Dungarvan Days

We recently spent a month in a coastal town in Waterford County in south-eastern Ireland that is divided into two parts: Dungarvan and Abbeyside, split in half by the Colligan River. We lived in Dungarvan and walked to Abbeyside daily, so we ended up getting a pretty good eyeful of its many and varied attractions, which include an Anglo-Norman castle, the ruins of a medieval friary and all the subtle beauty to be found on the edge of a vast shallow bay with its shorebirds and sunsets reflected on a shallow sea.

In the distant past, when more northern parts of the country were blanketed in ice, the surrounding area was grassland enlivened by clumps of willow and birch and inhabited by creatures such as the Irish giant deer, reindeer, horse, brown bear and artic fox. In 1859, postman and amateur antiquarian Edward Brenan saw some workmen carrying huge bones through the town square. They’d been found in caves and a limestone quarry nearby. An enormous tibia, supposed to be the thighbone of a giant, had been paraded through the square but a lot of the other bones had been taken for (exceptionally large) beef and mutton bones, so ground up for fertilizer. When Brenan saw the bones, he suspected their value and later discovered they belonged to Ice Age mammals, among them the woolly mammoth.

 

Dungarvan

Dungarvan itself is named for Dungarvan Castle or ‘Garbhann’s fort’, which was built about 1209 under Anglo-Norman rule to guard the harbor. Garbhann was a seventh-century Irish saint and not very much is known about him now. Inside the castle’s curtain wall, there’s a two-storey military barracks which was used by the British Army and Royal Irish Constabulary until 1922. Usually its museum is open to the public but Ireland has been at Level 5 restrictions for a few months so it was closed up when we were there.

Another notable place is the old Market Place, which is remembered as the site where local leaders of the 1798 rebellion were executed, their heads subsequently displayed on pikes by the castle tower. That might sound a bit medieval, but British government forces were exceptionally brutal with rebels across the country, no doubt scared shitless by the recent revolutions in France and America. Non -combatants were murdered and raped. Captured and wounded rebels were executed, and not in a nice way either. In New Ross and Enniscorthy they were burned alive, which prompted the rebels to retaliate in kind in the Scullabogue Barn Massacre, where Protestant non-combatants were burned in a barn.

Another part of history is remembered here and there about the town, with less enthusiasm because An Gorta Mór, The Great Famine (1845-1850) was particularly bad in Dungarvan, which was a notable potato-growing area. Laborers’ main source of nourishment was potatoes so as crops failed, people started starving and getting sick from eating bad potatoes. A Dungarvan Relief Committee provided American cornmeal at a heavily discounted price without being aware that it was largely indigestible for humans thanks to the fact it could be ground finely enough (it usually served as fodder for animals). There’s an interesting article on food in famine-era Dungarvan in Waterford News and Star.

The start of the famine more or less coincided with the completion of a big new workhouse in the town, designed to house 600 tenants. In order to receive government aid, poor people were required to live and work there. In such workhouses The Great Famine (kinsalebeg.com), family units were split up as men, women and children had to live in separate parts of the complex. They all had to wear a uniform and to carry out some kind of work, in Dungarvan this included breaking stones for road repair. The inmates’ main nourishment was stirabout, a kind of thin oatmeal. It wasn’t a place you’d want to be unless it was a matter of life or death. At the height of the famine, in 1847, almost 4,000 people were living in workhouses—by now there was more than one—in Dungarvan, so many that there wasn’t room to lie down to sleep at night.

In September 1846, a riot broke out in Dungarvan as thousands of people tried to break into grain stores on the quay and demanded that they be given employment. Leaders were arrested and later that day some of the crowd demanded that the men be released. When police refused, the crowd started looting bakeries. The incident was big news and even made it into the Illustrated London News.

An 1847 report from The Waterford Freeman gives a account of the suffering in the town:

The poor are dying like rotten sheep, in fact they are melting down into the clay by the sides of the ditches…The bodies remain for whole weeks in those places unburied. In a corner of the vegetable shambles, a man was dead for five days.’ I am informed that the Rev. John O’Gorman, Abbeyside, has to attend from 12 to 15 sick people every day; from morning till eleven o’clock at night he is engaged in administrating the last Sacrament to the sick and dying. The paper also referred to a poor woman who carried the dead body of her son around the town in a cart hoping to collect enough money to buy a coffin.

All the while, landlords were evicting the starving tenant farmers. R. J. Christopher, a resident of Dungarvan, remarked:

[There is] no part of Ireland that more houses had been levelled and more human beings have been turned out…and left to perish on the ditches. In Ballynahassery over 200 have been thrown out, at Abbeyside more than 100 poor creatures had their homes levelled, from 50 to 60 were thrown out near Kilgobnet, a similar number at Cuscham…some hundreds in Dungarvan had houses locked up…In the west of Dungarvan extermination has been carried on to a fearful extent, the poor peasantry have been swept off Slievegrine.’

The Colligan River & Estuary

The town sits right at the point where the River Colligan feeds into the harbor. Spanning the river is a scenic stone bridge that was finished in 1816 and still going strong, though it is a bit narrow if you’re a pedestrian. As you can see in the photo above, a sea mine sits at the end of a little stone pier near the bridge. It commemorates Ireland’s last naval loss of World War II. Even though Ireland was officially neutral, thousands of Irishmen fought and worked in factories to help the Allies. This wartime incident happened nearby at Helvick Head. A naval mine in this case got caught up in a fishing trawler’s net, killing all three crew members of the Naom Garvan.

On the side of the bridge opposite the harbor is Dungarvan estuary, where we saw a long surfboard that seemed to be anchored to the estuary floor for some reason. A quick internet search revealed that locals put it in place for the use of weary seals.

Abbeyside

After crossing the bridge you are essentially in Abbeyside. Here there is a path that tracks the edge of the bay and leads you past a large painted buoy, which serves as another monument to another sea disaster. On December 21, 1895 The Moresby left Cardiff, heading for Pisagua in South America with a cargo of 1,778 tonnes of coal. On December 23, it ran into rough weather and headed into Dungarvan Bay, where a lifeboat came up to see if they wanted to come ashore. They didn’t, and that night, about 4 a.m. on Christmas Eve, the ship’s anchor broke and the vessel fell on its side. The ship sent out distress signals but most of those on board the doomed ship decided not to wait and to swam for it instead. At about midday a rescue boat arrived and picked up the survivors, who were the minority. Of the 24 people aboard The Morseby, only five remained. 

The path goes on and turns into the cycle-and-walking path known as the Greenway, which continues 42 miles all the way to Waterford.

At the trail head, if you turn right and follow the edge of the bay, it’s a ten-minute walk to the old Augustianian friary. As you walk you get a nice view looking across to the castle on the opposite shore. Depending on the tide, you can see oystercatchers, cormorants, red shanks and dunlin. You also pass another painted buoy, this one topped by a scary papier mâché seagull.

The abbey in was built around 1290 and is now partially incorporated in a nineteenth-century church.

Based in coastal areas at first, the Augustinians gradually penetrated Gaelic Ireland and on the eve of the Reformation they were pretty strong throughout the country. When Henry VIII packed a sad about not being able to divorce, he got busy punishing the papists and enforcing the Suppression of the Monasteries Dissolution of the Monasteries – Wikipedia (1536-1541). One of the keenest enforcers was Henry’s Chief Minister Thomas Cromwell (1485-1540), who is probably familiar to fans as the central character of Wolf Hall. 

A couple of centuries later one of Thomas’ ancestors would lead the Conquest of Ireland (1649 -1653) and become one of the most hated Englishmen in Ireland ever, which is saying something. Oliver Cromwell loathed Catholics, which was the English fashion at the time, and set out to prove just how much. He ordered massacres at Drogheda and Wexford, drove out the original inhabitants, confiscated their land and kept it for the English purse, he forcibly transported women and children to work as slaves on plantations in Barbados, confiscated and destroyed food supplies and just generally got genocidally busy. Obviously, part of his plan was to stamp out Catholicism and he smashed as many churches as he could. One of these was the Abbeyside friary, another was the medieval structure of St. Mary the Virgin in Dungarvan proper. Now a Protestant place of worship, St. Mary’s Church of Ireland. stands in its place, its high stone walls incorporate the stones of the older Catholic church.

Legend has it that when Cromwell came to Dungarvan in 1649, he kindly refrained from destroying the whole village after a local woman stopped him at the gate and offered him a goblet of wine as much to say ‘Congrats boss for all your hard work.’ Whether or not this is true, the town did surrender and so avoided a siege.

Dungarvan in Literature

Depending on the weather, Dungarvan is either utterly delightful or mind-bendingly dreary, no in-betweensies. Thanks to John Betjeman’s poem “An Irish Unionist’s Farewell to Greta Hellastrom in 1922“, it is the dreariness part that has been immortalized. Ostensibly a sad monument to unrequited love, the poem is mainly a dire warning to anyone who will listen that ‘Dungarvan in the rain'(repeated at the end of every stanza) is a fit refrain because in Dungarvan it rains often and well.

Gales along the Commeragh Mountains,
Beating sleet on creaking signs,
Iron gutters turned to fountains,
And the windscreen laced with lines,
And the evening getting later,
And the ache – increased again,
As the distance grows the greater
From Dungarvan in the rain.

Weirdly enough, Betjeman isn’t the only big writer to mention Dungarvan. In Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Shape of the Sword”, the main character is an Irishman from Dungarvan. His tongue loosened by drink, the stranger proceeds to tell a story of the Irish Civil War. Notwithstanding all the Borges-ness, it is not so far from real stories out of Dungarvan at the time, such as those told in George Lennon’s Trauma in Time.

A final literary footnote, in the 1860s little Oscar Wilde and Edward Carson made sandcastles on Dungarvan’s beaches together. In 1895, Carson’s vicious cross-examination would lead to Wilde’s imprisonment and ultimately also to his premature death. Carson, on the other hand, would become one of the founders of Northern Ireland, his statue gesticulates outside of Stormont to this day.