It was typical of Merrily Harpur’s joie de vivre that she arrived at the Trinity College Elizabethan Society Garden Party in 1968 wearing a stuffed hen as a hat, an act of bravado commemorated by a photograph in the Irish Times the following day. A bright, witty young woman with a flair for drawing, Merrily became editor of Trinity’s Icarus magazine along with her great friend Margaret Hickey, and blossomed under English teachers such as Brendan Kennelly, David Norris and a youthful Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin. She relished student life and the atmosphere of Dublin, the birthplace of her father Brian, who grew up in Timahoe, Co Laois.
After Trinity she started training as a picture restorer, before making a decisive entrée into Fleet Street as a cartoonist – at a time when cartooning was almost exclusively a male bastion. Alan Coren, editor of Punch, was an early mentor of her work, and soon her drawings began to appear in the Guardian, the Times of London, Sunday Telegraph, Evening Standard and various magazines, including Tara, the Aer Lingus in-house magazine.
In the mid-1980s, weary of metropolitan life, she decided to renew her Irish connections by moving to a cottage in Toormore, near Schull, West Cork, continuing her cartoon work via the relatively new invention of the fax machine. She immersed herself in Irish culture, especially traditional music, becoming friends with members of the Chieftains, and penning CD sleeve-notes for Matt Molloy and John Carty. She also indulged in her favourite pastime, fly-fishing, especially in Oughterard, Co Galway.
In the mid-1990s, she relocated to a remote cottage on the side of Sliabh Bawn at Strokestown, Co Roscommon. There she built an artist’s studio, planted a circle of oak trees, kept hens, peacocks and a trusty tortoise, and created a full-size maze with a “hazel tree of knowledge” at the centre (still regularly enjoyed by children of the local Clooncagh national school). Most of all she co-founded the Strokestown International Poetry Festival, which still thrives. The festival was intended to raise the profile of the town, and this ideal seemed to reach its apogee by the attendance of Seamus Heaney in 2006.
Merrily herself was a talented poet. She won the Irish K250 International Poetry Prize in 2004, and her poems were shortlisted for the Irish National Poetry Competition and the UK Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition. All the while she was painting, cartooning and writing. Books appeared: The Nightmares of Dream Topping poked fun at urbanites moving to the country; Unheard of Ambridge brought to life the silent characters in BBC’s long-running radio series The Archers. Another book, Mystery Big Cats, explored the strange world of “anomalous big cats’”, including sightings of them in Ireland.
Merrily loved an adventure and in 2003 she decided to change her life again, moving to the west of England and embracing village life in Dorset. There she organised “Mythic Imagination” weekends and a “fox festival”, while, initially, continuing to direct the Strokestown poetry festival. She was also able to focus on her great love for painting, mainly oils of landscapes and still-lifes. She threw herself into the biennial Dorset Arts Week, holding sell-out shows from her cottage and persuading her fellow village artists to form the soi-disant “Tate Cattistock”. An early riser and enthusiast of life, Merrily was also pragmatic, wise and kind (she devotedly looked after her 90-year-old aunt, Daphne Harpur, in Schull). She continued to travel to Ireland in her seventh decade, visiting her relatives and friends in Laois, Kildare and West Cork. Although proposed to by several boyfriends, Merrily preferred her independence and never married. She leaves behind three brothers, Patrick, John and James; and a niece, Arin.