Westport

Westport, Days Five and Six, Monday and Tuesday. I am thankful that the drive from Sligo to Westport is short. It is over and done with quickly.

The people who came together to form my grandmother’s family had moved from Kilmeena and a place called Buckfield or Ballinlough or some such thing to Westport in County Mayo at some point in the 1800s.

Westport is a beautiful town, right on Clew Bay. The exchange my grandmother made – trading her life in Ireland for her life in the USA – seems from my perspective to be a one-sided, rotten deal. Life can be like that. Two of her sisters – Kate and Rose – made the same trade my grandmother made but – unlike her – at the inevitable point when they reevaluated they weren’t then shackled by a spouse or child and so they beat it on back to Ireland and stayed there.

We go to Mass at St. Mary’s in the heart of Westport on Monday or Tuesday, I can no longer remember which, although it was probably Tuesday, August 6. Again, it is the church of my grandmother but she left before the current building was completed, a weirdly recurring pattern. The church is perfectly located, right in the center of town and across from the gentle Carrowbeg River, but the church itself is not special looking. It almost looks on the inside like cement block construction, but that can’t be right, can it? This is the third Catholic Church at which we have attended Mass in Ireland, all three of them built after 1870: St. Patrick’s in Belfast, Immaculate Conception Cathedral in Sligo, and now St. Mary’s in Westport. They wouldn’t even be considered old in the USA. We also visited St. Coleman’s Church in Dromore, Northern Ireland, and it too is of relatively newer construction, circa 1850 maybe. It’s as if Catholicism is new to this island. Strange.

By chance when we are walking around Westport – including on Bridge Street, which I know was my grandmother’s street – either right there on Bridge Street or on the next street over, James Street, we see a sign for a store bearing the name of my grandmother’s family. It is entirely by chance that we see the sign. It’s not on the street proper. Instead it is a little off the street up a small alley. My wife spots it. I don’t.

My wife is social. I am not. She decides to introduce herself to the proprietor of the store. My instinct is to leave the guy alone. I assume it becomes tedious to the Irish when one American after another approaches and says, “my name is such-and-such and your name is such-and-such too . . . do you think we could be related?” The desire to find and form a connection with family is a legitimate one, but the risk of embarrassment and the risk of being an imposition are big risks. My instinct is to avoid those. My wife’s instinct is to charge ahead. So we do.

We go in to the shop. The proprietor is working. Sitting right there. We introduce ourselves. He is about age 50, give or take a year or two. He sets aside what he is doing. Calls coming in to his store are ignored. We confirm that he is indeed my relative, a second cousin. His great grandparents and my great grandparents are the same people. I get his email address and I send him a photo or two, can’t remember which ones, and shortly thereafter his father replies by email with an invitation to meet at the Clew Bay Hotel for a drink. The father is about age 84, the son of my grandmother’s youngest brother. We meet the store proprietor’s father that evening at the Clew Bay Hotel bar and I learn quite a bit about the family, things I could not have learned any other way. What I learn is for another day, not for this, however. It is a lucky turn of events. We end up exchanging a few emails, and I leave Ireland with three or four photographs of our common ancestors, whose photos I never would have seen otherwise.

They inform me that the place where my grandmother was born and raised is now a store on Bridge Street called Amber. At Amber you can buy crystals and talismans and beads and that sort of thing. If you’re a shaman and you need to buy supplies, Amber is your store. I enter the store just so that I can say I did but I’m back out again almost as quickly as I go in. Of course I don’t see either of the two upper floors, which presumably is where the family’s living was carried on. If you enter the store, face the street, and then stretch both arms out at shoulder length you will almost be able to touch both side walls simultaneously. It is so small, so narrow that if you shop there you have to enter backwards if you hope to be able to get back out the front door with your purchase in hand. My grandmother’s parents raise 15 children in this place, before indoor plumbing, before electrification. Hard to believe.

I had hoped to climb Croagh Patrick, a hill overlooking Westport, a climb that is a kind of pilgrimage for people in Ireland and elsewhere. Again, time and circumstances don’t allow it. No Croagh Patrick. But meeting cousins makes up for being unable to do the things I set out to do. So I’m zero-for-six now but that’s okay.

The name O’Malley is huge in County Mayo, particularly Westport. There are O’Malleys on both sides of my family. The most famous O’Malley is Grace O’Malley, Irish name Gráinne Ní Mháille, from the Westport area. She is a privateer, aka pirate, doing what pirates do from the middle to the end of the 16th Century. She dies in 1603, the same year Elizabeth I dies. Grace O’Malley is a Daniel Boone-level legend in Ireland. If you want to read more, hers is quite a story. Legit. This is one of the many tales of her life story: Ireland’s Pirate Queen: The True Story of Grace O’Malley, 1530-1603, by Anne Chambers. There have been movies about Grace O’Malley, but not a Hollywood big-splash version. Not yet. There’s a UK version, a short film. Viewing the trailer only, it was an exhausting two minutes, with a script written in ALL CAPS ITALICS and featuring a lot of exclamation, grunting, furrowed brows and shouting and gruesome violence and so on. Even a sword-wielding midget. Two of the longest minutes you will ever spend, but the point is that it remains possible for someone to make a movie about Grace O’Malley that is actually good.

While in Westport we stop in for a visit at Westport House, which I don’t really want to see but with the trek up Croagh Patrick cancelled there is a time vacuum of a couple hours that has to be filled up with some thing. Westport House it is. It is the 300 year-old manor house and 380-acre estate of the Browne family, the Marquis or is it Marquess of Sligo. It is free and open to the public, situated on the grounds where the O'Malley family castle once stood. If you happen upon a tourist brochure for Westport, it is a virtual certainty that the featured thing in the brochure is Westport House. The rear of the house is a vast grassy expanse that sweeps down to the very edge of Clew Bay. The house even has a dungeon in its basement, with bars and padlock doors that could still hold prisoners with just the slightest upgrade by Dungeon Solutions, Inc.

The Marquess of Sligo is some sort of peerage thing that passes in a bloodline from one generation to the next, and the house with it, but to males only. Colonel John Browne, aka Earl of Altamont, aka Marquess of Sligo caused the thing to be built in the very early 18th Century. Basically, the Marquess of Sligo owned everything, not just the 380-acre estate. Everything. As we know, with an army to support them the English confiscated all of Ireland: land, homes, churches, language, livelihoods, culture, you name it. Then they prohibited the indigenous Irish from practising their faith and they rented back to them the land stolen from them. According to Irish land records my County Mayo and Westport ancestors were tenants of the Marquess of Sligo back in the day.

Jeremy Browne, the 11th Marquess of Sligo, dies in 2014, leaving the estate to his five daughters. The title Marquess of Sligo and Earl of Altamont cannot pass to a female because it’s illegal for a girl to Earl, so the hunt is on for a male but none can be found in all of Europe and Great Britain until eventually one turns up down under over in Australia. So this guy – whoever he is – becomes the next Earl of Altamont and Marquess of Sligo. He doesn’t get the property, however. Just the title. Through some kind of legal shake-and-bake arranged by the 11th Marquess as he is facing death the girls get the property. They then have the last laugh, selling the estate in 2017 for beaucoup bank to the Hughes family, who occupy it to this day. Presumably the Hughes family aren’t bloodline peers or that sort of aristocracy, but they are instead just very rich as a result of the success of their safety clothing business, things like reflective vests and safety helmets and whatnot. The Hughes family does not live in the main house. They live in a more modern home – which is not free and open to the public – tucked behind a wall and protective hedge on the grounds of the estate.

It is not my place, it is not my privilege to get on a soapbox and denounce the Browne family, but candidly I am not super enthusiastic about them, they who like other English plantation owners don’t stop at appropriating Irish land and culture and language and religion, etc. It fittingly rounds out the appropriation of their allocated chunk of Ireland that the Browne family claim descent from Grace O’Malley, whose icky Catholic pedigree can be overlooked because she is awesome and famous and a pirate and stuff and had the very rare privilege of having a private audience with Elizabeth I, making her not royal exactly but sufficiently royal-adjacent to be tolerable. “If it’s cool, it’s ours. If it’s not cool, then . . . no, just kidding, that’s ours too. Suckers.”

There is a whole room of the manor house – in the basement – dedicated to Grace O’Malley, not too far from the dungeon where offensive people are stored. A family tree with Grace O’Malley’s name embedded in it is displayed prominently near the first-floor entrance of Westport House, next to a very modern and extremely unflattering gigantic bronze statue of Grace O’Malley. If the statue faithfully depicts Grace O’Malley, she was no sylph. Very unprepossessing. A big, big girl.

W.B. Yeats was a visitor on occasion at Westport House. Why is that not surprising? There is a room in the manor house dedicated to all the prominent guests who showed up from time to time, W.B. Yeats among them. Wax figures of the famous guests are sitting around a table while others are standing and looking on, and it’s all a little creepy. W.B. Yeats has a very punchable face, but I know I take liberties beyond what I’m allowed. W. B. Yeats is off-limits to knuckle-dragging, cro-magnon, mouth-breathing philistines. He is a towering figure in modern literature and there is still a protective cordon of intelligentsia around him, even in death, especially in death. No punching Yeats for me. Nevertheless, he was quite good at what he did, this poetry thing. Even I, a person who doesn’t know poetry, can see this.

A display in an upper room of the manor house informs those touring the house that the Browne family ancestors were opposed to slavery, by the way, even though at some point they presumably had a lot of slaves, or so I assume (on their Jamaica plantation, not their Irish plantation). So these people are good guys, not bad guys. And they don’t actually like slavery. “Yeah . . . we do it, but we don’t really like it.”

By the way, Wikipedia is the source of a lot of my information about Westport House and the Browne family, but the snotty editorial remarks are entirely mine. I know that when I meet my grandmother, she (or more likely her father) will say, “don’t be a jackass . . . the Brownes were fine – and in the end their marquess schtick will be so much straw against the flame and so too will be your goofy indignation. It all amounts to nothing and we will all be seated together at the same table someday as equals. So relax and drop it.” I cannot argue with this. It is dropped. It is hard to let it go entirely though.

I met my grandmother once, I think. I only remember that one visit, I should say. I was probably four or five at the time. She died when I was six and although we lived in the same city we never saw her. I am glad that after more than sixty years I have finally seen the place where she grew up, and the little store where she lived that for the moment is dedicated to shaman claptrap, and the gentle Carrowbeg River that flows through the center of town. Now there is more to her story than I had known. And the new things are good things. But still, she and her sister Nellie set out from here in September 1907 at ages 17 and 18, boarded the S.S. Baltic at Queensland (now Cobh), and by the end of 1919 Nellie was dead because of cancer and my grandmother had given birth to my father, and she never could return. It isn’t my place to pass judgement about the circumstances of her life but if she is watching she knows this isn’t forgotten and that someone could see what she saw.

A good way to bring this part of the trip to a close is the Hail Mary in Irish, or Fáilte an Aingil [The Angel’s Salutation], which my grandmother probably knew by heart and recited with feeling –

Sé do bheatha, a Mhuire,

atá lán de ghrásta,

Tá an Tiarna leat.

Is beannaithe thú idir mná,

Agus is beannaithe toradh do bhroinne, Íosa.

A Naomh-Mhuire,

a Mháthair Dé,

guígh orainn na peacaigh,

anois, agus ar uair ár mbáis.

Amen.

(From BiteSize Irish)

Our Westport adventure is done. Off to Limerick, the home of my mother’s father.