempt to capture Arklow, and was later executed after what Ruán O’Donnell describes as a ‘perfunctory courtmartial’.15 Barrell speculates that the mingling of the little and big rivers at Avoca may have been understood, in the aftermath of 1798, as representing the peaceful merger of Ireland and Britain. Moore's own social and professional success in England, at a time when you might have assumed that being an Irish Catholic was neither profitable nor popular, could be seen as a template for that particular project. But in retrospect the Avonbeg and Avonmore might more appropriately be seen as representing two different strands of Irish nationalism. Glenmalure of course symbolises the Irish Catholic nationalism of the O’Tooles and Michael Dwyer; the Avonmore the nationalism of big houses: the Bartons and Childers in Annamoe, and Charles Stewart Parnell in Avondale. Roy Foster movingly describes how deeply embedded in Wicklow society – not just Protestant Wicklow society – Parnell always was.16 His nationalism was reformist rather than revolutionary, favouring land reform and home rule, and who knows what might have happened if he had succeeded in achieving the latter. But as we know, that was not to be. His successor, John Redmond, did see Home Rule enter the statute books in September 1914, but by then the world was at war, and the time for reform was drawing to an end, not just in Ireland but in many countries. Two days after his great triumph in London, Redmond was travelling to his Wicklow retreat in Aughavannagh, which had previously belonged to Parnell. Driving through Woodenbridge, a little downstream from Avoca village, he came across an assembly of Irish Volunteers on the local golf course, and made a famous speech in which he urged them to join the British and Irish war effort. The Volunteer movement immediately split: Ireland was now on a path leading first to the Easter Rising, and then to full independence. Fifty thousand Irishmen would die in the war, which is almost exactly one hundred times as many as the total number of fatalities in 1916. If only a tenth of those who died enlisted because of Redmond, he would still have ten times as much blood on his hands as Pearse and his colleagues, a point that is perhaps not made often enough. The Rising made a huge impact on Robert Barton of Glendalough House in Annamoe, who was a serving British Army officer in Dublin at the time. He resigned his commission, and was elected a Sinn Féin MP in 1918. His cousin Erskine Childers, who had grown up with the Bartons, also served in the British Army during the war. Having previously supported Home Rule, he now became more radical. Like his cousin he was elected a Sinn Féin MP, and opposed the Treaty with its residual links to the British Crown. He was one of the most famous and tragic victims of the Irish Civil War: arrested in Annamoe, he was sentenced to death for the illegal possession of a revolver that had been given to him by Michael Collins. Having shaken hands with every member of the firing squad, he told them to ‘Take a step or two forward, lads, it will be easier that way.’ In 1996, the BBC started screening a drama series in which a young English priest was transferred to a parish in Ireland. Filmed in Avoca, the storyline involved a Moore-like mingling of British and Irish hearts, as Father Peter gradually fell in love with the beautiful Assumpta. But a more durable mingling occurred in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, upstream of Avoca in the old terra guerre, when three Anglo-Irish gentlemen – Parnell, Barton, and Childers – gradually came to share the political aspirations of their Catholic neighbours for a self-governing, or even fully independent, Ireland. Childers’ son would become President of Ireland; his granddaughter Nessa is an Irish member of the European Parliament. The sectarianism that still plagues Northern Ireland is absent from the South today, and I like to think that Wicklow had something to do with that.
Source: Critical Quarterly
DOI: 10.1111/criq.12392
Author: Kevin Hjortshøj O’Rourke
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2805833275