Where Mountainy Men Have Sown:War and Peace in Rebel Ireland 1916–21

Micheál Ó Suilleabháin

• Publisher: Mercier Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781781171967
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

Where Mountainy Men have Sown gives a first-hand account of the fight for freedom in West Cork from 1916–21. It chronicles the social and military aspects of the War of Independence and describes the IRA's activities in the area, from Macroom to as far west as Ballingeary and Coolea, and covering Inchigeelagh to Ballyvourney and the Derrynasaggart Mountains. Micheál Ó Súilleabháin joined the armed struggle for freedom in his local area of Kilnamartyra at the age of thirteen and describes attacks on armed police patrols, barracksand a large-scale engagement against the elite of Britain's specially recruited fighting forces in Ireland – the infamous Auxiliaries – all ex-commissioned officers and decorated veterans of the First World War. This is a personal record of ambushes, etc., carried out by young Volunteers, who did not wait to be confronted, but went on the attack against better armed and trained men, and emerged victorious.

1
THE LITTLE FIELDS

If you journey westward along the valley of the River Lee from Cork city you see on either hand, in the main, a pleasant and fertile land. It is a hilly country, but not such as to hinder cultivation of the hills. This cultivation adds beauty to the landscape, especially in the harvest of the year. What vista can excel one of hillsides with the green of grass and gold of ripening grain? For twenty-four miles the scene unrolls itself before you, until the town of Macroom is reached. Here the vista ends.

West of Macroom is a new countryside, a more forbidding one. Rocks begin to uncover themselves, sleepy fellows on outpost duty. Before you have advanced many miles, however, you will have discovered that somehow they have managed to warn the main body. You will not wonder at this, when you see all their connecting files and advance guard. Ill-kept and ill-mannered fellows they look, peering at you from behind their cover of brushwood or furze, and some standing naked and unashamed in the middle of small fields on steep hillsides. But they are not bad fellows after all, and when you get to know them you will like them very much. Personally I have a grievance against some of them, for I live amongst them. So have my neighbours, for these stubborn fellows are forever coming in one’s way. Yet they have their uses. And you must admire them for they are solid and unyielding, and the people who live with them must also acquire those qualities.

Let us continue our tour south-westward from Macroom into the country about which all these stories are told. We cross the Toon river by the bridge of the main road to Bantry and Glengariff. We are still on the northern bank of the Lee. We pass through Inchigeela village and now the Lee has widened and levelled to form Loch Allua, which in places almost laps the road, until we come to Ballingeary, five miles further on. Passing through this village of the Gaeltacht, we cross the bridge over the now narrow Lee, and continue westwards along its southern bank. Through a rugged glen with the cascading Lee as companion for a while, we go upwards through Túirín Dubh and soon the Pass of Céimaneigh confronts us. We will not go through that gap. We will look back for thirteen miles to Toon bridge. Thirteen miles of rugged scenery with a lake and two villages. Little pockets of green fields set, high and low, among the overwhelming rocks, marshes and bogs. Those thirteen miles form the southern boundary of the area I write about.

We will turn north and climb to Gougane Barra where rises the Lee. Once the abode of a saint (Finbarr), it is well known for its beauty, the little lake and island set in a corridor of towering and barren rocks. I would say that it is the general headquarters for all the rocks in that district. To traverse the western boundary of our area we must now go on foot across the Derrynasaggart mountains, travelling north by east until we reach the first east–west road crossing at Lackabawn. Again roughly north until we meet the next at Coom (the Cork–Kenmare road) and finally north by east again to meet the Cork–Killarney road at the Cork–Kerry border. We have completed a further ten miles, the extent of our western boundary. It is a mountain wall, heather-covered in places, barren enough in the remainder. Some feeding for small mountain sheep. Some peat bogs. Cover for grouse now, it was once the home of the eagle. From heights of over a thousand feet one may look down to the east and see nearly all our territory spread before him. The two principal rivers, the Lee and the Sullane, form with their valleys the whole of the ground we wish to cover.

Moving due east along the ridge of the Derrynasaggart mountains, we follow the mountain road between Ballyvourney and Millstreet for a few miles as far as the source of the Foherish. Three further miles eastward and we have completed our northern boundary, roughly six miles.

Turning due south with the rocky Foherish we reach Carrigaphooca, where the Foherish joins the Sullane, which comes from the western boundary. Here we cross the Sullane, a few miles to the west of Macroom, and continuing due south over a dividing ridge reach the Toon river at Toon bridge, the place from whence we started. The circuit of our area is complete. We have enclosed perhaps a hundred square miles and three parishes, Inchigeela–Ballingeary, Ballyvourney and Kilnamartyra.

What of the physical features within the enclosure? They are in keeping with the boundaries. Massive ridges of rock run from west to east through the entire area. There are not twenty acres together in any part of it, in which a rock, large or small, does not show. A twenty-acre field even with a rock showing is indeed a rarity. And small level fields are rare enough. The vast majority are inclined at a more or less difficult angle to the horizontal. All have been reclaimed from the rock, the marsh, the bog, the heather, the brake, and, worst of all, from the stony and eroded hillside. The quality of the soil is not good, even in the best pockets. I have seen little fields, reclaimed by past generations, where the area under the stone fence around one field exceeded one quarter of the area of the field itself. This was due, of course, to the number and depth of stones and boulders that had to be removed from the reclaimed area. A horse and cart could be driven on top of some of these fences. The little fields and big fences were indeed made at the cost of blood and sweat and tears.

What of the people who made the little fields? The best on earth, I would say. Driven long ago from the fertile inland by successive plantations, they took root among the rocks. It is significant that all bear old Irish names. You will rarely find a Planter’s name among them. If you do you will find that it is located on a spot worth occupying. It is hard to visualise how any human being, no matter how strong and courageous, survived the winters before the first little field was made. One could build a house of some sort in a short time, but to make a field in the wilderness takes time and energy. Food must be had to provide the energy. However, it was certainly done and the green spots started to show against the dour and forbidding background. In time, and following a colossal expenditure of human tissue and with the worst of tools, the little fields and cabin showed signs of the owner’s industry. They caught the Planter’s eye.

Surely the man who starts to work on a piece of rejected raw material and makes some useful article from it is entitled to be recognised as the lawful owner of it? Surely the unfortunate people who had to comply with the order ‘to Hell or Connaught’ were entitled to call the rocks their own? They had just been forced out of the good land they lawfully owned to make room for the Planters. To go to Connaught meant to go to the waste places where they could suffer and die at their leisure. The majority did die, but some survived and started to make the little fields. Surely the raw material they used belonged to them? It was flung at them as an alternative to hell. Certainly it was the next thing to it.

Now having made homes of a sort from hell’s alternative, the tormented people expected that at least their right to the meagre fruits of their labour would not be disputed. But the greedy Sassenach eye saw a way further to persecute the mere Irish and at the same time to enrich himself.

The rocks were divided into estates. A man’s mud-wall cabin and little fields were classified as ‘holdings’ and ‘farms’, and groups of them became estates ‘belonging’ to a landlord who already lived in the home of some Irishman driven to the rocks. Some there were who never saw ‘their estates’ but lived in England or elsewhere. They employed agents who collected the rents from the tenants. Thus did the people come to know those hated terms.

As well as taking rents from the people, the landlord ‘owned’ their bodies and tried hard for the mastery of their souls. If he wanted a man or men or women, he merely sent a servant intimating the time and place where his or their services were required. He ‘owned’ the wild birds of the air and all the ground game. Woe to the man or boy caught chasing a hare or setting a trap or snare. The penalty was meted out according to the humour of the particular landlord, he being also the local dispenser of British justice. I can cite an instance, from living witnesses, where the landlord’s gamekeeper saw a young man crossing one of the Derrynasaggart mountains accompanied by a greyhound. He shot the young man with a rifle and killed him. The gamekeeper was never brought to trial before a court. He left the country and there the matter ended. I am happy to relate, however, that some spirited young men from the parish of Ballyvourney crossed the Kerry border and, driving the landlord’s men before them into the Big House, they laid siege to it. A strong party of armed police soon intervened to effect a timely rescue.

My uncle, Dan Harrington, often told me of a little incident, which reveals an honest Englishman’s opinion of both the integrity of the landlord and the quality of the land he lorded over. One day when about twelve years old, Dan met a landlord and party shooting woodcock. Anxious to see this, for him, unusual pastime, he stood on a rock to watch the proceedings. The game was plentiful and his point of vantage being excellent he stayed on it. Presently the landlord and one of his guests, a British Army captain, also mounted the rock to rest and survey the activities of their companions. The captain’s eyes ranged over the terrain. At length he spoke.

‘Sir Augustus,’ he said, ‘did I hear you say that you took rents from the people about here?’

‘Oh, yes,’ replied Sir Augustus Warren, ‘the land about here is very good.’

‘Good,’ exclaimed the captain in astonishment. ‘Good!’

‘Egad sir, it is, for cock shooting!’

The forces of nature arrayed against the people were indeed formidable and unrelenting. My father told me how the little fields were made. Having cleared an area which had disputed every inch with them, the people could not afford to relax their heart-breaking toil and vigilance to any extent. For the nature of the soil was such that its desire to return to its former state was unappeasable. Like a genuine wild creature it was untameable. Did one but turn one’s back on it for but a short time, the rushes and the furze and the heather appeared above its surface. Even the rock that had been passed over ‘grew’ again. I remember an old man’s comment on the reclamation of a particularly boulder-infested patch. He stood watching the crowbar work for a while and then, referring to the soil, said, ‘It is hard. Do ye think ye will be able to release it?’ Yet there was little soil to release compared with the volume of stone.

The other forces massed against the people since, let us say, the year after the battle of Kinsale in 1601, were the alien forces that had driven them to the rocks. On the first day of the new year, 1603, O’Sullivan Beare, the last Irish military leader to tread the land, passed northwards through Ballingeary, Kilnamartyra and Ballyvourney on his last fiery trail into history. Military resistance, for the old Irish, was finished for many a weary year to come. Wars there were that helped in the further destruction of the natives and the confiscation of their lands. But they were wars between English rulers and it mattered little to the people which gained the mastery. Men like Eoghain Rua O’Neill and Sarsfield wasted their lives and talents fighting for Charles I and Seamus a’ chaca. It was not until the year 1798 that a serious attempt was made to shake off the yoke of the foreigner. It was a military failure, yet it was a victory in every other way. It showed the people, the enemy and the world that the utmost repression and barbarity of penal laws could not, though maintained for centuries, bring the people to their knees. Sir John Moore of Corunna, humane and gallant British soldier, who witnessed the brutalities of the soldiery and yeomanry of ’98, exclaimed: ‘If I were an Irishman, I would be a rebel.’ His own people did not appreciate his humanity, but Michael O’Dwyer of Wicklow did when he released him after capture, and Soult, Marshal of France, paid him tribut...

Table of contents

• Contents
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 THE LITTLE FIELDS
• 2 THE START
• 3 1916 AND AFTER
• 4 1917 – A NOCTURNAL EXPEDITION
• 5 THE MOUTH OF THE GLEN
• 6 A QUIET PERIOD
• 7 INCHIGEELA
• 8 BALLINGEARY BARRACKS
• 9 GEATA BÁN
• 10 TÚIRÍN DUBH AND CÉIMANEIGH
• 11 THE SLIPPERY ROCK
• 12 A HARVEST DAY IN 1920
• 13 THE FLYING COLUMN
• 14 COOLNACAHERA AND COOMNACLOHY
• 15 A DRIVE TO CORK CITY
• 16 KNOCKSAHARING
• 17 THE BIG ROUND-UP
• 18 THE CASTLE OF MACROOM
• 19 BURNINGS
• 20 SHOOTINGS
• 21 RAIDS
• 22 THE TRUCE
• 23 AISLINGÍ
• PHOTO SECTION
• APPENDIX
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• ABOUT THE PUBLISHER