Episode 2 Great Irish Journeys with Martha Kearney

Ireland's beauty has captivated artists and writers for centuries.

It's easy to see why.

I'm Martha Kearney and I was born in Ireland,

but I left when I was a small child, so in the course of this series,

I'm hoping to rediscover the land that I once called home.

My guide is going to be a 19th-century Irishman.

He was an artist and surveyor and he made it his life's work

to chronicle the country's landmarks and treasures.

His name was George Victor Du Noyer.

Du Noyer was part of a team

which undertook a groundbreaking series of surveys in Ireland.

Mapping its landscape and its geology.

But Du Noyer was also an accomplished artist

and he was inspired by all that he saw on his travels.

His work is like a memory map of the country as it once was.

As a journalist reporting from

Northern Ireland through the Troubles,

I've seen this place transformed by conflict and by peace.

Du Noyer drew some of the North's more iconic places,

some that resonate with its tense past

and others that help us to understand the place better,

and I'm off to visit them.

In 1922, Ireland was partitioned.

Out of the 32 counties,

six remained under British rule and this became Northern Ireland,

but the northern counties of Ireland had always been different.

Its proximity to Scotland and the nature of its people

had made it a very distinct place from the land further south

and Du Noyer captured some of the places and people that helped

give this part of the country its unique history and character.

I feel a real affinity with this part of the world

and that's because my family have got so many connections here.

My great-grandmother was born just along the coast at Carnlough,

my great-grandfather was a mayor of Ballymena

and my mother, who grew up in Northern Ireland,

used to have her childhood holidays in Portstewart,

a pretty little resort,

but I also sense that this area can shed real light on

the competing identities which should have both shaped

and, indeed, scarred so much of Ireland's history.

This is the north-east coast of Ireland.

It was once part of an ancient Gaelic kingdom called Dalriada,

which spanned the Irish Sea.

The people in this part of Ireland, known as the Scoti,

migrated to the land that you can see from here on a clear day

and the clue is in the name -

Western Scotland.

That closeness to Scotland has meant that, since ancient times,

there have been strong cultural and trading links

amongst all the people who live in these areas,

but, of course, some skirmishes and battles as well,

and you can see that most dramatically

in one of Northern Ireland's most stunning landmarks.

Perched on top of spectacular cliffs,

Dunluce Castle is a perfect vantage point from which to keep watch

over ships crossing the Irish Sea, friendly or otherwise.

Today, it's a haunting ruin,

but in its day, the castle played a key role

in the development of this corner of Ireland as a place apart.

When you look up at Dunluce Castle,

this dramatic setting of the sea beyond,

you can see why it inspired so many people,

like Edward Lear with the nonsense poems

and CS Lewis, who lived in Belfast,

used it for his Narnia stories, the castle of Cair Paravel.

My own father put a photograph of Dunluce Castle

on his book, British Isles, a history book.

And, of course, Du Noyer came here

and created one of his more dramatic sketches.

Du Noyer's 1839 sketch shows the castle

as it would have been seen by travellers arriving by boat.

I'd imagine it was quite a perilous journey.

This really is the most brilliant castle for exploring.

It was built more than 500 years ago by the McQuillans,

a powerful local family along this coast,

but then, from across the sea,

in fact from Islay, which you can see now,

there came a family who were once Lords of the Isles.

They were the MacDonalds. They vanquished the McQuillans

and then became the dominant force on the North Antrim coast,

establishing a strong Scottish presence.

So, what do you think the significance was of the MacDonald's

taking control of Dunluce Castle? What did that mean?

Initially, they had established themselves

in the Glens of Antrim, at the beginning of the 15th century.

And we see a process of expansion of their territory

during the 16th century, and in that time,

Dunluce Castle is the power base

and we know that this place was an important place,

going right back maybe 1,500 years ago to the time of Dalriada,

which would have spanned the North Channel

between North Ulster and the Hebrides.

And what do you think it means

when we look at the subsequent centuries in Northern Irish history,

the fact that the MacDonalds took Dunluce Castle?

At the beginning of the 17th century,

the political landscape in Ulster changes dramatically.

The leading Gaelic families, who had controlled Ulster

for centuries and centuries beforehand,

after a period of prolonged warfare with the Elizabethan English,

are defeated. That leaves a power vacuum,

which the English are very happy to step into

and under King James, a plantation scheme is developed.

Now, the MacDonalds stand out in this

because, through some adept political manoeuvring,

they manage to retain their lands

and, in fact, they become one of the largest landowners in County Antrim.

The MacDonalds were lucky they managed to hold on to

their splendid castle at Dunluce.

But the 1600s marked a period of massive change.

Thousands of Scots moved west to Ireland

under a scheme known as the Plantation,

launched by King James I.

They were mostly Scottish Protestants.

It's funny that the only part of Ireland nowadays

that is still part of the United Kingdom,

that is a part of Ireland which traditionally was the most Gaelic

until the collapse of the Gaelic order in the 17th century.

So, in the 17th century, there was a huge process of plantation

in order to ensure that it never again became

a bastion of resistance to British rule

and that had the effect of transforming it for ever.

The fact of the Plantation of Ulster led to a huge sectarian rift

because they were put on the island

not merely to ensure that Ireland was not a place of rebellion,

but it was to ensure that Ireland converted to Protestantism

and when you mix religion with all other concerns,

religion tends to triumph.

This peaceful valley with a river running through it

lies 130 miles south of Dunluce.

It was named after the goddess Boann in Irish mythology.

It may seem tranquil today,

but more than 300 years ago, a battle took place here

that has become ingrained in the story of Northern Ireland.

This is the River Boyne.

But, of course, nowadays,

the word "Boyne" has a very different resonance,

which is all to do with the battle which took place here

between the Protestant William of Orange

and the Catholic king, James II.

The day on which that took place, the 12th of July,

is still marked every year by loyalist Orangemen

in Northern Ireland, who see it as a celebration of their own identity.

But I know, from my own time as a reporter, that these parades

can be divisive when they go through Catholic areas.

Today, the Battle of the Boyne

is commemorated by northern Protestants,

but the backdrop at the time was much broader.

It arose out of a bid to become the most powerful monarch

in 17th-century Europe.

The Protestant Dutch king, William of Orange,

had usurped the Catholic King James II of England.

James, with the support of the French King Louis XIV,

arrived in Ireland where he had many supporters,

determined to win back his throne from William.

The more pragmatic of the Irish landowners realised

they risked losing everything if they supported the wrong king.

And that's the story behind this castle, Dunmow,

painted by George Victor Du Noyer.

The owner in 1690 was a man named George D'Arcy,

rumoured to have entertained both King James and William of Orange

on different occasions.

So, as the power shifted between different kings,

between different religions, that presented problems for people

like the D'Arcys, here in Dunmow, didn't it?

This uncertainty over land ownership,

and after all land was a source of wealth and power,

it was summed up quite pithily by the inhabitant of this castle

around the time of the Battle of the Boyne in July 1690.

The head of the household apparently quipped of his dinner guests that,

"Who shall be king, I do not know,

"but I will still be D'Arcy of Dunmow."

And it does tell you that, from the point of view

of Irish Catholic landowners at the end of the 1680s,

they were aware that they lived in a precarious time

in which they could be stripped of their patrimony

or they could hold on to it.

It really was a case of

accommodating yourself to whichever regime succeeded.

It was rare for two kings to meet in battle,

but James II and William of Orange

led their armies here to the Boyne and the outcome

was to change the political landscape of Ireland yet again.

Now, the Battle of the Boyne has a particular symbolism

because it was the only battle at which both kings were present

and that's crucial to how it was remembered.

If you were an Irish Catholic supporting the Catholic King...

Well, many Irish Protestants had flocked to William's banner

because they felt that they were in danger of being dispossessed

or wiped out by Catholic forces and that William might save them,

so from an Irish point of view, it was a very simple symbolism.

The Catholic King fought the Protestant king

and the Protestant King won.

We think today, in the 21st century,

of an organisation like the Orange Order,

founded to celebrate the legacy of William of Orange

and celebrate it as a victory

because this was the victory that had apparently, or allegedly,

secured Irish Protestants from destruction

at the hands of their Catholic neighbours.

Now, whether this was true or not is immaterial,

the point is it was believed to be true

and that's by the Battle of the Boyne is still commemorated to this day.

The Orange Order is still a vibrant organisation,

not uncontroversial, but its essential purpose

is to celebrate a 17th-century battle

and that 17th-century battle is basically seen as

a life-or-death struggle in the history of

Ireland's Protestant community, that's why it's remembered.

You could argue that Northern Ireland was forged out of

life-or-death struggles between the Scottish, English and the Irish.

After the Battle of the Boyne,

a policy of Anglicisation was put into action across Ireland,

in Parliament, law, education and land ownership.

Even the names of places and people were Anglicised,

and as my own name is Irish, it's part of the story too.

As I've been travelling around Ireland,

I've become more curious about the origins of my own surname, "Karney",

or "Kerney" as they call it in the North.

It's shrouded in mist, a bit like today really.

My father used to say it was based on the idea of a mercenary soldier,

the kerns and galloglasses

that are mentioned in Shakespeare's Macbeth.

Well, I'm hoping to find out more

in the course of the journey I'm making today,

with Du Noyer as my guide, to a place he once painted.

It's called Kearney Point.

This beauty spot is on the north-east coast

and I'd much prefer if my name was linked to it

rather than to a type of mercenary.

I've come here to see if I can find something out about my own surname

and where better to start than "Karney" Point,

or "Kerney" as I guess they'd call it round here?

It could have come from the surname "Kerney" or "Karney"

and we do know that there were several families with that surname

living in the Orange area in the 17th century,

so we know that there were Kearneys here.

The second possibility could be

that it comes from the Irish term "carnach"

which means abounding in heaps, full of heaps or piles,

and the third option could be

that it comes from another Irish term, "cearnach",

which means angled rocks.

Personally, I think it could be one of the two Irish terms

because about five miles maybe north of here,

there is a place called Cloughey,

which means kind of a stony ground or stony area.

The surname one, I wouldn't be too convinced about, to be honest.

That's probably what you don't want to hear.

There goes the romantic dream that this is my ancestral homeland!

How did the whole process begin,

where Irish place names were changed to English versions of them?

Prior to the 17th century,

the native Irish wouldn't really have had any need to record names down,

whereas, when the English and Scottish settlers came over,

they had more of a need,

for administrative purposes and taxation purposes.

The English didn't go about translating the names,

they didn't take an Irish term and then have an English equivalent,

what they were doing was transliterating,

so they would've taken a name and written that name down

the way it sounded to an English speaker.

So an English-speaking person would have heard the name Carnach

and written it down as if it was English.

What effect do you think it had,

changing those Irish place names into Anglicised versions?

The native names of Ireland usually describe physical features,

natural features like rivers or hills or trees,

and by the process of transliterating these names

into something that doesn't mean anything in English,

all that richness and all of that information was masked.

And here is Du Noyer's sketch of Kearney Point,

as I like to think of it.

The Irish landscape was, in effect, rewritten

with that complex layering of identities

that survived to Northern Ireland today.

The Ordnance Survey worked on by George Victor Du Noyer

anglicised the Irish names of the land they were surveying.

It's just one example of how the British

put their stamp on Ireland during the 19th century.

You can also see that stamp

in landmarks built by the Anglo-Irish aristocracy,

such as this one at Scrabo in Newtownards.

The tower was built as a memorial to a member of the Stewart family,

the Marquess of Londonderry.

Du Noyer came here and sketched a little part of it,

but his focus was the local sandstone quarry

which the tower is made of, but also so many of the Victorian buildings

which lie in the city beneath us, the city of Belfast.

Belfast reached its heyday during the Victorian era.

The wealth which came from industrialisation

can be seen in the prosperous buildings from the period.

Du Noyer made a sketch that beautifully illustrates

the changes taking place.

He drew a 200-year-old bridge just before it was pulled down

and renamed Queens Bridge in honour of Victoria.

Close by, there is even a clock in memory of her husband.

The Albert Clock is a magnificent monument to Belfast's Victorian past

and it was actually constructed out of stone

from the quarries sketched by Du Noyer.

Now, when I used to come to Belfast, I was understandably more

focused on the latest bout of violence or political negotiations

than I was on the city's history, so I've been fascinated to discover

just how much Belfast changed in the course of the 19th century.

Every busy Victorian metropolis needed a department store

and Robinson & Cleavers was Belfast's version of Selfridges.

Glenn Patterson has written extensively about the city

in novels that span the 19th century to the present day.

Where we're sitting now used to be a great Belfast landmark, didn't it?

This was one of the great department stores of Belfast,

certainly one I remember from my childhood.

Robinson Cleavers had...

I mean, it was a grand entrance and it had this phenomenal staircase

with a figure, I think, of Britannia on one newel post

and, on the other, Erin, so it was kind of a great statement.

I suppose it's very typical of the kind of architecture

that was fashionable in Victorian Belfast?

It is. This is late-Victorian Belfast.

I think it was finished around about...

the last bay of it was finished about 1890.

I think it's really one of those statement buildings of Belfast

that completed that vision of Belfast

as this very go-ahead, expanding city, which it had become.

It started the 19th century as a town and a relatively small town.

As the 19th century went on, it became Linenopolis,

it became a heavy industrial city

and it also became a great trading centre.

So Linenopolis because the fortune was based on linen?

The linen trade transformed Belfast and, of course, shipbuilding.

There was a great story, which is that when Belfast...

The traders of Belfast wanted faster access to the port

and so they petitioned for a cut, to make the access deeper

and straighter to the city centre, and in doing that,

there was a whole lot of soil dredged up, silt dredged up,

and dumped on the east bank of the Lagan

and what that gave us was the Queens Island,

which became the home of Harland and Wolff,

which produced the Titanic, and what I love about that

is that the traders of the city wanted one thing

and what we got was something completely different.

We got that which really made the name of Belfast shipbuilding

in the late 19th and early 20th century.

What do you think the character of the city was like at the time?

There's a great description of Belfast by a writer

who came here in the 1850s

and he remarks on the difference between Belfast and Dublin.

He says, "The people of Belfast seem to have matters of importance

"to attend to and they go about them in right earnest."

And I think there is a little bit of that,

whether it's building things up or tearing things down,

we have a singleness of purpose that would frighten you,

so, you know, there are periods of rapid growth in the city

and they are punctuated by periods of rapid decline,

often at our own hands.

The Victorians transformed the landscape of Ireland.

They built railways everywhere,

including this one which hugs the northern coastline.

On one trip north, Du Noyer visited this beach.

Just before the railway engineers blasted their way through

the cliff face, Du Noyer took out his drawing pad.

Du Noyer walked along the beach to make a sketch of this view

before it would be changed for ever and there are striking differences,

for example, the rock arch there has disappeared,

it must have been blasted away by the engineers.

But one feature does remain

and that the small domed building perched on the top of the cliff.

It's called Mussenden Temple

and it's an iconic landmark in Northern Ireland.

But the story of the man who built it is even more remarkable.

If there is one thing I've learned about Du Noyer,

it's that his sketches sometimes lead you towards

surprising places and individuals.

Here on this wild stretch of coast is Downhill Demesne,

once a house so luxurious that its walls

were hung with Rembrandts, Raphaels and Caravaggios.

It was built in the 18th century by Frederick Hervey,

the Earl Bishop of Derry.

He also built a library at the cliff edge.

This became known as Mussenden Temple.

Fun loving and eccentric as he was,

the Bishop was also a beacon of tolerance

amidst the sectarian tensions of the times.

-Hi, there.

-Hi, Martha.

-This is such a stunning view, isn't it?

And a perfect location for such an elegant building.

It's an amazing view and the building itself is amazing

because it's one of the finest neoclassical buildings in Ireland.

It's based on the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli in Italy,

a building which the Earl Bishop saw, because he loved travelling,

loved everything classical,

and he wanted to buy the Temple of Vesta, but of course,

he was prohibited from doing so, so he did the next best thing.

He used inspiration from that to build this circular rotunda.

What do you think people round here at the time

would have thought of a building like this?

Mind-boggling, to be totally honest and, of course,

this most spectacular location,

which famously was said of a contemporary source at the time

that only a romantic would expect to find a house here

and only a lunatic would build one here.

So, who was the romantic lunatic who built the Mussenden Temple?

Frederick Hervey. His father was the first Earl of Bristol.

Their family seat was Ickworth in Suffolk.

His older brother, George, was Viceroy of Ireland

and he got him a job as the Bishop of Cloyne,

but it was really just as a waiting moment for Frederick

until the bishop's seat at Derry,

which was the richest in Ireland at that time, be came vacant.

He had plenty of money, didn't he?

I mean, from his income as Bishop of Derry,

but then he also inherited an aristocratic title.

£10,000 is what we believe he earned as the Bishop of Derry

and in today's money, it's roughly around about 1.6 million per year

and when he came into the Hervey title of Earl of Bristol,

he suddenly inherited all the Bristol family estates.

Someone said to me one time before,

"It's Branson-esque type wealth in the late 18th century."

Of course, the 18th century was a time of trouble, of tension.

How did he fit into that?

A man ahead of his time.

When we think of this time, we all think of the penal laws,

which basically meant

that Catholics couldn't and didn't have access to churches,

but, of course, the Earl Bishop was in favour of Catholic emancipation.

He saw this as being a problem that could be fixed.

At a time when Catholics weren't able to say mass,

the Earl Bishop allowed them access to Mussenden Temple.

So, he was allowing Catholics to hold masses here in the temple,

when it was actually illegal?

Yeah.

-LAUGHING:

-Risky to do so!

He was an extraordinary character

and probably felt frustrated when he left Ireland

because there was so much he could have done,

so much he wanted to do, but of course we do have the legacy

of his building works and of course the great stories that surround him.

Extravagant as he was,

the Earl Bishop seemed to be an enlightened church leader

who welcomed Protestants and Catholics into his home.

And in that sense,

he continues to be an inspirational figure even today.

Northern Ireland is also full of inspiring places.

My last stop is considered to be its greatest marvel,

steeped in myths and legends.

The Giant's Causeway.

It's world-famous as THE place to study

how the Earth's crust was formed.

Geologists have flocked here for centuries

and, of course, George Victor Du Noyer,

as an artist with a passion for rocks, was one of them.

And in this lovely early-morning light, I'm able to see it really

as Du Noyer would have done in the past, without crowds of visitors.

Parts of it remind me almost of the ruins of an ancient Greek temple,

with the tumbledown columns.

No wonder so many myths and legends have grown up about the place.

The weird and wonderful shape of the Causeway

has long attracted famous writers,

even one of the leading figures of the Victorian age.

William Makepeace Thackeray, the writer,

came here in 1842 by boat, which must have been pretty tricky.

I think he fell over and ripped his coat trying to get on board.

But then he did write in his Irish Sketch Book,

"It looks like the beginning of the world somehow,

"the sea looks older than other places,

"the hills and rocks strange

"and formed differently from other rocks and hills,

"as those vast, dubious monsters were formed

"who possessed the Earth before man,

"when the world was moulded and fashioned out of formless chaos."

Parts of the Causeway have acquired some rather fanciful names,

like the Giant's Boot, or the Giant's Gate,

that's after the legend that it was Finn McCool who built it.

Now, this is called The Wishing Chair and I can see why.

It's rather comfortable.

It was painted in a watercolour by Du Noyer, but I don't think

he'd have had much truck with those mythological ideas.

You can tell by the detail in the painting that, actually,

he was much more interested in the geology of the Causeway.

Du Noyer subscribed to the theory progressive in Victorian Ireland

that the Causeway was formed by volcanic activity.

These theories laid the groundwork for what scientists believe today.

They attribute the formation of the Causeway

to the splitting of the North American and European continents.

Throughout the long period

of intense volcanic activity that followed,

the basalt columns were formed by slowly cooling lava.

What do modern scientists think about the Giant's Causeway?

For me, as a geologist,

this wonderful environment is important because of several reasons.

The first is because it tells us a story

in the emergence of geology as a science

and that is important, we mustn't forget that

and the role that those initial philosophers

and scientists had in that story.

The second reason is because, as a geologist,

I look around this environment and I see that this represents

a geological time, the opening of the North Atlantic Ocean.

So this is a very important area in terms of the formation of our world.

But it will always, I suppose, from the times,

the early times, the 18th century, when we looked at it,

it will always, hopefully, create

some sort of curiosity in people's minds

and I hope that doesn't stop and I hope that people

come to the Giant's Causeway and look at it with those eyes

and I hope they take away some very special memories from it, as well.

The Belfast poet Louis MacNeice beautifully describes.

"The hard, cold fire of the northerner

"Frozen into his blood from the fire in his basalt

"Glares from behind the mica..."

I've seen that hard, cold fire at first hand

in my days as a reporter, but thanks to Du Noyer,

I'll be taking away some new special memories

from this journey to Northern Ireland,

memories that go far beyond the headlines.