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Nicholas Grene
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Farming in Modern Irish Literature

Farming in Modern Irish

Literature
NICHOLAS GRENE
1
3
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DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198861294.001.0001
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To Hermione
Acknowledgements
Grateful acknowledgement for permission to quote is made as follows:
Poems from Jane Clarke, The River (2017) reproduced by permission of the
author and Bloodaxe Books. www.bloodaxebooks.com
Extracts from ‘Pity the Bastards’ by Tom French from Touching the Bones
(2001) reproduced by kind permission of the author and The Gallery Press.
www.gallerypress.com
Extracts from ‘Like Dolmens round My Childhood’, ‘Epilogue’, and ‘The Water
Carrier’ by John Montague from Selected and New Poems 1961–2017 (2019)
reproduced by kind permission of the author’s estate c/o The Gallery Press.
Extracts from ‘Witness’ by John Montague from New Collected Poems (2012)
reproduced by kind permission of the author’s estate c/o The Gallery Press.
The poems of Patrick Kavanagh are reprinted from Collected Poems, edited by
Antoinette Quinn (Allen Lane, 2004), by kind permission of the Trustees of
the Estate of the late Katherine B. Kavanagh, through the Jonathan Williams
Literary Agency.
Extracts from Máirtín Ó Direáin, Selected Poems: Rogha Dánta, edited and
translated Frank Sewell (2018) by kind permission of Cló Iar-Chonnacht for
the estate of Máirtín Ó Direáin.
Extracts from Bernard O’Donoghue, Gunpowder (London: Chatto, 1995),
appear by kind permission of the author.
Extracts from Bernard O’Donoghue, The Seasons of Cullen Church, by permis-
sion of the author and Faber & Faber Ltd.
Excerpts from District and Circle by Seamus Heaney, by permission of the
author and Faber & Faber Ltd for world rights excluding the United States.
Copyright © by Seamus Heaney. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus
and Giroux for US rights.
Excerpts from Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966–1996 by Seamus Heaney,
by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd for world rights excluding the United
States. Copyright © by Seamus Heaney. Reprinted by permission of Farrar,
Straus and Geroux for US rights.
Extracts from Maurice Riordan, The Holy Land, by permission of the author
and Faber & Faber Ltd.
viii 
Permission to use illustrations is gratefully acknowledged as follows:
Jack B. Yeats drawing, IVARO on behalf of the Estate of Jack B. Yeats

Map of Congested Districts, 1891, Ciara Breathnach, The Congested Districts of
Ireland, courtesy of Four Courts Press
Mick Lally as Sanbatch in 1983 Druid production of M. J. Molloy, The Wood of
the Whispering, photo Mark Kilroy, courtesy Druid Performing Arts
Seamus Heaney, District and Circle, jacket design by Charlotte Strick.
Copyright © 2006 Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Reprinted by permission of
Farrar, Straus and Geroux. Jacket Photo: Unknown Young Man, Ireland,
courtesy of Hughie O’Donoghue
I have to thank my wife Eleanor Grene who suggested the subject for this book and
who had to live with my constantly repeated obsessions while writing it. I am
grateful to the Trinity College Dublin students of English who took a course
I offered on Kavanagh, McGahern, and Heaney in the spring of 2020 and
contributed collectively to the ideas worked out in the last three chapters.
One of the pleasures of researching this book has been the help I have had from
a wide range of friends and colleagues, in several cases pointing me to texts and
authors I had not read before. For such help, I wish to thank Jane Brennan, Lucy
Collins, Gerald Dawe, Roy Foster, Laurence Geary, Hugh Haughton, Catherine
Heaney, Rosie Lavan, Madeline McGahern, Niall McMonagle, Cormac Ó
Cuilleanáin, Stephen O’Neill, Guy Woodward.
I am extremely grateful to Julie Bates, Adrian Frazier, Bernard O’Donoghue,
and Frank Shovlin who took the trouble to read drafts of individual chapters; their
response was much appreciated.
Parts of this book, like so much I have written in the past, have benefited from
the supportive encouragement and keen-eyed editorial comments of Hermione
Lee as reader. I first met Hermione in 1972 when we were colleagues at the
University of Liverpool, and she has been a very dear friend ever since. The
book is dedicated to her as a grateful tribute to that longstanding friendship.
Contents
List of Illustrations xi
Introduction 1
1. Family and inheritance 10
2. Life on the margins 34
3. Childhood memories 59
4. Community relations 82
5. Reactions to modernity 105
6. Patrick Kavanagh: Farmer poet 127
7. John McGahern and the alternative life of the farm 157
8. Seamus Heaney: World into word 180
Conclusion: Land and landscape 217
Bibliography 223
Index 231
List of Illustrations
1. Jack B. Yeats, illustration to J. M. Synge, ‘In the “Congested Districts”:

Possible Remedies—Concluding Article’ (Courtesy of IVARO, on
behalf of the Estate of Jack B. Yeats) 26
2. Map of Congested Districts, 1891 (Courtesy of Four Courts Press) 35
3. Author, aged 9, with American mother and Irish father in Wicklow
farmyard 1957 61
4. Threshing, Wicklow 1950s 92
5. Mick Lally as Sanbatch in 1983 Druid production of M. J. Molloy,
The Wood of the Whispering (Photo Mark Kilroy, courtesy Druid
Performing Arts) 111
6. Looking up at the rick of straw 150
7. Horse and rake used for gathering in hay for haycocks 165
8. Seamus Heaney, District and Circle (Jacket design by Charlotte Strick.
Jacket photo: Unknown Young Man, Ireland, courtesy of Hughie
O’Donoghue. Copyright © 2006 Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Reprinted
by permission of Farrar, Straus and Geroux) 198
Introduction
1971 saw a tipping point in Irish demography: for the first time, less than half the
population of the Republic of Ireland lived in rural areas.¹ By 2018, just over 5 per
cent of workers were employed on the land.² And yet, at the end of the second
decade of the twenty-first century, the small family farm continues to be a setting
and subject for Irish writers. So, for instance, in 2010 Claire Keegan’s Foster, which
originally appeared as a short story in the New Yorker, was (very unusually)
published as a single volume by Faber & Faber. Though set in 1981, this child’s
eye narrative of a summer spent with foster parents on a Wexford farm could be
from nearly any earlier period. Belinda McKeon’s widely acclaimed first novel
Solace (2011) intercuts the life of a PhD student in Dublin with returns to work on
his father’s farm in Co. Longford. The Booker-prize winning novelist Anne
Enright, normally tagged as an edgy postmodernist, opens The Green Road with
a chapter that could almost be out of John McGahern. Farming memories of his
childhood in Cork have always been integral to the lyrics of Bernard O’Donoghue,
distinguished poet and Oxford don, and never more so than in The Seasons of
Cullen Church, which was shortlisted for the 2016 T. S. Eliot Prize. John Connell’s
autobiographical memoir, The Cow Book: A Story of Life on an Irish Family Farm
(2018) traces a winter’s work with sheep and cattle that enables the writer to come
to terms with his life and his relationship with his farmer father. All of these
widely reviewed and lavishly praised books were published by prestige British
publishers for an international readership. Most Irish may now be city-dwellers,
working in banking, business, or IT, but the Irish family farm is alive and well in
the literary marketplace.
There are historical reasons why the small island of Ireland should have had the
small farm as its metonym. Right through the nineteenth century the movement
for legislative independence from Britain and land agitation were the two driving
forces of politics. They came together most obviously in 1879 with the appoint-
ment of C. S. Parnell, leader of the Irish parliamentary party, as president of the
newly formed Land League. The land question was integrally connected to
¹ The Central Statistics Office figures from the 1971 Census show 52.2 per cent of the population
living in aggregate town areas: https://www.cso.ie/en/media/csoie/census/census1971results/volume1/
C_1971_V1_T7.pdf.
² See https://tradingeconomics.com/ireland/employment-in-agriculture-percent-of-total-employment-
wb-data.html accessed 22 June 2018.
Farming in Modern Irish Literature. Nicholas Grene, Oxford University Press (2021). © Nicholas Grene.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198861294.003.0001
2     
nationalism throughout the revolutionary period.³ In fact, well before the Rising of
1916 and the 1919–21 War of Independence that led to the establishment of the
Free State in 1922, a more fundamental and far-reaching revolution had taken
place. By 1914 successive Land Acts had transferred title of the bulk of Irish land
from large landowners to their former tenants.⁴ It is not surprising, therefore, that
rural Ireland should figure so largely in the cultural imaginary of the literary
revival and the early national theatre movement. In Yeats and Gregory’s iconic
Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), when the allegorical figure of the Old Woman
complains that ‘[m]y land was taken from me’, the Gillane family tries to place
her in local terms: ‘Do you think she could be the widow Casey that was put out of
her holding at Kilglass a while ago?’⁵ The eviction of the tenant is merely the
colonial conquest of the nation felt upon the pulse.
As early as 1904, Bernard Shaw in John Bull’s Other Island had questioned how
much the transfer of land ownership would change rural Ireland. The newly
impropriated small farmer, Shaw argued, through his stage surrogate Larry
Doyle, would be as ruthless in oppressing the landless labourer as ever the
landowner had exploited the tenant. It certainly proved true that the farming
community in Ireland after 1922 was one of the most conservative forces within
the state. The Famine and its aftermath led to the familist culture where the
principal imperative was to retain undivided possession of the land by the election
of one of the sons as heir, while the other children had to find careers elsewhere in
education, emigration, or the Church, or in marriage to other eligible partners.⁶
This self-perpetuating system contributed to the distinctively unusual sociological
pattern of very late marriages, where the inheriting son of the family could not
afford to marry until his parents were willing to retire.⁷ The income produced by
small farms had traditionally been supplemented by support from family mem-
bers abroad and, consequently, economic units that would have been scarcely
viable without such support were allowed to continue in operation. For many
years in the period of the Free State and beyond, an ideological commitment to an
inward-looking country, differentiated from its large industrialized neighbours,
privileged the idea of rural Ireland. But through much of the twentieth century,
even when government policy sought to promote agricultural modernization, lack
³ See Philip Bull, Land, Politics and Nationalism: A Study of the Irish Land Question (Dublin: Gill
and Macmillan, 1996).
⁴ ‘By 1914, 75 per cent of occupiers were buying out their landlords, mostly under the Land Acts of
1903 and 1909’ Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland 1900–2000 (London: Profile Books,
2004), p. 62.
⁵ W. B. Yeats, Variorum Edition of the Plays, ed. Russell K. Alspach (London: Macmillan, 1966),
p. 223.
⁶ The classic adumbration of this process is Conrad Arensberg and Solon Kimball, Family and
Community in Ireland, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968 [1940]).
⁷ The psychological deformations produced by this system in its later phases were the subject of
Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ influential (though subsequently controversial) study, Saints, Scholars and
Schizophrenics 2nd ed. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982 [1979]).
 3
of consistency and poor execution left much of Irish farming unaltered.⁸ Even in
the later twentieth century when Ireland was changing and changing rapidly,
farming lagged behind other sections of society. The small family farm, subject
of so many childhood memories, stayed on stubbornly in imagination and in
actuality.
Most of the writers considered in this book come from the generations working
after 1922 in the partitioned Ireland of the Free State/Republic and Northern
Ireland. In spite of the distinctive differences of the industrialized northwest, this
remained initially a largely agricultural country both North and South.⁹ One of the
attractions of much of the writing in the early period was the inside view it
afforded of remote farming and fishing communities not previously represented
in literature: the Blasket Island autobiographies of Tomás O Crohan, Maurice
O’Sullivan, and Peig Sayers, the anti-romantic poetry of Monaghan small farmer
Patrick Kavanagh, the raw short stories of Liam O’Flaherty from Inishmore. The
authority of these writers derived from the fact that they actually came from the
little-known regions they evoked, offered personal testimony of the sort of agrarian
lives they brought before the reader. But it was not necessary to have such a direct
connection to rural Ireland to make it an imaginative subject. So, for example,
Daniel Corkery and Frank O’Connor from Cork, or Michael McLaverty from
Belfast, were drawn to the country districts of Munster, the Gaeltacht of the
West, or Rathlin Island, for a ‘hidden Ireland’ not available elsewhere. In the
largely autobiographical Never No More (1942), Maura Laverty invented a rural
grandmother with whom she goes to live as a teenager, and whose farmhouse way
of life is the loving subject of the novel.¹⁰
To become a writer is to join the middle-class professional classes, wherever
you may have started out. Patrick MacGill from Donegal was sent out to work as a
hired hand in Ulster farms at the age of twelve, subsequently as a seasonal labourer
and navvy in Scotland, but by 1912, when he published Children of the Dead End,
based on that experience, he was established as a journalist and wrote as a protegé
of the former royal chaplain Canon Dalton, with the Preface to the book dated
from ‘The Garden House, Windsor’.¹¹ Patrick Kavanagh began as a Monaghan
small farmer and cobbler who left school at thirteen, but the encouragement of
⁸ On the longer-term structural issues see Raymond D. Crotty, Irish Agricultural Production: Its
Volume and Structure (Cork: Cork University Press, 1966) and on the specific post-Independence
period see Paul Rouse, Ireland’s Own Soil: Government and Agriculture in Ireland, 1945–65 (n.p.: Irish
Farmers’ Journal, 2000).
⁹ Finola Kennedy notes that, in the 1926 Census, over half the working population of the Free State
was engaged in agriculture, and though in the North the figure was only 25 per cent, in England and
Wales it was less than 10 per cent. From Cottage to Crèche (Dublin: Institute of Public Administration,
2001), p. 64.
¹⁰ In the introduction to a reprint of the book, Maeve Binchy points to this fictional dimension to
what is otherwise close to a memoir of Laverty’s own childhood in Rathangan, Co. Kildare: Maura
Laverty, Never No More (London: Virago, 1985 [1943]).
¹¹ Patrick MacGill, Children of the Dead End (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 1999 [1912]).
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urban intellectuals like AE and Sean O’Faolain allowed him to move to a literary
career in Dublin and London. In the case of many later writers, there was at least
one degree of separation from the land. For the revolutionary generation after
1922 there were opportunities for work in the newly formed police force, An
Garda Síochána, in National School teaching, and in the civil service. It was the
children of these parents, many of whom came originally from farming back-
grounds, who continued the pattern of upward social mobility to university
education and a writing life. So, for example, John McGahern, Thomas Kilroy,
and Dermot Healy, were all sons of guards, in the cases of both McGahern and
Kilroy with fathers who had been IRA activists before joining the police in the new
dispensation. The childhood memories of farming that provide literary material
are thus often not taken from the parental home but the farms of grandparents,
uncles, or cousins in the country.
Seamus Heaney, who did indeed grow up on a farm in Co. Derry, would have
been typical of a whole post-war generation in Northern Ireland that availed of the
1947 Education Act to attain secondary and then third level schooling. For many
equivalent British writers this meant a transition from working class homes to
Oxford or Cambridge, a culture gap that often became the subject of their work.
For Heaney and contemporaries like Paul Muldoon, the family life left behind was
the country farmhouse, not the industrial back-to-back terrace. The juxtaposition
of farm work with the mental engagement of the writer is what has made Heaney’s
‘Digging’ such a signature poem, while Muldoon’s ‘Gathering Mushrooms’ is a
more playful treatment of the subject, with the poet’s memories of his father
harvesting mushrooms at home triggering a vignette of his own student indul-
gence in their hallucinogenic counterparts.¹² The experience of the farm and of
farming becomes available as literary material as it is distanced by education,
travel, and the self-conscious reflectiveness that such distance allows. Poems,
plays, autobiographical fiction, childhood memoirs are a secondary imaginative
re-working of the primary experience of rural immersion.
In 2011 I published a childhood memoir of my own. I called it Nothing Quite
Like It: An American-Irish Childhood, because I thought what might be of interest
was the unusual nature of my situation, born in the United States but growing up
in a tiny village in Co. Wicklow with an American mother, and an Irish father who
commuted to Chicago where he was a university professor. That was indeed
distinctive in so far as farming was for my father a chosen sideline, to which he
was passionately committed, rather than a means of livelihood. But as I have
researched this book, I came to realize that many Irish writers have comparable
transnational connections. John Montague was born in Brooklyn, where his
parents had moved to try to make money to save their mortgaged farm in
¹² ‘Gathering Mushrooms’ is the first poem in Quoof (London: Faber & Faber, 1983), as ‘Digging’ is
the first poem in Death of a Naturalist (London: Faber & Faber, 1966).
 5
Tyrone,¹³ though he was sent back to Ireland at the age of four to the rural Irish
upbringing he remembers in so many poems. Mary Lavin was another child of
Irish immigrant parents in the United States, though she was nine when she was
moved to Ireland. Eugene McCabe, too, was a reverse immigrant, having grown
up in Glasgow. Peter Fallon, born in Germany, was only six when he went to live
on his uncle’s farm in Meath. Bernard O’Donoghue’s father was a Cork farmer,
but his mother was from Manchester and that became the writer’s home after the
death of his father when he was sixteen. These sort of transplanted lives are an
inevitable part of the Irish diaspora; writing about the Irish countryside as a result,
however localized it may seem to be, yet frequently contains within it intimations
of a world beyond.
And, of course, as native English speakers, having access to an Anglophone
education system, Irish writers take their place within the global marketplace of
English as a world language. Even the Blasket Island autobiographers, though
writing in Irish, had mentors like Robin Flower and George Thomson to translate
their work and find them British publishers. By contrast, Máirtin Ó Cadhain’s Cré
na Cille, though long hailed as a masterpiece by Irish language scholars, had to
wait to reach a wider readership until two English translations appeared over sixty
years after it was first published.¹⁴ Because of the relatively small scale of Irish
book production, it is more or less essential for writers to find publishers and
agents abroad, or at least co-publication with an international house. Many Irish
writers—Frank O’Connor, Brian Friel, Mary Lavin, Claire Keegan—have had their
work internationally recognized and their careers sustained through publication
in The New Yorker.
Literary traditions have their own momentum, become self-sustaining. The
Revivalists in the early twentieth century created a rural Irish imaginary which
conditioned reception for work to come. So, in the 1930s, Kavanagh could be
welcomed as a ploughman poet, an Irish Robert Burns or John Clare. But The
Great Hunger (1942), with its fierce denunciation of Revival myths of the peas-
antry, fed an appetite for harsh realism fostered by critics of the day such as Sean
O Faolain. Nostalgia for a vanishing Ireland associated with the small farming
communities of the West could be fed in different keys. There is the mournful
tone of loss so prevalent in Tomás O Crohan or Peig Sayers. On the other hand,
there are celebratory recollections of childhood from Maurice O’Sullivan’s Twenty
Years A-Growing (1933) to Alice Taylor’s To School through the Fields (1988). The
claustrophobic oppression of a church-dominated, sexually repressed rural
¹³ I am grateful to Adrian Frazier for this information who explains that ‘Montague’s father and
uncle were bankrupted by borrowing to buy up horses [for shipment to the Greek government in their
war against the Turks], and then couldn’t pay back the loan’. Personal email, 18 June 2018.
¹⁴ Cré na Cille was first published in 1949 by Sáirseal agus Dill; the two translations appeared as The
Dirty Dust, trans. Alan Titley (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), and Graveyard Clay,
trans. Liam Mac Con Iomaire and Tim Robinson (Inverin, Galway: Cló Iar-Chonnacht, 2016).
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Ireland was a signal feature of the 1960s fiction of John McGahern and Edna
O’Brien, anatomizing the society in which they grew up. But in John Montague,
Seamus Heaney, or Bernard O’Donoghue images recalled from farming childhood
represent a primal iconography within the complex poetic interplay of past and
present, thought and feeling. In an international context, the identification of
Ireland as a belatedly agricultural country, a small green island unlike the rest of
the developed modern world, has facilitated many different forms of representa-
tion. It is the first business of this book to explore some of the key recurrent tropes
in the rendering of rural Ireland, where they come from in social and cultural
terms, and how they are played out in the writing. The last three chapters will then
be devoted to individual studies of three of the most important writers within this
tradition: Kavanagh, McGahern, and Heaney.
I begin with inheritance, the particular Irish pattern of the transmission of land
established in the mid-nineteenth century which persisted well into the twentieth.
The need to pick one of the sons as heir, but not on the automatic basis of
primogeniture, made for fraught family situations exploited by a number of
Irish playwrights for their dramatic potential: sibling rivalry over who was to be
the heir, the fates of the children not so chosen. However, the emphasis on having
a son to take over could produce its own drama where a male successor was
lacking, and the patrilineal process was challenged. The jealously guarded own-
ership of farms, won with such difficulty, could produce a fixation on land hunger
obliterating all other considerations. My second chapter is concerned with sub-
sistence, the harsh conditions endured in the poorest parts of Ireland. This could
sometimes be saluted as a heroic struggle for survival, as for instance in Robert
Flaherty’s romanticized Man of Aran film. What also emerges in the autobio-
graphical accounts of such conditions, however, is not just the hazards of the
environment, the sea and the climate, but the dependence on the wider world that
could bring temporary prosperity during periods of war, depression with the
collapse of international markets. These are marginal communities at risk from
forces completely outside their control.
Childhood is the focus of my third chapter because so much of Irish writing
draws on early memories of farming life whether in memoirs, in fiction, or in
poetry. The formative experiences of growing up constitute a stock in trade of
imaginative writing everywhere. But for Irish writers with a farming background
this takes the form of a distinctively earthed connection to the land, variously as
that may be represented. The Irish small farm is integrated within the farming
community, examined in the fourth chapter. The indexical system of signification
established in the Revival period, by which the rural community stood in for the
nation, had its legacy within Irish writing in later periods. So, for instance, sombre
evocations of farming in border counties and the North have highlighted the
intimacy of people living in conditions of co-dependence, yet subject to exacer-
bated sectarian divisions in the time of political violence from 1969 on. Elsewhere,
 7
the sardonic re-creation of backbiting and infighting within more culturally

homogeneous communities has called in question any lingering ideas of Revival-
generated rural idylls. Modernization did come to modern Ireland, though belatedly
and in its own form, not through the large-scale industrialization of other countries,
but through the growth of education and the backwash of global capitalism. The
response of Irish writers to modernity, whether angry and satiric, or more neutrally
accepting, is the subject of my fifth chapter.
Patrick Kavanagh, John McGahern, and Seamus Heaney are the major Irish
writers for whom farming experience is most central. The aim of the last three
chapters is to analyse the ways in which the imagination of each of them worked
upon the land and the more generic tropes explored in the first part of the book.
For the self-educated Kavanagh there was a heroic struggle to find the forms in
which he could make use of his own background and experience: in the early
memoir, The Green Fool (1938), the autobiographical novel, Tarry Flynn (1948),
in long poems and in lyrics. The confidence he eventually gained in the validity of
his subject, his polemic enunciation of a ‘parochial’ aesthetic, made him a crucially
important figure for Irish writers who came after him. One of these was
McGahern, who followed Kavanagh in affirming the primacy of the local in
literature, and who returned to the Roscommon/Leitrim counties where he grew
up for the setting of much of his fiction. The farming community which he re-
creates in so many of his stories and novels, however, is seen to some extent from
the sidelines, as the educated son of a policeman for whom the farm was never
more than a part-time occupation. He himself, relatively unusually among Irish
writers, chose to return to live and work on a small farm in his own home
territory, but even there his point of view is that of semi-engaged observer.
Heaney, who frequently acknowledged the importance of Kavanagh as enabling
predecessor, lived for most of his life in cities—Belfast, Dublin, Cambridge,
MA. He absorbed influences from everywhere: from his voracious reading of
other European writers; from his knowledge of folklore and mythology; from
his work as an inspired teacher of literature; from the friendships and connections
he made across the world. Yet, to an extraordinary extent, memories of his
childhood years on the family farm in rural Derry continued to provide a fresh
source for his poems from Death of a Naturalist (1966) to Human Chain (2010).
For all three of these writers, the small farms of the north and north-west of
Ireland constitute a primary imaginative hinterland, distanced as they might have
become from that experience by the very profession of writer.
Growing up as I did on a farm in rural Ireland in the 1950s, much of the
material dealt with by the writers in this book is very familiar to me. I have tried to
use this experience to bring alive aspects of the work that might otherwise be
obscure, and among the illustrations I have added in several of my own family
photos. Some limits to the scope of this study were deliberately chosen while others
have been forced upon me. The land is very important in nineteenth-century Irish
8     
literature from William Carleton on, and in symbolic terms at least it figures largely
in the writing of the Revival. For the most part, however, I have excluded this work
because I wanted to concentrate on the period of family-run small farms and the
generations of writers working since 1922. Equally, I have not dealt with the
literature of the Big House and its lands; neither ‘peasantry’ nor ‘hard-riding
country gentlemen’ are my subject. More reluctantly, I have left out representations
of farming in the visual arts, and in film and television, except in cases of cinematic
adaptations of literary texts, in order to give adequate attention to the range of
literary material and some detailed analysis of major writers. In spite of years of
learning Irish at school, I have shamefully not even a reading knowledge of the
language. I am very conscious of this inability to access Irish language texts in the
original and am restricted to reading those works available in English translation.
I am the more grateful, therefore, for the two published versions of Cré na Cille and
for the translation of the definitive scholarly edition of An tOileánach, which makes
clear that The Islandman, long available in the English translation of Robin Flower,
is an edited and redacted version of O’Crohan’s original text.¹⁵
One of the issues that has emerged in the preparation of this book has been the
degree of gender-skewing in the writers studied. Many women have made use of
their memories of farming childhoods in memoirs, novels, and short stories, and
this is reflected in the texts examined in my third chapter. However, it has been the
patriarchal bond between fathers and sons working the land together which has
been most often highlighted; the crucial question dramatized in the plays con-
sidered in my first chapter has been which son is to inherit. Perhaps in part
because of this patrilinear bias, Irish women writers, on the whole, have not made
the farming experience central to their work to the extent of their male counter-
parts. While many female poets write of nature and the natural world, few have
made literary capital out of farm work like Patrick Kavanagh, John Montague,
Seamus Heaney, Bernard O’Donoghue, or Peter Fallon—Jane Clarke is an import-
ant exception here. Among dramatists, Lady Gregory re-creates the rural village
rather than the farming community around it; landscape and the environment are
central in Marina Carr’s Midlands plays, but not really the farming of the land.
Rural backgrounds do indeed figure in the work of many women fiction writers,
from Edna O’Brien through (outstandingly) Claire Keegan to Belinda McKeon
and Anne Enright. Still, it is striking how little farming actually features in the
stories of Mary Lavin, for example—Lavin whose own father was a farm manager
and who herself owned and ran a farm for most of her adult life.¹⁶ Self-perpetuating
market-place conditions may contribute to this predominance of male writers in
¹⁵ Tomás O’Crohan, The Islander, trans. Garry Bannister and David Sowby (Dublin: Gill and
Macmillan, 2012) is a translation of Tomás Ó Criomhthain, An tOileánach, eagarthóir Sean Ó
Coileáin (Baile Átha Cliath: Cló Talbóid, 2002).
¹⁶ The farm merely provides a context for the study of bereavement in a story such as ‘In the Middle
of the Fields’: In the Middle of the Fields (Dublin: New Island, 2016).
 9
the imaginative territory of the farm. For whatever reasons, I have found no Irish
woman writer with a career-long preoccupation with this territory comparable to
that of Kavanagh, McGahern, and Heaney, the subject of my single-author
chapters.
Ireland has no monopoly on farm writing marketed for an urban readership.
Lorna Sixsmith’s series of books about Irish farming, of which the latest is Till the
Cows Come Home (2018), can be matched by Amanda Owen’s A Year in the Life
of a Yorkshire Shepherdess (2016) sequel to The Yorkshire Shepherdess (2014).
What makes Irish writing distinctive is the depth and persistence with which the
small family farm has featured throughout the modern period. This has been
shaped to a considerable extent by the historical context. The massive transfer of
land in the early twentieth century that turned tenants into owner-occupiers
produced a country of small farmers, doggedly retaining the farms that had cost
such a struggle to acquire, resistant to change, mythologized in the ideology of the
nation. Although Ireland has modernized, with increasing rapidity in recent years,
an imaginative time lag has retained the idea of rural Ireland as central to its
literary iconography. In spite of spirited protests against the archaism of such
representations, fiction and memoir, drama and poetry that looks back to the
family farm for its setting and substance persists.¹⁷ That look back, however, has
been essential to the perspective on farming in almost all the work considered in
this book. To the extent that the land is represented as remote from the implied
urban situation where most writers write and readers read, these works could be
construed as versions of pastoral. But there is also the distance of time in
childhood memories, the fixation on past periods such as the 1950s and 1960s,
the unwillingness to acknowledge the changes of contemporaneity. The writers
themselves, displaced from a farm background by one or more generation, or just
by the move into the middle-class urban-based situation that writing brings, look
back at life on the land which is for them imaginatively formative. The varied
nature of such formations and the way they are figured in Irish writing is the
subject of this book.
¹⁷ One such protest is Declan Hughes, ‘Who the Hell Do We Think We Still Are? Reflections on
Theatre and Identity’, in Eamonn Jordan (ed.) Theatre Stuff: Critical Essays on Contemporary Irish
Theatre (Blackrock: Carysfort Press, 2000), pp. 8–15. Many others are enumerated by Margarita
Estévez-Saá, ‘A Map of things Known and Lost in Anne Enright’s The Green Road, estudios irlandeses,
11 (2016): https://www.estudiosirlandeses.org/2016/02/a-map-of-things-known-and-lost-in-anne-enrights-
the-green-road/, accessed 11 June 2019.
1
Family and inheritance
When they discovered that my grandfather

was going, unexpectedly, to die young
of meningitis, they naturally set about
ensuring that his wife would not inherit
the farm. They assembled a group of solid men—
as they might have for the threshing: his brother
who lived south on the mountain;
a shrewd solicitor; and a man from Doon
with a good hand who often testified to wills.
Bernard O’Donoghue, ‘The Will’
In the deadpan tone of the poem, the one word ‘naturally’, offset against ‘unex-
pectedly’ in the previous line, carries the full force of ironic outrage. The patri-
archal conspiracy to disinherit the widow is as much in the day’s work as a
threshing for which all the available neighbourhood manpower is assembled.
The poet has supplied further details of the actual circumstances: ‘My grandfather
died of meningitis in 1914 when my father (the inheritor in the poem, an only
child) was four. [ . . . ] The arrangement was that his mother could go on farming
in his name provided she did not remarry in which case she could be turned out
for one shilling. In addition, if she could be shown to be mismanaging the farm the
O’Donoghues, her husband’s people, could try to get her turned out.’¹ The patri-
linear line of inheritance had to be preserved at all costs.
The second stanza of the poem, however, suggests some of those costs:
There was another witness whose existence

I know from no other evidence: my father’s
Uncle Michael. I suppose he emigrated
to the States or Canada, where—I suppose again—
he was set upon at his arrival
for the few pounds sewn inside his coat
and dumped into the sea, or maybe shunned
¹ Personal email, 20 June 2018. I am very grateful to Bernard O’Donoghue for this information and
for allowing me to quote it.
Farming in Modern Irish Literature. Nicholas Grene, Oxford University Press (2021). © Nicholas Grene.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198861294.003.0002
   11
because of the disease he carried

and left to die in the plague sheds of Grosse Île.²
The requirement that there should be just one male inheritor for the farm was a
humanly wasteful one. All the other siblings had to find a life elsewhere, many of
them through emigration. O’Donoghue here follows the lost Uncle Michael as one
of those collateral casualties. The repeated ‘I suppose’ marks off his hypothetical
imagined death as against the facts attested by the witnessed will. But the vividness
of that imagination of a casually extinguished life acts as a reminder of the
thousands of Irish people who perished in such a way, whether as victims of
mugging on the streets of New York or neglected patients in the Grosse Île
quarantine station of Québec. The lands of opportunity in the New World yielded
no opportunity at all for many.
Some fifty years after the execution of the will in Bernard O’Donoghue’s poem,
an independent Irish legislature provided against farm wives being thus legally
excluded from inheritance. The Succession Act, 1965 of the Oireachtas ensured
that a spouse was entitled to at least a third of the estate, half if there were no
children.³ But even as the Act was being debated, there were those who sought to
get around it. One such was Frank McGahern, father of John McGahern the
writer. Notwithstanding his difficult relationship with his oldest son, Frank
McGahern tried to transfer to him ownership of the farm he had bought on
retirement from the Guards, solely in order to avoid any part of it being inherited
by his second wife Agnes: ‘he wanted to pass on the name McGahern with the
inheritance.’⁴ A version of this episode provides the climactic moment in the short
story ‘Sierra Leone’, where the adult son is summoned by telegram from his father
to return home. The two go outside on to the land to ‘talk in peace’ about, as it
turns out, ‘an Act that makes sure that the widow gets so much of a man’s
property as makes no difference after he’s dead—whether he likes it or not.’
This leads up to the offer: ‘If I transfer the place to you before that Act becomes
law, then the Act can’t touch us.’ When the son refuses to accept this effective
disinheritance of his stepmother, the father protests bitterly: ‘You don’t even have
respect for your own blood.’⁵ What is crucial is the blood line descending from
father to son, keeping the association of the name with the property.
It was the American anthropologists Conrad Arensberg and Solon Kimball
who, in their influential study 1940 Family and Community in Ireland, first set out
in detail the pattern of family inheritance in the area of West Clare to which they
give the fictional name of Luogh:
² Bernard O’Donoghue, The Seasons of Cullen Church (London: Faber & Faber, 2016), p. 4.
³ See Succession Act, 1965, section 111: http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1965/act/27/section/111/
enacted/en/html#sec111 accessed 9 July 2018.
⁴ John McGahern, Memoir (London: Faber, 2005), p. 264.
⁵ John McGahern, Creatures of the Earth (London: Faber & Faber, 2006), pp. 220–2.
12     
On most small farms only one son can be kept at home as successor to land and
chattels. The family property, house, stock, and land, descend to him intact. The
other sons must be provided for elsewhere. In choosing the son to remain upon
the farm, the father has full power of decision. His interest lies in choosing
among his sons the one he thinks will carry on most successfully. [ . . . ]
The sons and daughters who are not to be portioned at home, in the words of
the Luogh residents, ‘must travel’.⁶
The work of Arensberg and Kimball has by now been much criticized, one scholar
claiming that their ‘account ranges from the inaccurate to the fictive’.⁷ Yet Damian
Hannan, who quotes this criticism, maintains that western farms in the period of
Arensberg and Kimball’s research did have the features they described where
‘characteristic inheritance, marriage and property settlement arrangements guar-
antee[d] the succession and marriage of heirs, the retirement of the old couple,
and the settlement and usual emigration arrangement for non-inheriting sons’.⁸
However, by the later period of the 1950s and 1960s education for non-
agricultural professions was to become the preferred choice for farm children.
As the 1962 Limerick Rural Survey showed, ‘[t]he sons who do not show scholastic
ability become farmers by default.’⁹ The father remained the autocrat, ‘loath to
consult either his wife or children on matters of finance and farm management’, so
insistent on his authority, ‘that he will risk losing his whole family rather than
make concessions to their point of view’.¹⁰ In such a situation, the inheritance of
the farm could become a burden for the designated heir rather than a desired goal.
‘Land was integral to the life of the family and in particular to patterns of
inheritance, and the implications of primogeniture to sibling relations, to parent-
ing and to family life more generally in post-Famine Ireland requires much
reflection.’¹¹ This chapter cannot offer the sort of wide-ranging historical reflec-
tion that Fergus Campbell here asserts is needed. However, the texts examined do
illustrate a range of the ways in which the issues he evokes have been
dramatized—and significantly these texts are almost all plays. Where the eldest
⁶ Conrad M. Arensberg and Solon T. Kimball, Family and Community in Ireland, 2nd ed.
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. 62–3, 143.
⁷ Damian F. Hannan, quoting P. Gibbon in ‘Peasant Models and the Understanding of Social and
Cultural Chance in Modern Ireland’ in P. J. Drudy (ed.), Ireland: Land, Politics and People, Irish Studies
2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 141.
⁸ Hannan, ‘Peasant Models’, 142–3.
⁹ Limerick Rural Survey, Third Interim Report: Social Structure, July 1962, p. 23.
¹⁰ Limerick Rural Survey, pp. 38–9.
¹¹ Fergus Campbell, Introduction, in Land Questions in Modern Ireland, ed. Fergus Campbell and
Tony Varley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). Campbell here speaks of primogeniture
as if it was the norm, but Liam Kennedy has shown that, in all the diverse areas he surveyed, only a
minority of eldest sons inherited: ‘Farm Succession in Modern Ireland: Elements in a Theory of
Inheritance’, in John Davis (ed.), Rural Change in Ireland (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s
University Belfast, 1999), pp. 116–42 [124].
   13
son does not necessarily inherit the farm, but the heir may be chosen on the basis
of his fitness for farming or his father’s preference, what is the relationship
between the potentially competing siblings? The ageing father wants to retain
complete control over the property with which he identifies himself, yet he also
yearns for a successor to carry on his name. That conflict of interest in itself makes
for tension between parent and child, exacerbated still further when the father
enters into a second marriage with a younger wife. Emigration is the most obvious
alternative to staying on the farm for sons and daughters. This can be seen as the
enforced second best for the rejected child or the opposite, an opportunity for the
fulfilment thwarted by staying on the land. Such are the issues that figure
repeatedly in the first half of the twentieth century when land and nation are so
integrally connected. But they have not altogether gone away even in the twenty-
first century.
Who will inherit the farm?
‘The Exile’, the opening story in George Moore’s The Untilled Field (1903), offers
one template for the issue of farm succession that was to recur so frequently in later
works. One of Pat Phelan’s sons, James, is down to earth, practical, ideally suited to
farming, and Catherine, the girl he wants to marry, has an exactly similar tem-
perament and set of skills. By contrast, James’s brother Peter is thin-skinned,
chronically indecisive, as hopeless at selling bullocks in the fair as he is at
ploughing. Still he is clever, and destined for a life away from the farm, but cannot
make up his mind whether he wants to be a priest or a policeman: ‘is it the cassock
or the belt you’re after?’¹² There is just one problem with the obvious solution to
the farm inheritance: Catherine, for some perverse reason, is in love with Peter not
James. Not wanting to be a rival to his brother, Peter makes up his mind to go to
Maynooth and train for the priesthood. Catherine is broken-hearted and goes into
a convent. However, Peter discovers that he is as unsuited to the priesthood as to
farming and returns from the seminary. The family decide Catherine should be
told before she takes her final vows, and though the Mother Superior is very
reluctant to let her go—she has proved extremely valuable in running the convent
farm—she is released, and a happy ending of sorts is contrived. There is a poignant
final parting between Catherine and James, as the ‘exile’ of the title leaves for
America. ‘I shall be able to make something out of Pether’, Catherine reassures the
father (Moore, Untilled Field, 24). ‘The Exile’ touchingly renders the genuine
feeling between the three Phelans, father and sons, and in this is notably unlike
so many harsh versions of the farm family dynamics to come. Yet Moore also
¹² George Moore, The Untilled Field (London: Heinemann, 1936 [1903]), p. 4. All further quotations
from Moore are from this edition cited parenthetically in the text.
14     
exposes the materialist basis for religious vocations and the iron laws that so
drastically limit the characters’ options: to stay and farm, to take orders, or to leave.
‘The Exile’ represents a benign version of the family farm with two potential
heirs. In Birthright, T. C. Murray’s first play staged at the Abbey in 1910, there is a
tragic outcome to the same situation. Once again, there is a stay-at-home son
Shane, devoted to the farm, who in this case is at the point of emigration when the
action begins. His just-purchased cabin trunk is brought on stage in the first scene,
and it seems to his mother sinisterly like a coffin. The inheritance of the farm has
long been promised to the older brother Hugh, which is the reason Shane has to
emigrate. Hugh, however, is no hopeless case like Moore’s Peter. On the contrary,
he is a local hero, star of the neighbourhood hurling team, an Irish language
enthusiast, winning ‘a meddle for the great verses he made for the Feis’.¹³ But it is
just this that his father Bat Morrissey resents—‘his hurling, an’ his versifying an’
his confounded nonsense!’ (Murray, Selected Plays, 35). Nothing other than his
own obsession with the land would be adequate for his heir in Bat’s eyes, the farm
he has bought ‘with the bit o’ money I made in the States’ and single-handedly
transformed from the ‘cold, poor place’ it was. Bitterly he remembers all his years
of labour: ‘I’ve been out in the darkness before the dawn, an’ remained stuck in the
trench an’ the furrow all day, till the black darkness came on me again, and the
moon come up, and the faintness on me that I couldn’t walk into this house for
staggering no better than a cripple or a man that would be drunk’ (Murray,
Selected Plays, 35). As D. E. S Maxwell puts it well, the ‘place possessed narrowly
possesses.’¹⁴ Maura, Bat’s gentle, loving, and devoutly pious wife, tries to soften
her husband’s smouldering aggression against his son, but with no success. When
at the end of the first act, news is brought that the cheering crowds coming from
the hurling match have (fairly implausibly) so disturbed the Morrisseys’ young
mare that she injures herself and has to be shot, Bat is enraged. Half illiterate
himself, he orders Shane to take his own name off the trunk, and write in Hugh’s
instead. The stage is set for the play’s final confrontation between the brothers.
The context for the play is notably different from that in Moore’s The Untilled
Field. Moore, dissident Catholic who was to turn Protestant in 1903, placed much
of the blame on the repressive and grasping church for what he saw as the
desolation of rural Ireland. In Birthright, the offstage Father Daly is in the
vanguard of the cultural revival represented by the GAA and the Gaelic League,
and is the more disliked for it by Bat: ‘Ah, don’t annoy us with Father Daly an’ his
¹³ T. C. Murray, Selected Plays, ed. Richard Allen Cave (Gerards Cross: Colin Smythe; Washington,
DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1998), p. 31. This is the edition used for all citations from
Murray’s plays. The Feis Ceoil was established in 1897 as part of the movement of the Gaelic League to
revive Irish language culture; it was an annual competition with prizes not only for music but for
poetry—hence Hugh’s ‘meddle’ for his verses.
¹⁴ D. E. S. Maxwell, A Critical History of Modern Irish Drama, 1891–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1984), p. 76.
   15
talk. [ . . . ] Destroying the parish he is, since he came into it, taking people away
from their work an’ putting notions into their heads’ (Murray, Selected Plays, 31).
(The contrast could not be greater with the equally unseen Father Reilly in Synge’s
Playboy of the Western World, a menacing authority figure who looms large only
in the consciousness of the craven Shawn Keogh.) When in Act II, Hugh resists
the entreaties of his mother to stay home with her for the evening, she only gives
in when he produces the personal note from Father Daly asking him to take
charge of the post-hurling entertainment: ‘You can’t refuse the priest’ (Murray,
Selected Plays, 41). Murray identifies Hugh and his mother with a forward-
looking, devoutly Catholic, cultural nationalism contrasted with Bat’s older,
tunnel-vision concentration on the land.
The play’s title pointed an audience towards the story of Jacob and Esau, but
Murray reversed the roles of the parents. In Genesis, ‘Isaac, who had a taste for
wild game, loved Esau, but Rebekah loved Jacob’ (25:28), whereas in Birthright
Maura favours the first-born Hugh, while Bat identifies with the second son
Shane. Here, of course, the birthright is not sold for a mess of pottage and there
is no chicanery equivalent to Rebekah’s scheme to win Jacob the blind Isaac’s
blessing. But the favouritism of the two parents very much figures in the sense of
rivalry between the brothers, brought out sharply in Shane’s complaints to his
mother in Act III:
When we were small boys an’ we sitting there at that table, who always used to be
given the white loaf, an’ who used to get the strong cake? An’ who was it always
got the fine cloth from the shops in Macroom, an’ which of us had to be wearing
the grey homespun that was like what the poorhouse boys do be wearing, an’ they
walking out the country roads with their schoolmaster?
(Murray, Selected Plays, 54)
The class markers here, between shop-bought as against home-made bread and
clothes, are significant, as is the fact that Hugh was chosen to serve as altar boy
rather than Shane. Every well-remembered grudge against Hugh, the mammy’s
boy, pours out of the disgruntled younger son:
An’ when we grew up ’tisn’t one nor a dozen distinctions that was made between
us, but a hundred and more. How could I have the soft feeling for you, or for him,
or for anyone else? An’ if I have the black hatred in my heart instead this night, is
it your fault or my own? (Murray, Selected Plays, 55)
With this outbreak of rage, the story of Jacob and Esau transmutes into the first
fratricide, Cain and Abel.
The play is tightly structured, the whole action unfolding over the one evening,
culminating in the return of Hugh past midnight, when he discovers that he has
16     
been disinherited. The longstanding expectation that he would be the heir is set
aside by the will of the father:
HUGH. Ever since I was a little child ’twas told me to me that this place would
be mine—you told me so yourself.
BAT. I don’t care what I told you! This farm is my own and no one else’s. I have
put the whole work o’ my life into it, and I’ll do whatever I like with it. And out of
this you’ll march bag and baggage on Thursday morning! There! (Taking trunk
and flinging it towards him.) You’re a great scholar. You’ll be able to read that
label, I suppose. (Murray, Selected Plays, 51)
The last comment marks the resentment of the father at the son’s literacy. But of
course, the fact that the label is in Shane’s handwriting makes Hugh believe that
his brother is responsible for the disinheritance. His ousting has already been
associated with evictions: ‘Thursday morning he said. Short shrift enough! “’Tis
the hard landlord that gives only three days’ notice” (Murray, Selected Plays, 52).
In the final confrontation, Hugh uses the worst insult available in the small
farmer’s vocabulary in his accusation of Shane:
HUGH (passionately). You’re a coward and you’re a grabber! That’s what you
are, and nothing else.
(At the word ‘grabber’, SHANE rushes wildly at HUGH. They get into handgrips
and begin to struggle in blind and furious passion.) (Murray, Selected Plays, 56)
A ‘land-grabber’ was someone who occupied a farm from which the tenant had
been evicted, a traitor to the principles of solidarity in the rural community so
important within the Land League agitations. That is the accusation that provokes
the final fatal fight.
Birthright was taken by the Abbey on tour to the United States in 1911, and
even before The Playboy had caused riots on that same tour, Birthright
shocked its Irish-American audiences. Murray had already changed the
original melodramatic ending in which Shane shot his brother, but the version
seen in New York, where he kills Hugh with a blow of the hurley, was hardly
more acceptable: ‘They’re not Irish’, came the cries from the audience, ‘No
Irishman ever killed his brother.’¹⁵ Lennox Robinson placed this as a reaction to
Murray’s realism clashing with a conventionally sentimental view of Ireland
based on the melodramas of the past: ‘Here is no cottage with the roses round
the door, no Wicked Landlord, no loving old mother, just a stark, ugly tragedy
¹⁵ Richard Allen Cave, Introduction, Murray, Selected Plays, p. xii.

   17
played between father, mother, and two sons.’¹⁶ No doubt national image and
self-esteem were key elements in the protests—‘They’re not Irish’. But the play
may also have reached down to deeper levels of the identity politics of the time.
In the absence of the Wicked Landlord, a bogeyman from the past by 1910–11
with the bulk of Irish tenants in possession of their own land, it was to be
assumed that the new owner-occupiers would be able freely to pass on their
farms to their sons. The land had been hard won, and its winning was associated
with the larger national struggle for independence. A play such as Murray’s
adumbrated a conflict between the idealism of the cultural revival and the
tenacious conservatism of the small farmer. But, worse still, it dramatized
traumatic fissures over land inheritance within the family itself, the central
icon of the nationalist imaginary.
Bernard O’Donoghue in ‘The Will’ reached back two generations for his image
of misogynist patriarchy in the disposition of property. John Montague makes the
poet himself an onlooker in ‘Witness’, the poem’s title punning on the witnessing
of a will. He sits in the kitchen making nervous small talk with the family, ‘[w]hile
the lawyer unhooked a lamp | From the peat-blackened rafters | And climbed the
circle of stairs’. Above there is:
an old man, hands clenched

On rosary beads, and a hawthorn stick
For hammering on the floor—
A nuisance in the working daytime,
But now, signing a parchment,
Suddenly important again, as long before.
There can only be conjecture as to how the conversation with the lawyer may go,
one way or another:
With bald head swinging like a stone

In irresistible statement: ‘It’s rightly theirs.’
Or: ‘They’ll never see stick of mine.’
The poem ends with a vivid cameo of the anxiously waiting family, all normal
activity suspended:
Down in the kitchen husband and wife

Watched white ash form on the hearth,
¹⁶ Lennox Robinson, Ireland’s Abbey Theatre (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1951), p. 96.
18     
Nervously sharing my cigarettes,

While the child wailed in the pram
And a slow dark overcame fields and farm.¹⁷
The dying man’s statements for inheritance or dispossession are ‘irresistible’

because, until the 1965 Succession Act, the farmer was entirely free to do whatever
he wanted with his property. The issue of who will inherit, who will be forced to
leave, plays out in ‘The Exile’ and Birthright. But the father figure, needing to
maintain his power yet vulnerable in his desire to ensure succession, could himself
become the subject of drama.
Ageing autocrats
One of the outstanding demographic features of Ireland in the first half of the
twentieth century was the high levels of celibacy and the late age of marriage.
Arensberg and Kimball summed up the position based on the 1926 Census figures
for the Irish Free State:
[T]here was a larger proportion of unmarried persons of all ages than in any other
country for which records are kept. Marriage, furthermore, did not take place until
a comparatively late age. Thus 80 per cent of males between twenty-five and thirty
years of age were unmarried in 1926, 62 per cent of males thirty to thirty-five,
50 per cent of males thirty-five to forty, and 26 per cent of males fifty-five to sixty-five.
These were compared with Denmark, an agricultural country of comparable size,

that had equivalent figures of ‘49 per cent, 25 per cent, 15 per cent, and 8 per cent’
for the relevant groups. Though this was a countrywide phenomenon in Ireland,
‘[l]ater marriage and high incidence of bachelorhood is, like population decline,
more pronounced among the country people. And among them, it is highest in
those areas where small holdings prevail.’¹⁸
In 1940 Arensberg and Kimball could still present this in terms of a functioning
model for the transfer of the family farm, with the father at a certain point arranging
a marriage for the inheriting son, and the parents formally ‘retiring’ by moving out
of the marital bedroom. But the question always was at what point this retirement
took place. By the 1950s, with the pace of emigration growing, the traditional
patterns of late marriage and high levels of celibacy came to be seen as a demo-
graphic crisis.¹⁹ The economist P. J. Drudy, accounting in 1982 for the continuing
¹⁷ John Montague, New Collected Poems (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 2012), pp. 236–7.
¹⁸ Arensberg and Kimball, pp. 99–101.
¹⁹ See, for example, John A. O’Brien, The Vanishing Irish (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1953), a
collection of essays that was to be followed by a number of studies of the problems of rural Ireland
   19
regional disparities between the smallholdings of the West and the relatively
modernized and more prosperous East coast farms, concluded that one factor
had been ‘the common practice for older farmers, and in particular those on smaller
units, to retain ownership of their farms until quite late in life.’²⁰ A corollary of this
pattern of late marriage and continuing control was that a man in possession of a
farm could be considered eligible well into middle age and beyond. The result of
such December–May unions had been dramatized as early as Synge’s The Shadow
of the Glen and went on to provide the matrix for T. C. Murray’s Autumn Fire
(1924) and Eugene McCabe’s King of the Castle (1964).²¹
Owen Keegan, the central character in Autumn Fire, is a ‘strong farmer’ in
every sense of the phrase. He is introduced as belonging ‘to the more comfortable
class of Munster farmer’, in his mid-fifties but physically still close to his prime:
‘Time has only brushed him with his wing. Youth might well envy his complexion,
which had a healthy ruddy freshness as of rain-washed apples, his clear blue eyes
which twinkle in season, and the thick clustering hair which has yet too few
strands of silver to be noticed except at close range’ (Murray, Selected Plays, 126).
His capacity still to excel on the hurling field encourages his belief in his own
continuing virility. (This is not as improbable as it may seem in terms of modern
professional athletes: the legendary Cork hurler, Christy Ring, was still playing for
his club at forty-seven.) He is attracted to the lovely young woman Nance
Desmond, and thus becomes a rival to his own son Michael who is also courting
her. Where in standard classical comedy such a rivalry would invariably result in
the triumph of the son, here it is the father who succeeds in marrying Nance. Her
motives in this marriage are never fully revealed, but a factor may be Owen’s
avowed determination to frustrate the designs of young women looking to marry
Michael ‘because of the place’. ‘Owen Keegan will hold to every sod till he’s one
with the clay himself ’, he declares (Murray, Selected Plays, 137).
The pleasure-loving, sexually desirable Nance is contrasted with Owen’s daugh-
ter Ellen, characterized when first introduced as a conventional spinster with
‘narrow shoulders’, ‘flat bosom’, and ‘mean knot of hair twisted tightly behind’
(Murray, Selected Plays, 121). However, she is given a passionate protest against
the supposition that only good-looking women like Nance can be animated by
desire: ‘When God made me and every girl like me didn’t He make us hungering
for love, or whatever you like to call it, as well as you?’ (Murray, Selected Plays,
125). We are to learn later that Ellen’s intense puritanism, her rigid fixation on
housework and farmwork, come from a disappointment in love. But there is also a
class issue in the opposition between Ellen and Nance. Nance, Ellen reminds
such as Hugh Brody, Inishkillane (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, 1973) and Nancy Scheper-Hughes,
Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics, 2nd ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1982 [1979]).
²⁰ P. J. Drudy, ‘Land, People and the Regional Problem in Ireland’, in P. J. Drudy, Land, Politics and
People, Irish Studies 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 191–216 [201].
²¹ Dates given for plays are for first production, those for all other texts are for first publication.
20     
Owen, is ‘old Donnchadha Desmond’s daughter—our own labouring man’

(Murray, Selected Plays, 131). The Desmonds have come into some money from
an uncle, Mrs Desmond no longer has to cook and clean for the Keegans, and
Nance, having spent some years in the town, is able to set up a thriving business as
a dressmaker. But Ellen is not slow to remind her father of Nance’s social origins:
‘’Tisn’t so long since you saw her without a shoe to her feet and she trailing in here
after her mother to get a bit of hot cake or a cup o’ tea from us maybe’ (Murray,
Selected Plays, 131). This is the acute sense of country class-consciousness,
summed up in the traditional phrase, cutting down to size anyone with social
pretensions, ‘’Twas far from that he/she was reared.’
Ellen’s best efforts to prevent her father from this misalliance, the youthful
attractiveness of Michael as a lover, are not enough to stop the marriage of Owen
and Nance going ahead. The third act climax comes nine months after the main
action, with Owen bedridden after the fall from a young horse that he should not
have tried to ride—the symbolism is obvious enough. His brother Morgan has
been sent for; he and Ellen tut-tut about Owen’s headstrong ways, riding the
young horse, marrying ‘a slip of a girl at this time of his life.’ But, as Morgan says
philosophically, ‘sure, the life of a man is his will.’ But for Ellen the word raises the
spectre of disinheritance:
That’s all very well if having your will isn’t the ruination of other people. There’s
Michael and myself and we after spending a good share of our lives here and we
don’t know no more than the dead how we stand if anything happened this
minute. (Murray, Selected Plays, 158–9)
Ellen and Michael’s situation is exactly that of the anxious husband and wife in
Montague’s poem, waiting on the will. Sure enough, when Owen is alone with
Morgan, he confides in him that the farm is going to Nance. Morgan protests on
behalf of Michael and Ellen: ‘’Tisn’t for me to interfere, I know, but they’re your
own blood and mine. I wouldn’t see them wronged.’ Owen believes that fifty
pounds a year to each of them for four years, and a home in the farmhouse for as
long as they wish to stay, is enough for his children. However, much as he trusts in
Nance’s love, he has guarded against the possibility of her re-marriage: ‘let her
marry and she’ll walk straight out of here with the bit o’ money she brought in in
her pocket. Spancelled, she is, Morgan, though there’s little need for it. Spancelled ’
(Murray, Selected Plays, 162–3). The re-emphasized word is significant. A span-
celled animal has two feet tied together to stop it rambling. Nance’s position is that
of Bernard O’Donoghue’s grandmother, shackled to the farm and the memory of
the dead husband, on pain of dispossession if she should stray.
Morgan warns Owen that it is not ‘a good will’, which will produce ‘clamper in
the house some day.’ But it is he who, unwittingly, starts a ‘clamper’—a row or
dispute—with his remark, when he learns that Nance and Michael are spending
   21
the day in the town selling heifers: ‘I wouldn’t be throwing young people too much
in each other’s company’ (Murray, Selected Plays, 163). Owen is outraged at the
suggestion of a love affair between his wife and son, but his jealousy is aroused
nonetheless, and the scene is set for the play’s denouement. When the young
people arrive back very belatedly, Nance lies about what delayed them, making
obvious their enjoyment of being together. However, left alone with Michael, she
reveals that she has confessed to the priest about ‘some queer enchantment [that]
was drawing us together in spite of ourselves’, and asks Michael to do as the priest
urged and leave in order to avoid sin (Murray, Selected Plays, 172). Michael
reluctantly agrees, demanding only one last kiss. And, of course, it is this pas-
sionate kiss that is seen and misinterpreted by Owen coming down the stairs.
Protestations of innocence are ignored, Michael is banished forthwith, Nance
ordered to remain—‘Wicked and all, you’ll stay. You’re my wife. [ . . . ] I won’t
be a mock for the parish and a good honest name put to shame . . . ’ However, his
anger dies back and he accepts that ‘There’s only myself to blame’, as an old man
who ignored warnings from everyone against marrying a young wife (Murray,
Selected Plays, 176). The play ends with him left alone, saying his prayers by the
firelight, looking up at the crucifix on the wall:
OWEN. They’ve broken me . . . son—wife—daughter . . . . (He pauses, looking

intently on the cross) I’ve no one now but the Son o’ God.
(As the curtain falls he is heard mumbling prayers while the beads pass slowly
between his fingers.) (Murray, Selected Plays, 177)
It is a strong curtain for what is in its own terms a powerful play, very well
received when first produced in the Abbey in 1924, transferring to London with
equal success in 1926.²² But it is a measure of the decorous restrictions of the Irish
theatre of the time that it was staged in the same year as Eugene O’Neill’s Desire
under the Elms. O’Neill’s play has a very similar plot to Murray’s: the elderly
farmer Ephraim Cabot marries the young Abbie, a marriage that threatens to cut
his son Eben out of the inheritance. But from the very beginning, with the heavily
marked Freudian symbol of the elms that hang over the house, sexuality—‘love, or
whatever you like to call it’, as Murray’s Ellen euphemistically terms it—is the
overt driving force. Abbie quite deliberately seduces Eben, hoping to secure the
land by way of an heir. When a baby son is born, Ephraim throws a party to
celebrate this token of his virility. Abbie, who by now is really in love with Eben,
kills the baby as a terrible proof of the sincerity of her love. In 1924 this would
have been much too strong stuff for Dublin, where in Murray’s play the prospect
of actual incest is immediately headed off by the advice of the priest in the
²² See Robert Hogan and Michael J. O’Neill (eds) Joseph Holloway’s Abbey Theatre (Carbondale and
Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967), pp. 267–8.
22     
confession box. Forty years on, with Eugene McCabe’s King of the Castle, things
had changed. As Micheál Mac Liammóir put it, McCabe had made the terrible
discovery that ‘Kathleen ni Houlihan had legs under her skirt.’²³
The farm as heritable property is central to all the texts looked at in this chapter
so far but farming itself is in the background. It may serve as evidence of the
suitability or otherwise of the sons as heirs or can be used to get characters on or off
stage. Bat Morrissey and Shane in Birthright have to sit up all night with a farrowing
sow so that they can be present for the midnight confrontation with Hugh. A day in
town selling bullocks in Autumn Fire is an occasion for Michael and Nance to spend
a suspiciously long time together, but also to be away from the farm while Owen
consults with his brother Morgan about his will. By contrast, Eugene McCabe,
Monaghan farmer himself, opens King of the Castle with a group of men busy at a
threshing, even though by 1964, with the advent of combine-harvesters, it proved
difficult for the play’s director Godfrey Quigley to find a still operating threshing
machine to appear on stage.²⁴ It was not just a desire for verisimilitude that
prompted McCabe to begin with a harvest scene. The fertility associated with
harvest is there to be contrasted with the sterility which is the play’s central theme.
Scober MacAdam is another tough ageing farmer who has built up his property
from nothing. Originally so poor that he could not afford to hire an undertaker to
bury his father, he has created a farm out of barren mountain land: ‘There’s a ton
of barley to the acre from three inches of soil out there.’²⁵ By modern standards
this is not a good yield, but on such thin topsoil it is indeed remarkable. The
connection between the fertility of the land and sexual fertility is made from the
beginning when Scober’s antagonist Jemmy Maguire says leeringly to Tressa,
Scober’s young wife, that the heavy yield of barley will ‘[p]ut a belly on your
lofts’ (McCabe, King of the Castle, 14). For the play’s plot turns on the fact that
Scober, who has done so much to make his land fertile, is infertile himself. The
mockery of the local community, led on by the venomous Maguire, makes him all
too aware of the fact that, three years married, there is no sign of Tressa becoming
pregnant. In fact, as we learn later in the play, Scober is impotent, the result of
venereal disease acquired by going with prostitutes in a brothel.
The edge to Maguire’s hostility to Scober, the reason he so enjoys needling his
neighbour on his lack of an heir, is Scober’s success in buying up neighbouring
farms. We hear of the next likely acquisition, when the men muse over the latest
local news. ‘I see poor Halpin’s in the Celt’ (McCabe, King of the Castle, 22) is the
laconic introduction to the discussion. Halpin, a widowed small farmer down on
his luck, has committed suicide and his farm is advertised for sale in The Anglo-
Celt, the local paper which has that title because it covers counties both sides of the
²³ ‘Irish Theatre in “A Scramble to Survive” ’, Irish Times, 30 September 1964.

²⁴ See ‘A Threshing Problem Solved’, Irish Times, 15 September 1964.
²⁵ Eugene McCabe, King of the Castle (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1997 [1978]), p. 30. This is the
edition used throughout for quotations from the play.
   23
border between the Republic and Northern Ireland. Maguire is the smallholder
resentful of the predatory appetite of a MacAdam who gobbles up land all around
him. His revenge is to point out that the names of the other helpers at the
threshing, small men like himself, will survive, while Scober for all his acres,
having no heir, will be forgotten:
Twenty—fifty years from now, when crows come to lodged corn—you’ll have
Maguires, Tobins, Hagertys, Halpins, Conlons. Poor little raggy men with sticks
who’ll run and shout and talk with grippers, bury the last cow, break roots, work
in British tunnels, live in kip-houses, and when they’ve suffered, come back.
(McCabe, King of the Castle, 23).
It is a vivid enough evocation of the lives of such scrabbling marginal farmers,

always facing the possibility of bankruptcy—‘talking with grippers’ or baillifs—
working in miserable and dangerous conditions in Britain to supplement their
tiny farm income, yet, Maguire insists, capable of surviving to the next generation.
The smallholder against the grasping gombeen man is one class dimension to the
play. But the house that the MacAdams occupy introduces another. For it is a Big
House, associated with the landlord class, and it is a measure of Scober’s success that
he has been able to buy it and refurbish it for his trophy wife. During the ‘money-
moon’ as Maguire sardonically calls it, ‘[h]er first year here, he bought for her like
gentry. Painted, stripped, re-floored from top to bottom—gadgets, fancy furniture,
what not—from a man who lived in one room for twenty years, with a paraffin
stove, and orange boxes’ (McCabe, King of the Castle, 13). But for Tressa, who has
somewhat more education than Scober, having trained as a nurse and worked in
Dublin for a few years, the contrast of the house before and after reclamation only
adds to her feeling of frustration: ‘We keep worm doses, cod liver oil, farming
papers, syringes, pig powders—and twenty years of Old Moore’s Almanac, where
there used to be five thousand books—women in long dresses—candlelight—
wine—a big log fire.’ Against this nostalgic vision of the Ascendancy past, Scober
resentfully recalls the oppression suffered by people of their class: ‘’S not so long
since we were growled at by gun dogs—and handed gruel in workhouses, those with
no pride—the rest stayed hungry—or left in coffin ships, and died—by the million’
(McCabe, King of the Castle, 32). Here, as so often, it is the traumatic memories of
the past that drive the land hunger of the likes of Scober MacAdam, while the drab
utilitarianism bred of long-term poverty is felt by Tressa as cultural loss.
Maguire makes a pass at Tressa, hinting at his knowledge of Scober’s past life
visiting ‘kip-houses’,²⁶ contrasting his own superior potency: ‘If he’s away—and
you want service with profit—Jemmy can oblige anytime—with pleasure’
²⁶ ‘Kip-house’ is here used in its original meaning of brothel, but it also came to mean simply the
poor lodgings where workers and homeless people ‘kipped’ or slept; this is the meaning in the passage
quoted above where the poor migrants in England ‘live in kip-houses’. See OED, ‘kip’, n. 3.
24     
(McCabe, King of the Castle, 27–8). In telling Scober of this encounter, curiously,
Tressa repeats a phrase that we do not hear in her actual dialogue with Maguire:
‘he said—“Take me, I’m a man. I’ll put a belly on you” ’, and she mutters, ‘Maybe
he could too’ (McCabe, King of the Castle, 35). Is she voicing the subtext of
Maguire’s proposition, expressing her own frustration at her childlessness, or
seeking to inflame Scober’s jealousy? It is not clear. But the effect is to put into
her husband’s head the grotesque bargain he seeks to strike with Matt Lynch, the
threshing-machine operator. Scober will pay him to sleep with his wife and get her
pregnant—she has indicated it is her fertile time of the month—and thus act as
surrogate father to the heir Scober cannot get. Lynch is young, strong, a virgin, and
as a landless labourer is about to emigrate to Canada, so will not remain in the
neighbourhood to create trouble.
The initial bargaining goes on in the pub, where Scober is standing drinks to
the men who have worked at the threshing, all that remains of the traditional
celebratory harvest dance. Lynch is initially revolted by the proposition but, plied
with enough alcohol, he follows Scober back to the house, where there follows a
very awkward three-way conversation with Tressa. She is completely outraged
when she learns her husband’s plan, immediately retreats upstairs, and Lynch
leaves in embarrassment. For Scober this is a sign that he is afraid: ‘You’re not a
man’, he shouts after him, ‘do you hear me? Not a man’ (McCabe, King of the
Castle, 66). The whole play turns on manhood and virility, what constitutes full
masculinity. Meeting Lynch the following morning—the unfortunate man has
another day’s threshing to finish—Tressa pours out her scorn on him, contrasting
him with her husband: ‘You got drunk with a man last night—not a nice man, but
a man [ . . . ] [w]ho’d buy and sell you ten times—who’d fit more in his life that you
would in ten lives’ (McCabe, King of the Castle, 68). Here she is talking Scober’s
sort of language; the true man is the one with the power to acquire, to claim a stake
in the country. But the vicious quarrel between the two turns into another sort of
inflammation, and they retire behind the bales off stage to accomplish what Scober
designed.
The final confrontation is between husband and wife, in which she lashes out
at him for his appalling plan: ‘To think I’d sweat in bed with any slob you’d pick,
and have a bastard with your name tagged on, and you to watch me grow, and
know and not pretend, and when the cub is in the cot, stick out your chest proud
as a bicycle pump!’ (McCabe, King of the Castle, 73). She tells him she has had
sex with Lynch, but insists it was to ‘reach you, not fool you. God, I—Can you
not see, know, feel, how I loved you—yes, loved you.’ She demands that they face
their relationship, not think about what the mocking community may or may
not say. ‘We’re not yesterday’s people. We’re alone’ (McCabe, King of the
Castle, 74).
The success of the play depends on the capacity of Tressa to make her love for
Scober credible. There are cues for this in the text: she is the only character who
   25
throughout the play calls him by his given name Barney rather than his nickname
Scober (suggesting his nature as one who ‘scoops’ up all around him), who
admired him at first meeting as a ‘man who knew what he was doing and did it
well’ (McCabe, King of the Castle, 63). Still, it is a difficult part to bring off, given
that is it somewhat underwritten, and so much of the dramatic attention is given
to MacAdam. But King of the Castle certainly digs deeper into the psychology of
the ageing farmer figure than anything before it: the drive needed to acquire and
cultivate the land seen as diverted sexual energy; self-sufficient pride always
conscious of the backbiting local community resentful of superior success; the
obsession with power and control undermined by the awareness of mortality;
manhood under threat.
Leaving or staying
The historian J. J. Lee provides the remarkable statistic that ‘[f]our out of five
children born in Ireland between 1931 and 1941 emigrated in the 1950s.’²⁷ This
was of course the culmination of a phenomenon that had been continuing for a
century and a half. Emigration to the United States was already high in the first
half of the nineteenth century, became a torrent during the appalling tragedy of
the Famine, and continued steadily in the decades that followed.²⁸ The Congested
Districts Board, set up in 1891 to address the social problems of the impoverished
counties of the western seaboard, was ironically named because, even though these
districts were indeed congested in not having enough resources to support their
inhabitants, they suffered particularly from depopulation. Jack B. Yeats’s final
illustration to the series of articles J. M. Synge wrote for The Manchester Guardian
on the Congested Districts in 1905 is of a countryman, standing with packed bags
on a railway station platform (see Figure 1), as an example of what Synge
identified as ‘one of the chief problems’ of the region.²⁹
The situation became so acute in the 1950s that a Government Commission on
Emigration was set up to investigate causes and possible remedies.³⁰ Non-
inheriting sons and daughters from small farms would always have been among
those leaving. As M. A. G. Ó Tuathaigh points out, while more prosperous farmers
could secure futures for their children in the Irish professions, ‘for many of the
children of the smallholders and the landless men the life-chances in Ireland were
simply too few, their prospects too narrowly circumscribed from birth. They could
²⁷ J. J. Lee, Ireland 1912–1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 379.

²⁸ See Brody, Inishkillane, pp. 53–9.
²⁹ J. M. Synge, Collected Works, gen. ed. Robin Skelton, II: Prose, ed. Alan Price (London: Oxford
University Press, 1966), p. 341–2.
³⁰ See Commission on Emigration and Other Population Problems (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1955).
26     
Figure 1. Jack B. Yeats, illustration to J. M. Synge, ‘In the “Congested Districts”:

Possible Remedies—Concluding Article’
Source: Manchester Guardian, 26 July 1905.
not, or would not stay.’³¹ But there were always some for whom emigration was
a positive choice: staying at home to inherit the farm was bondage, leaving a
liberation.
Padraic Colum’s The Land (1905) is set at what was an exciting time for Irish
farmers. Wyndham’s Land Act of 1903 had made the prospect of tenants buying
their own farms at last a reality. The Government was putting up a large capital
sum to advance cash to landlords willing to sell, including a 12 per cent bonus for
those prepared to part with the whole of their estates. Guidelines were established
³¹ M. A. G. Ó Tuathaigh, ‘The Land Question, Politics and Irish Society, 1922-1960’, in Drudy,
Ireland: Land, Politics and People, pp. 167–89 [180].
   27
for the prices to be paid, and generous terms of repayment at low rates of interests
were offered to the purchasers.³² Early in the first act of The Land we hear
animated discussions of the farmers whose delegates are negotiating with the
landlords on the price to be paid for their land. One man declares that ‘it’s settled
for twenty years on the first-term rents’, another that it might ‘go as high as
twenty-three.’³³ The rents established by the Land Commission, set up as a judicial
authority in 1881 to mediate between landlord and tenant, were called ‘first term’,
those from a later adjudication in 1896 ‘second term’.³⁴ The land was to be valued
at a certain number of years rent, the issue here being between twenty and twenty-
three. Cornelius Douras, a speechifying young windbag, insists that the delegates
‘must demand the mineral rights’ as part of the bargain (Colum, Three Plays, 19).
But they want the opinion of Murtagh Crosgar, ‘a hard, strong man, seldom-spoken,
but with a flow of words and some satirical power’ (Colum, Three Plays, 17). He is
the familiar type of the farmer patriarch, at sixty ‘still powerful mentally and
physically’, and for him this is a great moment: ‘From this day out we’re planted
in the soil’ (Colum, Three Plays, 18). That word ‘planted’ is all the more forceful
because of its associations with the ‘planters’, traditional term for the colonizing
landlords. This is the dispossessed people taking back possession.
Murtagh, the hard, well-to-do farmer about to become owner-occupier, is
contrasted with Martin Douras, a weak and well-meaning neighbour who has
not prospered, even though he has been ‘in gaol for the cause’ (Colum, Three
Plays, 12). He is not in a position to offer for his land, and there is therefore no
prospect that Murtagh will allow his son and heir Matt—the plot would be easier
to follow if their names did not all begin with ‘M’—to marry Ellen, daughter of
Martin. The relationship between Matt and Ellen is set out in the dialogue between
them early in the first act. Ellen is convinced that when Murtagh ‘owns the land,
he’ll never let a son of his marry a girl without land or fortune.’
MATT. Ellen, Ellen, I’d lose house and land for you. Sure you know that, Ellen.
My brothers and sisters took their freedom. They went from this house and away
to the ends of the world. Maybe I don’t differ from them so much. But I’ve put
my work into the land, and I’m beginning to know the land. I won’t lose it, Ellen.
Neither will I lose you.
ELLEN. O, Matt, what’s the land after all? Do you ever think of America? The
streets, the shops, the throngs? (Colum, Three Plays, 17)
³² For full details, see Philip Bull, Land and Nationalism (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1996),
pp. 152–8.
³³ Padraic Colum, Three Plays (Dublin: Allen Figgis, 1963), p. 19. This is the text used for all
quotations from the play.
³⁴ I am very grateful to Lawrence Geary for elucidating this and for all his other help.
28     
The dialogue may be clunky but the issues are clear. Matt, as the last son left on the
farm, is sure of inheritance and reluctant to leave the land in which he has invested
so much labour, while conscious also of the attractions not just of the woman he
loves, but the prospect of freedom she offers.
The plot moves back and forth, along predictable lines. Murtagh is as intransi-
gent as expected and casts Matt out when he discovers his love for Ellen. Matt, still
wavering over the loss of the land, then quarrels with Ellen. The way seems to be
paved for a conventional happy ending when Murtagh gives in, agrees to the
marriage, and even offers to build the young couple a house of their own. But Ellen
now refuses the offer: ‘I can’t go into a farmer’s house. This place is strange to me’
(Colum, Three Plays, 43). Ellen leaves, declaring ‘it’s my freedom I want’ (Colum,
Three Plays, 44), and it looks as if Matt will be left with the ownership of the farm
as his only consolation. However, in one last twist of the plot, we are told that
‘Matt’s going to America, and [ . . . ] Ellen will wait for him for a year at the school’
(Colum, Three Plays, 47)—Ellen has been offered a teaching job in remote Leitrim.
A defeated Murtagh, who has set so much store on a son of his carrying on his
name in the place, agrees to a match between his foolish daughter Sally and the
equally foolish Cornelius, son of Martin Douras. It is Cornelius who prepares a
speech for his prospective father-in-law Murtagh with which to address the
delegates coming from the negotiations with the landlords:
‘Men of Ballyhillduff,’ you might say, ‘Stay on the land, and you’ll be saved body
and soul; you’ll be saved in the man and in the nation. The nation, men of
Ballyhillduff, do you ever think of it at all? Do you ever think of the Irish nation
that is waiting all this time to be born?’ (Colum, Three Plays, 47)
Colum himself, remembering the production of the play nearly sixty years after
the event, claimed it was successful with both parts of the audience of the Abbey,
shortly before the schism which separated off the more politically committed
members of the national theatre movement:
It pleased an audience who wanted a theatre that would have political orienta-
tion; as the people who fought the Land War were shown as coming into their
own, this was felt as a chapter in the re-conquest, and it had the approval of the
hundred per cent nationalists. It was accepted, too, by the literary coteries.
(Colum, ‘Preface’, Three Plays, 6)
If that was the case, such ‘hundred per cent nationalists’ can have had little sense
of irony, given that the final speech, which exactly expresses their sentiments, is
voiced by the imbecile Cornelius. In fact, the play shows those who fought in the
Land War and had gone to prison for it, like Martin Douras, losing out to the
tight-fisted Murtagh Crosgars. Here, as in Murray’s Birthright from a few years
   29
later, there is an opposition between the narrow-minded land-obsessed peasant

farmer and the more enlightened, literate, and broad-minded nationalists. Matt’s
final rejection of the land, his acceptance of Ellen’s doctrine of freedom in emigra-
tion, is a denial of the identification of land and nation of Cornelius’s rhetorical
peroration. And it is worth remembering that Colum and his wife Mary Maguire
left Ireland in 1914 to base their long joint literary career in the United States.
John Murphy’s The Country Boy (1959) was an emigration drama produced at
the Abbey half a century after The Land. The Mayo setting shows some signs of
modernization: the ‘kitchen of a farmhouse that has now almost completely
replaced the thatched cottage’.³⁵ Instead of cross-road dances there are ‘these
bloody dance halls’ (Murphy, The Country Boy, 3), as the reactionary father Tom
Maher calls them, seeing them as the source of his son Curly’s dissipation. There is
no more handball, as the ball alley has fallen down, prompting the outcry of Eddie,
the older son returning from fifteen years in the United States: ‘isn’t there
anything around here any more I know that hasn’t either fallen down or flown
away?’ (Murphy, The Country Boy, 29). But somewhat changed as the social
setting may be, the drama is still that of the ageing farmer holding on to the
land, dictating his son’s marriage choice: ‘I’ve got nothing against Eileen Tierney.
But she’s not the one that’s comin’ in here . . . and not when Mr. Curly feels like
it either’ (Murphy, The Country Boy, 4). Curly, not allowed even to choose the
colour to paint the outside lavatory roof—the new farmhouse is not all that
modern—forced to wait indefinitely to take over the farm—‘By the time I get
the place I’ll be getting the pension’ (Murphy, The Country Boy, 30)—is deter-
mined to emigrate like his brother. In fact, it is Eddie, as was so frequently the case
with relatives already based abroad, who is funding Curly’s emigration.
Act I gives us the comedy of the returned ‘Yanks’ for whose arrival the Mahers’
house has been turned upside down: Eddie boasting of the opulence of life in New
York, sporting his expensive cine camera as token of wealth, his loud, brash wife
Julia, whom the family have never met before, appalled at the conditions of the
farm and farmhouse, screeching about the insanitary conditions in which a
calving cow is being delivered. Yet for all that, Eddie seems to question Curly’s
decision to leave:
EDDIE. What do you expect to find in America? Can you . . . tell me what do you
expect to find?
CURLY. I’ll be able to please myself what I do and don’t do.
EDDIE [ . . . ] Is that so wonderful? What price do you pay for the privilege?
(Murphy, The Country Boy, 29)
³⁵ John Murphy, The Country Boy (Dublin: Progress House, 1960), p. 1. This is the text cited for all
quotations from Murphy’s play.
30     
This leads on to Eddie’s key speech which supplies the play with its title:
Some guys fit in, Curly. They just become part of the bricks and concrete and the
railway lines and the street cries. And they never smell the gasoline fumes or the
stink from the chimneys. But other guys, Curly, are country boys.
(Murphy, The Country Boy, 31)
Eddie, it becomes increasingly evident, is himself one of these ‘country boys’ who
has not fitted in, and is trying to warn Curly against following his example.
The play develops along the lines of an Ibsen play, the first act appearance
dismantled by the realities that later acts reveal. The bravura performance by
Eddie and Julia is seen to be just that, a life-lie they are living for the benefit of the
family at home. In New York they do not live in a modern apartment building
with a gleaming elevator, but in a top floor walk-up, where ‘you got to push your
way up the stairs past Puerto Ricans and stinkin’ Eyeties who live in the apart-
ments below’ (Murphy, The Country Boy, 48). (The immigrant Irish reserve their
racist prejudice for other immigrant communities, who should be lower down the
pecking order than themselves.) Eddie is an alcoholic, entirely dependent on the
meagre earnings of his wife; the cine camera is hired, the large cabin trunks have
nothing in them; the marriage is a disaster. There is a turnaround scene in which
Julia reproaches Eddie for his fixation on the life—and the girl—he has left behind,
his refusal to accept the reality of their marriage. Conscience-stricken, he responds
to her appeal for his love.
This paves the way for the happy ending. Curly goes off to Westport, sup-
posedly to buy his ticket to the United States but instead blues it on an engagement
ring for Eileen, leaving Tom flabbergasted: ‘Sixty pounds for a ring. Hell’s fire.
(Exploding) The price of a bloody good cow.’ But he is forced to give in, not least
by the firmness of his wife: ‘Where are we goin’ to go?’ when Curly brings a
daughter-in-law into the house. In response, Mary Kate ‘points firmly to room
right [ . . . ] Up in that room’ (Murphy, The Country Boy, 63). Moving into the
‘other’ room is the customary marker of the older couple’s retirement.
The Country Boy, Murphy’s only play, is a curious phenomenon. First per-
formed by the Group Theatre in Belfast in 1959 with a distinguished cast—the
young Colin Blakely playing Curly—it was a huge success in the Abbey produc-
tion just months later, running for a then remarkable 101 performances, revived
again in 1960 and 1965.³⁶ Ernest Blythe, long-serving, conservative managing
director of the Abbey, claimed that it was so well received because the author,
himself a returned emigrant, could see ‘both sides of the picture’ (Murphy,
Preface, The Country Boy, n.p.). It has been credited with an influence on two of
³⁶ See Christopher Murray, The Theatre of Brian Friel (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 250, n. 22.
   31
the key plays of the new emerging generation of Irish playwrights, Brian Friel’s
Philadelphia Here I Come! (1964), and Tom Murphy’s A Crucial Week in the Life
of a Grocer’s Assistant (1969).³⁷ Unlike these other two, The Country Boy is a
conventional well-made play of three acts, the action building to a traditional
reconciliatory ending. In just one visual tableau is there a hint of the inner drama
staged by the later playwrights of the would-be emigrant caught between leaving
and staying: at the end of Act II, ‘Curly is stitting on the table staring at the floor.
He is positioned on the dividing line between the light from the fire and the
darkness at the other end’ (Murphy, The Country Boy, 46). The play, though, with
its unhappy returned emigrant, the farmer’s son determined at last to face his
father and take control, is suggestive of a moment in Ireland’s relationship with a
wider world. While The Land, for all its setting at the very time when Irish farmers
were at last becoming owner-occupiers, sends its young lovers abroad in search of
freedom, The Country Boy, coming at the end of the 1950s, the peak decade for
Irish emigration, insists that fulfilment can be found at home.³⁸
Back on the farm
In his contemporary memoir The Cow Book (2018), the author John Connell is
back on the family farm in County Longford. At twenty-nine, he has been living
abroad for years as a film producer and writer with no very conspicuous success.
The arrangement is that, in return for free board and lodgings, he will help his
father with the farmwork, while devoting whatever free time he has to his writing.
This is 2016 and a very different situation from that featured in the plays of
T. C. Murray, Eugene McCabe, Padraic Colum, or John Murphy. The farming
enterprise is sustained by EU subsidies and off-farm income. Connell’s mother
runs a Montessori school and day-care centre at the back of the house; his father
has extended the farm by his work in the building trade, a business he has now
handed over to an older son. Connell keeps in touch with his girlfriend in
Australia by Facebook and, when a lamb is ill, he uses Google on his phone to
check out the symptoms and possible treatments. And yet it is still very much a
family farm, with the family dynamics featured in so many of the texts considered
in this chapter.
³⁷ See Murray, The Theatre of Brian Friel, pp. 16–18, and Nicholas Grene, The Theatre of Tom
Murphy (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), p. 175, where Tom Murphy calls The Country Boy ‘the fulcrum
on which modern Irish theatre turned’.
³⁸ Though it has to be said this is not the path taken by its author, John Murphy, who spent the rest
of his career working on Australian radio scripts and later in Hollywood. See Mary Gallagher,
‘An Irishwoman’s Diary’, Irish Times, 3 February 1997, https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/an-
irishwoman-s-diary-1.28320 accessed 21 July 2018.
32     
The book takes the form of a winter journal in which Connell records the daily
life of lambing and calving seasons: the sense of pride and exhilaration when, for
the first time, he successfully delivers a calf unassisted; the set-backs when a ewe or
lamb dies; the sheer exhaustion of nights spent awake monitoring the stock. The
narrative thread that runs through it is his tense relationship with his father, his
efforts to avoid confrontation, the friction over the management of the farm, with
the mother trying to act as peacemaker between them. The crunch comes when
the suppressed ill temper of months explodes between father and son. Connell is
told he is not needed and responds angrily: ‘I’ve been working here for the last
four months and you tell me you don’t need me. I’ve other things to be at. I could
be working at my writing.’ To which comes the devastating reply: ‘Your writing!
You’ve wrote four books now and none of them have succeeded. You’ve no job, no
money, your life is a mess and you’re a failure.’³⁹ After which, Connell feels he has
to withdraw from the farm, taking himself off to a month-long holiday in Spain.
Significantly, however, it is at this point that his writing career takes off with the
publication of an extract from what is to become The Cow Book. Eventually he
returns to Longford and a tacit reconciliation with his father:
‘I’m going to the bog,’ Da says. Would you like to come?’

It is the first words we have spoken in over a month and I know this is his olive
branch. There is a part of me that seeks to refuse, to break wholly from him.
I pause and breathe.
‘OK, I’ll come,’ I say. (Connell, Cow Book, 274).
The upbeat ending is an affirmation of continuity and succession in the image of

the family farm. Throughout the book, which has a strongly ecological dimension,
Connell emphasizes the personal dimension of the relationship between the
farmer, land, and animals on the small-scale, family-run property, denouncing
by contrast the practices of industrialized agriculture in other countries, seeing his
own country as a continuing exception: ‘The factory farming of cows has not yet
taken hold in Ireland’ (Connell, Cow Book, 253). The economic historian Liam
Kennedy speculates on why this should be, why ‘large-scale capitalist farming
(agri-business) has failed to displace family farm production’ in Ireland and
suggests as one of the most significant reasons ‘the role of inheritance, and its
associated institutions of family and kinship. Farm property flows along kinship
lines according to corporate (family) and individual members’ strategies. This
closed system of transactions insulated heirs from the full play of market forces
in competing for land and productive resources.’⁴⁰
³⁹ John Connell, The Cow Book (London: Granta, 2018), p. 246.

⁴⁰ Liam Kennedy, ‘Farm Succession’ in Davis, Rural Change in Ireland, pp. 135–6.
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doubtless instructed by the cook, that he received unceremonious
dismissal. The road could not be hard to find in any case, so we set
out, leaving the knight of the toasting-fork to follow at his leisure.
Soon he thought better of it, and took his place again at the head of
the procession. In the lower reaches of the valley we saw further
evidence of Circassian industry, in the rich crops that waved by the
wayside. A short distance east of our route lies a small village, which
takes its name from the saint whose tomb stands there—Neby Hûd,
renowned in ancient Arab story.
We took the more easterly of two possible roads—the longer, but
also the easier for the animals. The greater variety and beauty of the
scenery repay the extra travel. The descent into the Jabbok valley
winds down a narrow ravine, turning sharply round jutting crags, and,
in parts, almost precipitous. Oaks and thorns clung to the steeps;
luxuriant vegetation covered the ground. The fertile soil of the valley
supported a fine crop of wheat. The line of the river could be traced
by a winding glory of oleander bloom, overtopped by tall, gracefully-
bending papyrus reeds, whose heavy heads swayed in the breeze.
Reaching the “brook,” we found the bed more than half dry, but even
thus the water took the horses above the saddle-girths. With a short
struggle, we all landed safely on the other side. During the winter
months this must be a perfectly impassable torrent.
On the farther bank we sat to rest and lunch. The horses too
refreshed themselves before facing the steep mountain in front. We
gathered bunches of papyrus heads—an operation requiring both
care and skill, as we found the undergrowth bound together with
trailing brambles, furnished with the sharpest of prickles. Two square
towers stand one at each end of the meadow in which we halted.
They have not the appearance of great antiquity. There is no
entrance to their interior, and their use we were unable to discover.
Climbing the mountains south of the Jabbok, or Zerka—“the blue”
river, as it is now called—was the hardest work our horses had to
face. The track was narrow, and the foothold often extremely
precarious, especially over rocky parts where a slip would have
meant a fall of hundreds of feet. What a tremendous gorge that
Jabbok is! It literally cleaves the country in twain.
GORGE OF THE JABBOK
Now we were within the borders of the modern province of el-Belkâ,
of which es-Salt is the principal—indeed, the only—city. This lies in
the land of the ancient Ammonites. These cool, breezy uplands,
beautifully diversified with wooded knoll and pleasant vale, in which
may be heard the murmur of flowing water most of the year, offer a
rich return to the hand of the enterprising and diligent cultivator. But
whence is he to come? Numerous are the flocks and herds that
browse on the grassy slopes, find shelter in the shady woods, and
drink from the oleander-fringed streams in the vales. But no one who
sees it can for a moment suppose that this rich soil is designed
simply for the support of sheep and oxen. Those who hope for the
return of Israel to the land of their fathers should turn their eyes
rather to this rich and empty land than to the more populous and less
kindly country west of Jordan.
CHAPTER XII
“Time is money”—Rumamain—Priestly hospitality—Fair
mountain groves—Es-Salt—The springs—Relation to
Arabs—Raisins—Descent to the Jordan—Distant view of
Jerusalem—View of the river, the plains of Jordan, the
Dead Sea, and the mountains beyond—The bridge—The
“publican’s” shed—The men from Kerâk.
Causes for delay are never far to seek among Orientals. “Time is
money” is a phrase void of meaning in Arab ears. Money is precisely
the thing he lacks most, while of time he has more than abundance.
An Eastern in a hurry is one of the rarest sights. We were still on the
uplands, far from our destination, when the sun began to throw his
evening glories over the western hills. Our cook thought fit to profess
that he had lost the way—this doubtless to pay us out for our refusal
of a guide. His manner, however, was much too cool and collected,
so we were not deceived. But it was annoying, as the whole caravan
drew up, to see him comfortably seated among the bushes, on the
top of a huge precipice, enjoying a cigarette. We moved rapidly
forward, and fortunately found a wandering Bedawy who, for a
consideration, agreed to conduct us to es-Salt. He led us by a steep
pathway to the bottom of a sweet valley. Then suddenly we plunged
into a romantic ravine, down which dashed a brawling stream,
sprinkling rock and bush with sparkling diamonds. A stiff climb up the
farther bank brought us to the little village of Rumamain, just as the
light departed. Our tents were pitched by candle-light. The villagers,
who are Christians, were most cordial in their welcome, and
hastened to furnish whatever we required, as far as it was in their
power. The priest invited our party to take refreshments with him,
and those who could be spared from the camp gladly accepted his
hospitality. He well maintained the eastern traditions in the
entertainment of strangers, although some of his beverages were
stronger than the desert law prescribes!
RUMAMAIN
The village stands on the edge of the gorge through which we had
passed. The mountains tower aloft on either side. The valley narrows
southward, but to the north it opens out into a broad, fertile expanse,
bounded by the mountains, torn with water-courses, which form the
southern bank of the gorge of the Jabbok.
Before daybreak we were all astir. Waiting only for a supply of
beautiful milk, which was brought us by the Arabs in the mountains,
we got to horse again. Our guide shouldered his club and marched
off towards the thickets that hung, shaggy and dark, on the sides of
the valley. Our path wound among these delightful groves almost to
the confines of es-Salt. About three hours sufficed to bring us to the
city, but the ride was one not soon to be forgotten. It was one of the
most enjoyable parts of our whole journey. Thick oaks and thorns
gathered in the bottom of the hollows; honeysuckle, entwining their
gnarled limbs, shed perfume on the air; the hillsides were clad with
trees of richly varied foliage, while tall pines swayed gracefully high
over all. The morning was fresh and beautiful. Even the horses
seemed to feel the inspiration of surroundings, and footed it merrily
along. It seemed all too soon when we reached the edge of the
forest, and looked forth on the treeless hills beyond. Many of these
are, however, covered with vineyards, whose sprouting green
relieved the dull monotony. Tree-clad they too once were, as we can
see from the numerous stumps in the fields. A few of the forest
patriarchs, left here and there in the cultivated ground, would have
done much to beautify the land, and would have yielded grateful
shade to the labourers. But it is difficult to restrain the axe when it is
once set in motion. Here we found evidences of genuine industry.
Wherever it is possible, vines are planted and carefully tended, so
that the face of the country assumes quite a cheerful and prosperous
aspect.
The city of es-Salt, lying as it does on the steep slope of a valley, is
not seen until one is fairly upon it. The name es-Salt is evidently
derived from salton hieraticon—“the sacred forest.” The inhabitants
may number in all some seven thousand, of whom the great majority
are Moslems. With the Christians, however, they continue to dwell
together in harmony. There may be about two thousand Christians,
taking Greeks, Latins, and Protestants all together. The last belong
to the church founded by the Church Missionary Society. It was our
good fortune to meet with the Syrian clergyman of this congregation,
Kassîs Khalîl Jamal—a gentleman whose praise is in all the
churches. With his counsel, we were persuaded to stay here for the
day, instead of pushing straight on to Jordan, as we had originally
intended. In the valley under the city are olive groves, where the
company, dismounting, sat down for lunch, under shadow of the
trees, with the sound of running water in their ears. Our tents we
pitched on the top of the hill overlooking the town, separated by a
narrow valley from that on which the ruins of the old castle stand.
Having seen all right about the camp, some of us set out, gun in
hand, tempted by the numerous partridges, and enjoyed an excellent
opportunity to see the surroundings of es-Salt. There are few
remains of antiquity, and these not of great interest. Traces of old
graves, found along the hill-faces, and the bare ruins of the old
castle are the chief. The springs, to which the town owes so much of
its life, are, of course, highly prized. The town itself is interesting as
being the chief mercantile centre in all the district east of Jordan
through which we travelled. The market is frequented by the Beduw
from far and near, and everything necessary for their poor life is
found exposed for sale in the streets. Hither the “housewives” bring
their samn, jibn (clarified butter and cheese), skins, and other
products of the wilds, and carry off in return the cloth of which their
scanty clothing is made, coffee, tobacco, etc. Es-Salt thus forms an
excellent basis from which to reach the Arab tribes in these parts.
The advantages it offers are utilised, as far as possible, by the
missionaries there, and, with the help of the medical department of
the mission, they have found considerable entrance; but, in order to
overtake the work in a manner at all satisfactory, men would have to
be set apart to devote all their time to evangelising the Arabs. With a
well-manned station here and another at Bozrah, nearly all, if indeed
not all, the tribes that touch the eastern borders of Palestine might
be reached; and in due time evangelists from among themselves
would go forth with the glad tidings into the inhospitable wastes
beyond.
We were assured that the grapes grown in the district are unsuitable
for the making of wine. However that may be, wine is not made, but
a great business is carried on in raisins, those of es-Salt being
famed throughout the whole country. The Jewish merchants of
Tiberias buy large quantities of them and use them to produce ’arak
—a distilled spirit which is working havoc among the youth of
western Palestine, Moslems as well as others falling a prey to its
seductive influences, although all use of intoxicants is for them under
religious ban.
ES-SALT, THE FOUNTAIN
Our stores were replenished from the market, two days’ provision
only being required, as in that time we hoped to reach Jerusalem.
Early next morning all was packed up and ready for the descent to
Jericho. Several of our party were already in the saddle, when the
horse of one who had been assisting the ladies to mount thought fit
to bolt, and, in their wild efforts to catch him, the European horsemen
may have given the Arabs some new ideas in horsemanship. In any
case, we gained a more intimate acquaintance with the nearer
surroundings of the city than would have been possible otherwise.
When at last the runaway was captured, the main part of our
caravan had already disappeared some distance in front; and it may
give some idea of the crookedness and irregularity of the road to say
that we did not catch a glimpse of them again until we were almost
upon them, on reaching the plain to the north of the Dead Sea. It is a
descent of over four thousand feet in about fifteen miles. The road
turns abruptly now to one hand, now to the other, adapting itself to
the possibilities of the rough, rocky surface, plunging into ravines,
and anon emerging on grassy tracts; but downward, ever downward,
is its course. The wild birds here are evidently little used to be
disturbed by man. Even the timid partridge sat quite close, or nimbly
ran along the rocks on either side of the path. We had not left es-Salt
half-an-hour when, from an eminence commanding a wide prospect,
we saw the high tower that crowns the Mount of Olives in the far
distance, and thus caught the first glimpse of the environs of
Jerusalem. This is one of the most tantalising sights. It seems so
near, and yet hours of toil in the hot sun seem to bring the traveller
no nearer. And when, as the sun sinks, he descends into the valley,
and it is lost to view, it seems as if he had been following some
strange kind of “Will o’ the wisp.” Ere long, too, we obtained a view of
the Dead Sea, lying under a blue haze away below us to the left; and
soon we could trace the course of Jordan through the sandy plain by
the winding breadth of deep green that fills the valley within the
valley in which the river is confined.
JORDAN, SHOWING TERRACES

In that clear, dry atmosphere distances are most deceptive. Seen
through the openings in the hills, one would think that on touching
the plain we should immediately reach the river, but there are miles
of flat, sandy ground to cover ere we pass under the shadow of the
embowering foliage and hear the rush of the waters of Jordan.
Leaving behind us the mountains of Ammon, which form the eastern
boundary of these deep plains, their scarred sides stretching away
into the beetling heights that rise darkly over the Salt Sea, the
prospect before us was one of enchanting interest. We were already
on the borders of the “circle” of Sodom, which charmed the worldly
eye and heart of Abraham’s nephew, when viewed from yonder
mountains to the west, and which was so generously given up by the
aged uncle to the youthful Lot. How strikingly these barren plains
enforce the lessons of that old-world history! How vain the choice of
beauteous pastures, one day ere long to be o’erwhelmed in desert
sand! How infinitely wise the choice of Abraham, the portion of
whose inheritance was the unchanging God Himself! There,
stretching away southward until lost in a blue haze between her
guardian mountains, are the waters of the great sea, which still, in
name, is associated with the unhappy Lot; for the natives call it only
Bahr Lût—“the sea of Lot.” Before us flowed the river whose tide
rolled backward, and over which, while the ark of the covenant stood
in the midst, the great “congregation” of Israel crossed dry-shod.
Yonder lies the site of Gilgal, whence the conquering hosts went
forth under the gallant Joshua. Towards the western border of the
plain we saw great patches of green, over which rose a curl of blue
smoke, marking the position of Erîha, the village which now
represents the city of Jericho, whose walls fell down at the shout of
the armies of Israel. Beyond rose the dark, frowning crags of
Karantal, by tradition identified with the wild scenes of our Lord’s
Temptation.
The Jordan Valley stretched away northward between its mountain
walls almost as far as the eye could reach; the high cone of Karn
Sartabeh rising full two thousand feet above the plain. This last has
been by some identified with the great altar raised by the Eastern
tribes on their return from the conquest of the West. It is in reality an
“altar” of Nature’s raising, and is interesting as one of the signal
stations from which, by means of great fires, intelligence was flashed
over the land when the new moon had been seen in Jerusalem. The
wooden bridge by which we crossed the Jordan was entirely
concealed by the groves around until we were almost upon it. A
substantial structure it looked, made of strong beams, supported by
great posts, all securely fastened together; it seemed as if it would
outlive any ordinary flood, and so, doubtless, it would. But the floods
of the winter 1890-91 were not ordinary. For some months the rains
were excessive. The river rose far above its usual level, submerging
large tracts, and carrying off much that was valuable—among the
rest the bridge, which had done us and others such good service.
The river here is deep and strong, sweeping with great rapidity round
its swift curves. The water is of a thick, brown colour, charged with
the soil over which it passes. Care must be taken in approaching the
treacherous banks of sand and clay. Toll was collected by an
enterprising Syrian, who had erected a wooden shed at the Jericho
end of the bridge. One or two native huts also stood on the little
level, almost surrounded by a bend of the river, and protected to
westward by high sand bluffs.
It was already past mid-day when we arrived, and, as the heat was
terrible, we were thankful to take refuge in the “publican’s” shed. We
were received with every token of welcome by the owner, who at
once busied himself to provide for our refreshment. We found it an
excellent plan to carry with us a supply of tea. It is often easy to get
boiling water when it is hard to get other things. Tea is swiftly made,
and, on a hot journey, is most refreshing. Leban, also, there was in
plenty. After our meal, the more weary of the party, stretched in the
shade, enjoyed a delightful nap,—only for a little, however; for this
being the chief thoroughfare between east and west of Jordan, quiet
could not be secured for long at a time. Shepherds passed over with
their flocks, and guided them down to the water’s edge to drink.
Negotiating with some of the more tractable of these half-wild men,
we secured draughts of delicious milk. Then came Arabs from the
uplands of Moab; strong, stalwart, sallow-featured men; some armed
with the spear, others carrying rifles, with belts stuck full of battered
cartridges. They sat down sociably around the shed, and conversed
freely. They were greatly impressed with the strength of the men of
Kerâk, the ancient Kir Moab. The district was not even nominally
subject to the Ottoman Government. The spirit of wild independence
was abroad among them. While yielding ready obedience to their
own sheyûkh, they resent and battle to the death against any
interference with their tribal liberty. Holding themselves absolute
masters of the soil, they consider themselves entitled to levy
blackmail on all who pass through their territory. This varies in
amount, according to the prudence or the want of it displayed by the
traveller. One who goes with tents, a large retinue of servants, and
luxurious appointments may have to pay some hundreds of pounds
before he escapes their hands; another may shoulder his camera,
ride in on a mule, and with a few rotls of coffee and a judicious
distribution of a few pounds of tobacco and snuff, may march about
with freedom, photograph all of interest in the district, and carry off
his work in safety. In these regions one must avoid every
appearance of wealth. The Turkish Government claims a supremacy
which for long it was unable to assert. Often we heard that the Hajj
guard, returning from Mecca, was to attack and subdue the
Kerâkers. The report that there were four thousand trained men,
armed with repeating rifles and no lack of ammunition, no doubt
restrained the valour of the gallant guard. At length the Turk has
established a certain shadowy authority in the town of Kerâk itself;
but over the Arabs, who occupy the town only a few months in the
year, it is difficult, if not impossible, to exercise any effective control.
The stronghold, the thought of attacking which gave cold shivers to
the Turkish soldiery, could not daunt the high-hearted soldiers of the
Cross. With admirable courage, in the true spirit of Christian
heroism, a missionary and his wife braved all the dangers in the way,
and made for themselves a home in the midst of these people. That
they had dangers not a few to face, and many privations to endure,
needs hardly to be said. But these “things did not move them”; and
the bold warrior Arab learned to love the man of peace, and prize
him as a friend. Who knows whether the Cross may not soon
triumph where the crescent so long struggled for supremacy in vain!
CHAPTER XIII
The banks and thickets of the Jordan—Bathing-place—The
Greek convent—A night of adventures in the plains of
Jericho—The modern village—Ancient fertility—Possible
restoration—Elisha’s fountain—Wady Kelt—The Mountain
of Temptation—The path to Zion.
The Jordan, in the lower reaches, is shaded by overhanging willows,
and the path along the bank is lined with tall oleanders. In the
brushwood, which grows thickly over the little peninsulas formed by
the circlings of the river, we were assured that the nimr (small
leopard) found a lurking-place; and, further, that he and his grim
neighbour, the hyena, haunted the bushy hollows between the sand-
dunes which stretch away towards the sea.
We shouldered our guns, and, armed with ball cartridge, set out to
beat the brushwood in the hope of starting game of this class.
Perhaps it was as well for ourselves that we were disappointed; but
a gun in a man’s hand adds marvellously to his powers of endurance
in walking, so we were able to explore the shady banks of the river,
and attain a fuller knowledge of its windings. The bridge was
photographed with a group in front as a souvenir of our visit; then,
sending the muleteers straight to Jericho with tents and baggage, we
prepared to ride towards the sea, with the intention of returning to
Jericho for the night. Our road wound among the sand-dunes for
some distance. Here we were charged to keep close together. The
advice was necessary. Had one lingered behind, and by any
mischance lost the way, he might have wandered long enough in the
labyrinth formed by these little sand-hills, which resemble each other
so closely as to be distinguished only by the trained eye. They are
the haunts of robbers too, who, in the multitudinous winding hollows,
may easily escape pursuit.
We did not go so far down as the fords and famous bathing-place;
but on a subsequent occasion I saw something of the extraordinary
scenes enacted there—a great company of Russian pilgrims, men,
women, and children, plunging promiscuously into the sacred river.
Most wore a thin linen garment as they went down into the water.
This is afterwards carefully preserved, and is worn again only as a
shroud. Certain men standing in the stream saw that each one went
at least three times over the head.
FORDS OF JORDAN. PILGRIMS BATHING

Leaving the labyrinth, we emerged on a wide sterile plain, over which
grew only a few stunted desert bushes. Here and there we could see
the shimmer of the sunlight on a thin crust of salt. The Greek
convent, standing in the midst of the waste, served as a landmark,
and thither we directed our course, leaving the winding road. This
cross-country riding in these parts has its dangers. The horses are
apt to sink through the soft surface, into holes burrowed by the
rodents; and deep ruts, worn by winter torrents, are often difficult to
pass. At length we stood before the gate of the convent, and the
hospitable monks regaled us with refreshing draughts of pure, cool
well-water. It seemed only a short distance farther to the sea; but
some of our company were growing fatigued, and, at our rate of
riding, it would take almost till sunset to reach our camp by the “City
of Palms”; so, reluctantly, we turned our horses’ heads northward,
comforting ourselves with the hope that in a more convenient season
we should stand on the shores of the Dead Sea and plunge in its
sullen waters.
On arriving, we found the mukaries busy with the tents, which soon
were ready for our reception. But we were disturbed somewhat to
hear that one of our attendants was missing. He ought to have come
with us toward the sea; but when we found he had not come, we
concluded that he had accompanied the muleteers to Jericho. Now,
however, he was nowhere to be found, and the mukaries assured us
he had started immediately behind us. The evil reputation of the
district made us rather anxious; but the reckless character of the
man, and his habit of starting off on the wildest projects without a
moment’s warning, led us to believe that Saʿid would turn up again,
as he had often done before. We set up lights, however, on the most
conspicuous points, when darkness fell, so as to guide him, if
possible, over the plain. As the night advanced, and we still had no
news of him, our anxiety increased, our main hope being that, as he
followed us, he had arrived late at the convent and taken shelter for
the night, or that haply he had found his way back to the bridge.
Even with fifty men it would have been futile to search that
wilderness in the dark. A hunt after a number of wild swine that came
to the neighbourhood of the camp served only as a temporary
diversion from the graver subject occupying our thoughts. The
“garrison” of the town consisted of one soldier, whose services we
secured without much difficulty. He was despatched, with the
breaking light, to go towards Jordan bridge, and southwards to the
convent, while some of our party prepared to scour the plain, the rest
getting in order for the ascent to Jerusalem.
All were very early astir. Just before mounting, the plain was swept
with the telescope, and in the distance a coming horseman was
descried, who seemed to resemble the lost man. His appearance
caused no little excitement in camp; for, on a nearer view, there was
no doubt of his identity. Both man and horse were utterly wearied,
and Saʿid’s garments were covered with blood. The tale he told of
his experiences was terrible enough. On our departure, he lingered a
moment to see the muleteers ready and on the road; then, as he
thought, he followed us, but missing the way, he pushed straight
southward, guided in part by the river, arriving on the Dead Sea
shore just as the sun set. As he had ridden rapidly, he thought he
might have passed us on the way; but, after waiting and careful
search along the lonely beach, he despaired of finding us. He turned
away in the twilight, hoping by instinct to hit upon some way leading
to Jericho. Soon the night was filled with the horrid howlings of the
jackals, all over that weary waste, and here and there the shrill laugh
of the hyena fell on his ear. Pushing forward, he was speedily
entangled among the sand-dunes. Climbing one after another, he
sought to hit upon some landmark to guide him; but ever, on
descending, his bearings were lost, and he wandered almost
hopelessly. As the night closed in, he could see shadowy forms
moving around, and the howlings came nearer and nearer.
Suddenly, in the track before him, he saw a hyena glaring upon him.
The natives believe that the hyena will not attack a man save when
famishing or grievously provoked. But in such moments one does
not reflect much on these things.
Fortunately, Saʿid had my gun and ball cartridge with him. With
nerves steadied by something like despair, he aimed at the brute’s
head, and, the ball crashing through the brain, he rolled over with a
groan. A momentary silence followed the report, and then the dismal
noises broke out again. Riding onward he saw, and not a moment
too soon, a leopard crouching for a spring. Aiming swiftly, he fired,
and the ball took effect in the leopard’s neck; but, withal, the brute
was able to spring, and almost to reach his mark. “Then,” said Saʿid,
his lip quivering and an unaccustomed tear trembling in his eye
—“then I must have had strength given me from heaven; for, as the
brute sprang, I reached forward, caught him by the neck, and hurled
him back violently to the ground, where he lay stunned, and a
second ball finished him.” He attempted to carry the leopard on the
pommel of his saddle, and this accounted for the blood-stains on his
garments. But weariness and anxiety soon overcame his purpose,
and the leopard was left to decay among its native wilds.
Finally, baffled by the darkness and the intricacies of the labyrinthine
windings, he climbed a little knoll, and tying the horse’s halter to his
arm, stretched himself on the ground to sleep; but ever and anon, as
the denizens of the desert drew near, the trembling creature tugged
at the halter to awaken his master, and seemed to long for waking
fellowship. At last he was overcome with sleep, and was only
aroused when the horse had apparently come close up and whinnied
in his ear. Then, rising bolt upright, it seemed to him as if the gloomy
waste were all alive with moving shades, and vocal with dismal
howlings. How he came out of that pandemonium he never could
say; but ere long the dawn stole into the sky, and the wild beasts
crept away into their dens. He found a poor shepherd, walking out
with his flocks, who, seeing his forlorn condition, sustained the best
traditions of desert hospitality by offering what he had for his day’s
food to the weary traveller. Then he was able to make out the
direction of Jericho, and, before the morning was well born, he was
again with his companions, uttering perhaps the most sincere
hamdulillahs of his life. After hearing this tale from the lips of that
worn-out man, on the borders of the desert plain of Jericho, one
could better realise what it meant for the Son of Man when, driven of
the Spirit into the neighbouring wilderness, through the long nights
He was “with the wild beasts.”
JERICHO. ELISHA’S FOUNTAIN
Poor Saʿid has now “joined the majority.” He escaped the beasts of
the Dead Sea plains to fall a victim to a more subtle and deadly foe.
While at work on the new railway near the Hummeh, the hot springs
in Wady Yarmuk, he and many others were mortally stricken with
typhoid. A heavy toll in human lives these valleys have exacted on
the passage of that road of iron. Saʿid was a typical light-hearted
Syrian, prone to err, who yet through years of service proved faithful
according to his light, with a larger infusion of courage in him than is
common among his countrymen. In steadfast loyalty at his master’s
side, neither fatigue nor peril daunted him.
A burden was lifted from all our minds, and, moving forward that
morning, even higher spirits than usual prevailed. We rode into the
village, and stopped a little at the hotel, where souvenirs of the Dead
Sea plain, staffs made from the oaks of Bashan, Bedawy clubs, and
such-like articles, are exposed for sale to travellers. Then we rode
along lanes bounded by hedges of prickly pear and thorns towards
the spring of Elisha, called now ʿAin es-Sultan—“Fountain of the
Sultan,” where man and beast drank from the cool stream and were
refreshed.
The modern Erîha is a miserable representative of the famous cities
that rose one after another in the neighbourhood of this copious
spring. The land immediately around is a marvel of fertility, bearing,
when under cultivation, with tropical luxuriance. Near by the spring
stood the ancient city which was attacked and overthrown by the
Israelites—the first stronghold gained on this side of the Jordan.
Near the same spot rose the city of Heil, who dared the curse and
endured it—the curse pronounced by Joshua—in order to restore the
crown of splendour which his ancestors had crushed so ruthlessly.
This latter was the city known to Elijah and Elisha, not yet ancient in
their time, for the inhabitants of which the waters of this lovely spring
were miraculously healed. One of the “schools of the prophets”
existed here; and here Elijah had his last interview with the youth,
the hope of Israel, ere he went forth to yonder lonely tracts eastward,
to be parted from the faithful Elisha by the chariot of fire, and caught
away to heaven in the whirlwind. The fertility of the plains of Jericho
was almost proverbial in later days, when its rich revenues were
farmed by Herod from Cleopatra.
Then the magnificent balsam gardens and the groves of stately
palms lent added beauty to a scene in the midst of which the luxury-
loving Herod had his winter quarters. In the days of our Saviour the
sycamore tree was not wanting, as we learn from the story of
Zaccheus. The remains of old sugar-mills testify to the ancient
culture of the sugar-cane; and the ruins of ancient aqueducts, dating
from high antiquity, which brought the contributions of distant springs
to the grounds around the city, show with what care the paradise of
Jericho was watered. The balsam has now utterly disappeared; and
the stranger, coming unprepared upon the scene, might well-
exclaim, “How could Jericho ever be called ‘the city of palm trees’?”
But great fruitful vines may yet be seen, in the badly-kept gardens,
yielding with prodigality in spite of indifferent husbandry; and heavily-
laden bananas, bending over the hedges, offer of their sweetness to
the hand of the passer-by. The modern village boasts a hotel, a
Greek hospice for the accommodation of Russian pilgrims, and the
ruins of an old castle, which frown out upon the wilderness to
eastward. Those who are willing to be pleasantly deceived by
monkish tradition may also have the house of Zaccheus pointed out
to them. There are some three hundred inhabitants in the village,
creatures of a miserable physique, and with a most undesirable
reputation for laziness and thievishness.
That the plains of Jericho might be once again what they were of old
—a very garden of delights, wherein is enough and to spare for all—
needs hardly to be said. Were proof required, it would be found in
the surroundings of Elisha’s fountain. Wherever the waters of the
fountain come, the desert sands are transformed into fruitful fields,
and all its banks are clothed with emerald. No small supply of water
would serve to waken life over all the plains; but is not the vast
volume of the Jordan only waiting to be caught in the higher reaches,
and taught to run in fertilising streams all over the broad lands? For
long generations it has flowed idly past, only a few yards on either
side of the rushing flood tasting its refreshing power. What untold
wealth is rolling there, in these rich brown waves! What hand shall
arrest the flow, and turn its powers to noblest uses, so that all the
valley may be filled with the music of rustling grain and with the
beauty of ripening fruit?—that the wilderness may rejoice and
blossom as the rose. Ere this is possible, the reins of government
must be held by stronger and more righteous hands, the
husbandman must be secured in the enjoyment of the fruit of his toil.
But surely now the appointed season for favour cannot be long
delayed. Happy the eyes that shall behold the awaking of all the land
to fresh life after its death-like slumber! In those sweet days of
reviving, no fairer scenes will greet the eye than these broad
stretches, proudly in the midst of which will rise once more the
beautiful palm-girt city.
MOUTH OF WADY KELT

We could have lingered long beside that delightful spring, pouring its
sparkling waters forth in blessing over the plain; but the sun rose
higher in the heavens, and we had a hard ascent before us. We rode

Farming in Modern Irish Literature Nicholas Grene Full Chapter

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Farming in Modern Irish Literature

Farming in Modern Irish Literature

Farming in Modern Irish

Grateful acknowledgement for permission to quote is made as follows:

Permission to use illustrations is gratefully acknowledged as follows:

Jack B. Yeats drawing, IVARO on behalf of the Estate of Jack B. Yeats

1. Jack B. Yeats, illustration to J. M. Synge, ‘In the “Congested Districts”:

2     

4     

6     

the sardonic re-creation of backbiting and inﬁghting within more culturally

8     

When they discovered that my grandfather

There was another witness whose existence

   11

because of the disease he carried

12     

   13

Who will inherit the farm?

14     

   15

16     

¹⁵ Richard Allen Cave, Introduction, Murray, Selected Plays, p. xii.

   17

an old man, hands clenched

With bald head swinging like a stone

Down in the kitchen husband and wife

18     

Nervously sharing my cigarettes,

The dying man’s statements for inheritance or dispossession are ‘irresistible’

These were compared with Denmark, an agricultural country of comparable size,

   19

20     

Owen, is ‘old Donnchadha Desmond’s daughter—our own labouring man’

   21

OWEN. They’ve broken me . . . son—wife—daughter . . . . (He pauses, looking

22     

²³ ‘Irish Theatre in “A Scramble to Survive” ’, Irish Times, 30 September 1964.

   23

It is a vivid enough evocation of the lives of such scrabbling marginal farmers,

24     

   25

²⁷ J. J. Lee, Ireland 1912–1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 379.

26     

Figure 1. Jack B. Yeats, illustration to J. M. Synge, ‘In the “Congested Districts”:

   27

28     

   29

later, there is an opposition between the narrow-minded land-obsessed peasant

30     

   31

Back on the farm

32     

‘I’m going to the bog,’ Da says. Would you like to come?’

The upbeat ending is an afﬁrmation of continuity and succession in the image of

³⁹ John Connell, The Cow Book (London: Granta, 2018), p. 246.

JORDAN, SHOWING TERRACES

FORDS OF JORDAN. PILGRIMS BATHING

MOUTH OF WADY KELT

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