FARIHY, parish in the barony of Fermoy, County of Cork, and province of Munster, six miles (W) from Mitchelstown, on the road to Doneraile … There is a considerable portion of mountain pasture in the north of the parish where it borders the County of Limerick, from which it is separated by part of the range called the Galtees. Two small oatmeal mills are worked by streams from these mountains, at the foot of which is situated Bowenscourt, the seat of HC Bowen, Esq.
In this entry from his Topographical Dictionary of Ireland, which appeared in 1837, Samuel Lewis mentions the adjacent church of St Colman as a plain building with a tower then undergoing a “thorough repair”.
Bowen’s Court was swept from the Farahy landscape 65 years ago, but St Colman’s church, which is believed to have been built in 1721, remains. The Government’s Buildings of Ireland inventory lists it as an excellent example of a very rare early-18th-century Church of Ireland church in Co Cork with ”strong cultural links with the writer Elizabeth Bowen”.
In a letter Bowen wrote in the autumn of 1945 to Charles Ritchie, the Canadian diplomat who was her lover for more than three decades, she reported that she had been decorating as harvest festival approached: “so our small rather musty church looked much engaye this morning, with beets, dahlias, turnips, carrots, michaelmas daisy. No sheaves of corn could be got, as all the corn has been threshed. It was really rather a moving little service – all the congregation are farmers and farmers’ wives, and all has safely been gathered in.”
RM Block
It is here in the village of Farahy that an annual service in memory of Bowen is held each September. The author’s optimistic words seem to resonate, as year after year people gather amid the landscape made lyrical by her prose. Conversational groups walk up the avenue beside the locked gateway near the road. The old path through the fields from the house to the church has also vanished, yet somehow, almost mythically, there seems still to be a there there. Attention is paid to the grave of Bowen and her husband, Alan Cameron, and, nearby, to that of the Famine victims of the neighbourhood.
“St Colman’s was very special to Elizabeth,” the writer Sally Phipps says, remembering the childhood days when she walked with Bowen across the fields from Bowen’s Court to the church. Phipps’s mother was the playwright and author Molly Keane, a close friend of Bowen, and Sally and her sister, Virginia, frequently visited Bowen’s Court with her.
Although childless herself, Bowen was always interested in other people’s children, one of whom was Patrick Grove Annesley, of neighbouring Annes Grove: “I only met Elizabeth Bowen through the parties for children she gave at Bowen’s Court a long time ago,” he says, “although I know that she often brought her guests to see the Annes Grove Gardens.”
While living at Annes Grove, Patrick and his wife, Jane, were central to the Farahy service, with Jane arranging a series of musical events to keep the building in use. Patrick welcomes a developing relationship with Doneraile Court, where the Office of Public Works has enlarged the rooms dedicated to Bowen.
When he takes up the collection at this year’s service, on Sunday, “to keep the roof on”, he will be doing what he has done since he first attended. “I’m still coming to Farahy because Dr McCarthy is still coming to Farahy.”
Dr Robert McCarthy, then provost of Tuam, with the painter Derek Hill, the historian and essayist Hubert Butler – Bowen’s cousin – and the art collector JB Kearney, held a thanksgiving service here in 1979 to celebrate the completion of the restoration project they had carried through.
The impetus for that event, at which the preacher was the then archbishop of Armagh, George Simms, was McCarthy’s discovery a few years earlier that the church was “closed and abandoned, with a large hole in the roof”.
Bowen, who died in England in 1973, had at one time anticipated the destruction of her Irish house. So many big houses had been destroyed both before and during the Civil War
Aware that Bowen’s Court itself, sold in late 1959, was demolished in 1960, McCarthy set about ensuring what he has called “the continued existence of this last physical reminder of the Bowens in Ireland”.
Since then the catalogue of speakers at the event has ranged from home to abroad, from scholars to gardeners, from writers and poets to clergy and politicians. The key to the door remains in the unfaltering hands of Brenda Hennessy and the local community, largely through Kildorrery Community Development and Kildorrery Historical Society, which has voluntarily monitored the building’s condition for years.
Bowen’s fiction and journalism were always notable during her lifetime. Virginia Woolf appreciated her both as writer and friend – in a letter to Vita Sackville-West, she writes that she is expecting a visit from “my Elizabeth”.
Two years later, in 1934, Woolf is a guest of Elizabeth and Alan Cameron at Bowen’s Court. “Merely a great box,” she wrote to her sister Vanessa Bell, “however they insisted in keeping up a ramshackle kind of state, dressing for dinner and so on”.
Writing to the poet and novelist May Sarton in 1939, she mentions that she would be seeing Elizabeth “and a young man called Sean Ó Faolain, which I shall enjoy”.
The historian Ian D’Alton, a regular attendant at the September service and a member of the UK’s Elizabeth Bowen Society, sees the novelist as straddling two worlds, that of London and Oxford literary society and that of the lady of the big house in Ireland.
“The Anglo-Irish have a form of dual loyalty: that hyphen seems to represent the journey from Holyhead to Dublin and back again,” he says.
He believes that minorities are a mirror to the soul of a nation, and that Bowen’s work, much of it written in Co Cork, “can hold up a mirror to a different Ireland”.
There remain echoes of that difference at Farahy, where the organist Dr Ian Sexton brings his Clerks Choral choir to the service while now also working to secure the future of the church.
That these should have a continuing local aspect seems crucial, not only for St Colman’s itself but also for a locality where a literary-tourism route could be looped from Farahy to Doneraile (for its links with the novelist Canon Sheehan and Doneraile Court estate), to Kilcolman (Spenser and The Faerie Queene), to the Annes Grove Gardens (Spenser and Walter Raleigh) and around to Kilavullen with the Nagles (Edmund Burke, Nano Nagle and Hennessy brandy).
David Myers, of the neighbouring village of Kildorrery, sees the potential of this loop: “Here we have history in the making at Farahy. It is part of our parish, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. However, it’s a big issue, and not for us alone.”
Bowen, who died in England in 1973, had at one time anticipated the destruction of her Irish house. So many big houses had been destroyed both before and during the Civil War, including that of Molly Keane’s family home of Ballyrankin, in Wexford, that Bowen’s father, Henry, had warned her to expect the worst.
In her book Bowen’s Court, from 1941, Bowen wrote that she had been told that a protest against its burning had been raised “by one of those very neighbours of ours whose own farm had been burned by the military”. So Bowen’s Court stood, “and the kind inherited tie between us and our country was not broken”.
For Sally Phipps, the importance of St Colman’s is that it and its little schoolhouse are all that remain of Bowen’s Court. Remembering Bowen’s own comment that permanence is an attribute of recalled places, she fears that, without the annual service, people might just forget. “Although I suppose Elizabeth’s books will continue to be read.”
The poet Thomas McCarthy has no doubt that Bowen is as relevant today as she was 50 years ago. “She’s extraordinary, a queen of style, especially in her short stories, with a striking modern sensibility in her writing.” He credits Bowen’s agents at Curtis Brown with keeping her alive by keeping her books in print. “These are where her house is now, and that’s where we go to find her, in the bricks and mortar of her books.”
The Elizabeth Bowen memorial service takes place at St Colman’s Church, Farahy, Co Cork, on Sunday, September 14th, at 3.30pm. The guest speaker is Dermot Dunne, the dean of Christ Church, in Dublin
