TRANSPLANTING...

'My father's people' -- an expression I recommend using at every available opportunity -- hailed from south County Mayo. They still do, 800 years after they swept in on the coat tails of the De Burgos during the Norman's invasion of Connaught.

We were De Stauntons then -- a locational name ('of stony ground') assumed in Britain by a clan of Norman or possibly Flemish lineage.

When an internecine rivalry arose within the De Burgos, the De Stauntons were forced to pick a side. This they seem to have done -- without giving too much away -- with somewhat more enthusiasm than the brief required.

Suffice it to say that the De Burgos realligned, in that inevitable 'what's the worst that can possibly happen' kind of way,  and the De Stauntons found themselves politically embarrassed, to put it mildly.

Clan splits, disassociations and name-changing ensued.

MacEvilly is the anglicization of 'Mac A' Mhile' (Son of the Warrior) which takes its provenance from an earlier, and presumably blemishless, head  of the clan.

The MacEvillys were finally pried from their ancestral demesne by Tibbott na Long (Tybalt of the Ships), surname Burke of course, and spouse of none other than the legendary pirate queen, Grace O'Malley.

But when the National Library recently released Ireland's 1910 census online, the great majority of MacEvillys still lived in that same historic stretch of territory which runs from Louisburgh, through Westport and the pilgrim way between Croagh Patrick and Ballintubber Abbey -- the last Abbott (1542) was Walter MacEvilly -- and east to Loch Carra; in short, the land which they first occupied eight centuries ago.

My father grew up, dirt poor, on twenty acres during the 'Hungry 30's' -- the mighty had certainly fallen by then -- and though a gifted schoolboy, by all accounts, was forced to forego university in order to find work immediately. What the heartbreak of that disappointment must have been to him I can barely imagine.

During my childhood in Cork I would travel back to 'Granny's' every summer, to save hay 'the old way' and run wild in the meadows and woods.

'The West' was an ecstatic place for me, and when the train crossed the Shannon into Connaught I was as delirious as if I had crossed the Indus and was climbing back towards Shangri La.

When I first read Dylan Thomas's 'Fern Hill' I knew immediately that the Welsh wizard had been touched by the same mystic joy. The Pagan had been ignited in me, and I can tell you now, dear brethren, he's not ever going away!

I can honestly say that that tiny farm was the undoing of me -- in the best possible sense. The same hungry patch of land that produced the 'poor scholar' who was my father, ensured with terrible irony that his son would never emulate his academic achievements -- or care to do so.

I glimpsed heaven in those sun-drenched fields -- yes, the summers were better in those days; it's called our youth! -- and no schoolroom or science lab was going to teach me anything higher or more empowering in this world.

This year that little farm, which has been in the family for almost a hundred years, went under the auctioneer's hammer. The cottage will not survive, and no stone will remain that will bear any trace of our name. So it is. Ashes to ashes, rubble to rubble.

We gathered for my Uncle Jim's commemorative mass -- one of those rare occasions I enter a Catholic church, or endure what must surely be the most uninspired religious service on the planet.

As we were leaving the cottage, closing the door for the last time, I looked around and consciously memorised the little box hedge, the humble dog roses, the firs sighing in the soft breeze. They might raze this place to the ground, but in my heart's eye it would stand forever.

I laid Jim's old bicycle into the back of the car. It had leaned against his gable for decades and now it will lean against mine.

Finally Maureen lifted some gladioli shoots from a little bed, out of the soil that had fed my forbears. Perhaps these saplings could take root in West Kerry, in the new home where I had tremulously planted myself.

We bedded them in grey weather, with 'the sky on the ground' and the year end looming. We expected nothing.

It was a misty morning, the light struggling, and the slope of the 'Strickeen' rising away beyond the kitchen window.

I was making coffee when a blanket of warmth opened across the gravel. I looked out...

It is theorised that some part of our DNA has migrated all the way from the Himalayas.

Shangri La.

It is with us. Everywhere.




(Originally posted, WritersCut.net, 10/12/2012.)