Listening to the Wind by Tim Robinson

Author:Tim Robinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Published: 2019-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

THE ROBINSON ERA

In the aftermath of the Famine the ruined communities of the Martin estate, quarrelled over by their rivalrous spiritual leaders and deserted by the last representatives of their hereditary patriarchs, fell into the hands of the financiers to whom it had been mortgaged. Whereas the Martins are said never to have evicted anybody, the mortgagees knew that their only hope of selling on the vast desolation they had acquired for little or nothing was to rid it of superfluous human beings, and so they energetically carried on with the clearance the Famine had begun. The Law Life Assurance Society, a faceless, distant abstraction, has left no trace in Connemara lore that I know of, and its representative in oral history is its land agent, George Robinson, Justice of the Peace and Chairman of the Board of Guardians. Even his grim figure is half-dissolved into that of his son Henry, a more genial personality according to report; between the two of them they span the whole period of painfully slow ameliorations from the rapacity of Law Life to the social engineering of the Congested Districts Board, and today’s busy and indifferent Connemara scarcely remembers that they were different people.

George Robinson of Thomastown in Mayo had previously been employed as a civil engineer at Shannonbridge, where he had married Rebecca, daughter of the Protestant minister of Aughrim and a descendant of the Martins and Wood-Martins of Sligo. He came to Connemara in about 1857 with his wife and the beginnings of a large family, and took up residence in the former Martin abode, Ballynahinch Castle, which was then a plain two-storey house looking down through a few trees to Ballynahinch Lake. As a surveyor a few years earlier had reported, its setting was bleak:

There is a good field, not of land, but of rocks and water, to be worked upon, and the scene might be made truly a ‘Highland House’, but up to the present time the cutting and carving that has taken place, and the unfinished and poverty stricken state of everything around the Castle, has only weakened the natural romanticness of the spot.

Although the Law Life Assurance Society furnished the house with battlements in about 1858, the poverty of its surroundings still outweighed its ‘romanticness’ in prospective purchasers’ minds, and the estate remained on their hands until a London brewer, Richard Berridge, bought it in 1872. Thus the Robinsons occupied the Castle up to that date, and probably until 1885 when they built their own mansion at Letterdife, for George became agent to the Berridges, who themselves did not opt for residence in the increasingly dangerous times of the Land War.

The society the family grew up in was as harsh as its setting. A photograph by the well-known William Lawrence of Upper Sackville Street, Dublin, shows the Protestant chapel (now a Catholic chapel, and closed) a mile or so away from Ballynahinch on the Galway–Clifden road. Not a tree or shrub mediates between the pretty little Gothic-revival building and the windswept boglands around it.

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