The Nally plot at Clonmacnois.

 

BEE KEEPING

In the old days honey was widely used because sugar was scarce. My grandmother knew all there was to know about bees and she always had a few swarms about the place. So from a young age I was used to hiving bees and putting them in the wooden boxes. I wasn't a bit afraid of them even though they used to crawl up the legs of my short trousers. I just used to stay quiet and let them work their way down again and from those days to this I was never without bees. At one time I had 35 stocks and I used to sell run-honey in jam pots to Mr O'Brien, Mr Fleming and the other shopkeepers in Athlone.

I remember, I think it was in the 40s, a disease struck called the Isle of Wight disease and it wiped out stocks all over the country. An agricultural instructor called Kinsella came out to me this day as he heard that my bees were healthy. He told me that little insects were getting into the bees' breathing apparatus and blocking it up, and that they were getting a kind of diarrhoea and dying off. He looked at all my swarms and asked, "What do you leave it down to, Frank, that you don't have the disease?" "I don't know," says I. "Except that I smother the bees like my grandmother and the people around here did from the beginning of time." Then Kinsella said, "Frank, I couldn't recommend that or my job wouldn't be safe."

Anyway when Kinsella left I gathered "me" head, and I puzzled out why my bees were healthy. You see I smothered the bees to made it easy to get the honey out. I used to place an old bath over the hives and a few lighted coals under it; then I used to throw a few handfuls of sulphur on the coals. The sulphur fumes killed the bees. The problem arose because you can take honey directly out of a bar-frame hive, or what they call the American hive; however you could have the same swarm for 20 years and that's where the risk of infection comes in. I smothered half my swarms each year and this cleared up infection and disinfected the hives - just like a sulphur candle in a fever house!

After a few years they found a cure for the Isle of Wight disease called the Frau method which was invented by some German fellow. It was made up from a mixture of nitrobenzene, petrol and oil of wintergreen. You put a couple of drops on a bit of a felt hat and you place it on the flight pool where the bees come out of the hives. It has the same effect as sulphur, as the fumes go into the hive and kill the microbes. You don't hear anything about the Isle of Wight disease nowadays.

But Isle of Wight disease apart, bees are uncanny creatures, there's something strange about them. I could go out and stand in front of a hive and you could stand ten yards behind me and every bee would go for you. I don't know why, some say it's body odour. It's like a dog which is able to know when you're afraid of him; there's some nerve or something which gives out a smell that annoys them. I remember once there was a three years old child here. His parents went off to Mass and left him with me. The next thing I went to the door and here was "yer" man in font of a hive and he talking to the bees and pushing them in as they were coming out. Isn't it a strange thing none of them stung him. As I say, they're uncanny creatures and of course in the old days there was a custom that if someone died belonging to you, you had to go out and tell the bees. You'd have to tell the bees, "Paddy (or whoever) is dead."

GHOSTS AND THE BANSHEE

Out this way the banshee used to cry for the Dullys, the Mackens, the Foxes and some of the Nally families. Of course at the time I'm talking about the people "waked" their dead all night and as there were no lorries or motorcars they could hear everything that happened. When my grandfather was dying another fellow was along with me at the back of the house some part of the early morning. Suddenly we heard this cry and then we heard it again about half a mile further away; then the next cry was surely a mile or more from us. The next day my grandfather died and only then did we realise that what we heard was the cry of the banshee. It was the only time I heard the banshee but there was a woman out our country who went to town on a bicycle every night and she heard the banshee 40 or 50 times.

But getting away from the banshee, one summer's night at about 12 o'clock I was coming home with my auld dog when he got into a drain after a rat. I had my back turned to the road and I trying to get him to come home. Then I got this notion that someone passed behind me, so I stepped back out onto the road and there was this big man, about 6 feet 4 inches, gliding along in front of me. To this day I could swear he was dressed in a long brown robe. How I could realise it was brown on a dark night I don't know but I did. He was like a huge Friar and I think the brown robe was a habit, like they used to use to bury people in. Before that happened I was never afraid of a ghost and when people told me they saw a ghost I used to say to them, "Go about your business, they won't heed you."

Some years later I was out shooting badgers on a May evening when it was coming on to dusk. This badger came out of a burrow and started moving up along the ditch. I started stealing along trying to hear him and I was getting ready to take a blind shot. Suddenly I realised that the cap was rising on my head. Now if I was thinking of ghosts I wouldn't mind but I was concentrating on the badger at the time. I had to go about a mile to get out of the field and, though I could see nothing with the fright, that presence or whatever it was, was behind me all the time. I sung hymns, I whistled and I did everything ever I could but still it followed me until I came out onto a road near my own house. The following year at the same time I went to shoot the same badger earth with two lads. I shot a badger but the lads shot "nare a wan". So we parted, they went one way and I headed for my house; but before I was half way across the field didn't the presence strike me again. One of the boys looked back from away up the field and shouted, "Frank, are you all right?" I was too proud to say I wasn't as the presence stayed with me until I walked that mile of a field and came out onto the road. I never set foot near that fort or badger earth again as I have a feeling there's something evil there.

I read in the paper that the Russians made a study of psychic people and they brought it out that certain people are born on the same wavelength as the dead and that they can receive messages from them. So after my experiences I'm always inclined to leave him down as an ignorant man, the man who tells me he doesn't believe in ghosts. If I heard a strange story I'd listen to it, and I'd say to myself, "It could happen, we don't know."

FUNERALS AND BURIALS

I was only three years old and I hardly knew what was going on when I assisted at a cot funeral, that is a funeral where the body was brought from Clonbonny to Clonmacnoise by boat. A day before the funeral a priest came out from Athlone and blessed a plate of clay which was taken from the garden outside the dead man's house. Then the coffin, the plate of clay, baskets of sandwiches and several dozen bottles of stout were loaded onto the cot. Then the cot set off down the river followed by a number of rowing boats. When they pulled in at the shore below the monastery, the coffin was brought up to the Cathedral Church and the grave digging began. Eventually prayers were recited and the coffin was lowered into the grave; then the priest shook the plate of clay over the coffin. When the grave was closed up and all the work was done, the gravediggers and everyone else started into the sandwiches and porter. In later years the people used to ask Mrs Devery, who had a shop in Clonmacnoise. to boil a kettle for them.

I remember the cot funeral of Jane Mulrean who was married to a man named King. It was a windy day and the flood was real high. Fr Dardis or Fr Kilroe came out from Athlone and just before the people were due to set sail for Clonmacnoise this old woman turned to the priest and said, "Father, they'll be all drowned, can you do anything for them?" With this the priest pulled three handfuls of grass from the shore and flung them on the water; shortly afterwards the storm abated and the people got to Clonmacnoise safely to bury the corpse.

In the old days Clonbonny people organised their own funerals and they only went to Athlone to bring back a coffin in a horse and car. They bought coffins from the undertakers, people like the Farrellys and the Geoghegans in Athlone. Later on it became fashionable to hire mourning cars which were horse-drawn and held four people; it was easier to get to Clonmacnoise by horse and car than by water. Then of course motor hearses came in and that finished the horse hearses.

Traditionally Clonbonny people were buried in Clonmacnoise and it didn't matter whether a funeral went there by foot or horse-drawn hearse it had to stop at Tullow Hill In the old days this place was the outside of the monastery grounds and nobody was allowed to pass it. The monks were afraid of raiders because the monastery had been plundered more often by Irish than by foreigners. So the monks stopped all funerals at the Fighting Hill and took the corpses into the monastery grounds and buried them; as a result relatives didn't know rightly where their dead were buried. Even to the present day when a funeral goes up the road into Clonmacnoise it stops for one minute on the top of the Fighting Hill.

There are two huge dykes about ten or twelve feet deep, which we called the claoidhnán, between the Fighting Hill and the graveyard; it seems that they had guards along them in the old days. The first dyke was connected to the Shannon and Loch of Clonfanlough and was the first line of defence; raiders had to swim it to get across it. Now there's another theory that timber was floated down these dykes when they were roofing the churches. But I think the true explanation is that they were lines of defence. A fellow told me the other day that in Irish claídh means a dyke built on sodden ground on the bank of a river, claoidhnán means ramparts and claoíchán means field fencing or a low embankment used as a defensive measure.

My great-grandfather on the Feeney side wasn't entitled to be buried in Clonmacnoise; so his body was carried on a bier from Clonbonny to Benown graveyard on the road to Killinure. It seems the Feeneys must have come from up there, somewhere near Glasson, I suppose he wasn't long enough in Clonbonny to have a grave in Clonmacnoise. However, when my granny married Nally we became eligible to burial in Clonmacnoise in the Nally plot were there were 14 graves.

Since the foundation of Clonmacnoise the people followed certain rules when burying the dead. First of all, no corpse was disturbed until it had been buried at least 15 years. Then when another family member died he or she was buried in the grave which had been closed the longest. This grave was opened, all the bones and the breast-plates from all the old coffins were taken out, and the grave was sunk again to its fullest depth, about five or six feet. Then, before the new coffin was lowered the old bones and breastplates were dropped down beside it. I often saw graves being opened in Clonmacnoise with maybe ten breastplates; the lads who did the digging used to rub grass on them and try to read them. They'd try to figure out who the dead were and how far back they went. With this system, when there were three or four related families in one plot, as was the case with the Nallys, the dead were all mixed up. The father might be in grave number one, the mother in grave number five and some other relative in grave number eight and so on.

I remember on Pattern Day in Clonmacnoise the lads used to try to lift this big stone, it wasn't a hundredweight but it was such a shape that it was difficult to grip. Anyway the Canon here, he was Donoghue from Coosan or Clonbrusk, figured out it was a distraction on pattern day so he sent down a few boys with sledges and they made bits of it.

When the old cemetery was closed in Clonmacnoise the people of Clonbonny were assigned to Coosan because the journey to Clonmacnoise was considered too long. However, some families whose forefathers were buried in Clonmacnoise bought plots in the new cemetery there.

 

The editor of this book, Geoffrey Foy, visits Frank's cottage.

 

Paul Breen visits Frank Hemstead at home.