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‘Synge’s travel writings are particularly fascinating’
The Irish Times
‘Synge’s Ireland will always strike an echo’
Times Literary Supplement
J. M. Synge, playwright, poet, essayist and translator, was a key figure in the Irish Literary Renaissance. Born in County Dublin in 1871, he studied at Trinity College Dublin and then at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. With Lady Gregory, William Butler Yeats and others, he was a co-founder and later a director of the Abbey Theatre. He is best known for The Playboy of the Western World, which famously provoked a riot on its opening night, and his travel writing – notably, The Aran Islands and Travels in Wicklow, West Kerry and Connemara. He died in 1909, aged thirty-seven.
Paddy Woodworth was for many years an Irish Times journalist and is the author of Dirty War, Clean Hands: ETA, the GAL and Spanish Democracy and The Basque Country: A Cultural History.
J.M. Synge
Travels in Wicklow, West Kerry and Connemara
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Foreword by Paddy Woodworth
Serif
London
This e-book first published 2015 by
Serif
47 Strahan Road
London E3 5DA
First published, in a slightly different form, by Serif in 2005
This expanded edition first published by Serif in 2009
Originally published as In Wicklow, West Kerry and Connemara in 1911 by Maunsel & Co. Ltd, Dublin
Foreword copyright © Paddy Woodworth, 2005, 2015
Corrections to this edition copyright © Stephen Hayward, 2005, 2009, 2015
This edition copyright © Serif, 2005, 2009, 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
ISBN 978 1 909150 49 2
e-book produced by Will Dady
Cover design by Will Dady
Contents
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Foreword by Paddy Woodworth
In Wicklow
The Vagrants of Wicklow
The Oppression of the Hills
On the Road
The People of the Glens
At a Wicklow Fair
A Landlord’s Garden in County Wicklow
Glencree
In West Kerry
In Connemara
From Galway to Gorumna
Between the Bays of Carraroe
Among the Relief Works
The Ferryman of Dinish Island
The Kelp Makers
The Boat Builders
The Homes of the Harvestmen
The Smaller Peasant Proprietors
Erris
The Inner Lands of Mayo
The Small Town
Possible Remedies
Publisher’s Note
Serif Travel Library
Foreword
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You’ll find no poetry here,’ a Wicklow farmer told me when, aged twenty, I was rash enough to tell him about my literary ambitions. His tone was matter-of-fact, utterly lacking in ironic intent. He was speaking just as a fiery dawn extended its mantle from behind the Great Sugar Loaf mountain and down onto the Calary Bog, where we had already started mending a ditch in the half-light.
Poetry is not entirely a product of leisure, but the beauty in a landscape certainly becomes less visible when the land demands twelve hours’ manual toil every day, and even then barely provides enough to feed your children. This farmer was a man of deep if discreet feeling, and he was not myopic: he simply could not afford to take his eyes off the damp ground.
Few writers have been so sharply aware of this clash between literary perceptions of the countryside and the real lives of country people as John Millington Synge. The abundant poetry he found during his wanderings in the Wicklow Mountains, in Kerry and in Connemara is constantly qualified by a deep sensitivity to the conditions of the people who had no choice but to live there. The beauty itself is constantly shadowed by a melancholy that seems to drift like a sinister mist across the land itself and is inherent in a human world on intimate terms with hunger and typhus:
When the sun rises there is a morning of almost supernatural radiance, and even the oldest men and women come out into the air with the joy of children who have recovered from a fever. In the evening it is raining again. This peculiar climate, acting on a population that is already lonely or dwindling, has caused or increased a tendency to nervous depression among the people, and every degree of sadness ... [pp.28–9]
Or again:
Near these cottages little bands of half-naked children, filled with the excitement of evening, were running and screaming over the bogs, where the heather was purple already, giving me the strained feeling of regret one has so often in these places when there is rain in the air. [p.34]
Almost every page of this book is pervaded with a sense of ‘splendour that was almost a grief in the mind’. [p.139] This is, in fact, a sensibility remarkably similar to Seamus Heaney’s world where ‘nature is suffused with foreboding’, as Elmer Andrews has put it.1 Curiously, Heaney has written much of his poetry – see especially the ‘Glanmore Sonnets’ in Field Work 2 – while living in what was once the Synge family’s gate lodge at the Devil’s Glen. For those who like to pursue such connections, Heaney first rented and then bought this house from Ann Saddlemyer,
