An Irishman’s Diary on Faugheen’s leap of the imagination

A few years ago here, I mentioned the Jumping Church of Kildemock, one of Co Louth’s lesser-known tourist attractions, near Ardee. To recap, it’s a 14th-century ruin, the western wall of which now stands a metre inside its original foundations. It has stood there for almost exactly 300 years, in fact, because the wall’s reputed leap dates from a night in February 1715.

The scientific explanation, itself barely believable, was a “night of the big wind”. But local tradition, insists the wall was religiously motivated – that it jumped inwards to exclude the grave of an excommunicated (or as I’m sure I was told on a school tour many years ago, “Protestant”) man who had been buried inside.

Whatever the truth, it was a prodigious leap for a wall estimated at 40 tons. So when writing about it, I suggested that, even by the standards of Ireland’s famously mobile religious masonry, this had to be a record. But it seems I may have been wrong.

An even more dramatic church vault – pardon the pun – came to light earlier this week when I was researching the etymological origins of “Faugheen”, one of Ireland’s supposed “bankers” on day one of the Cheltenham racing festival. Faugheen presumably derives from the Irish “faichín” (“little green”). And according to the Logainm database, it’s the name of a village in South Tipperary.

But not for the first time, the search also led me into that treasure-trove of storytelling, the National Folklore Commission’s school survey from the 1930s, now online at dúchas.ie. And this too featured the Tipperary Faugheen, said by one of the participating children to be part of an area known as “Monksland”, which had formerly been home to a community of Cistercians.

The order existed there peacefully for a time. Then one day, according to the student’s story (which she had heard from her father), “robbers” broke into the church “and stole some holy things”. As a consequence, a few nights later, “the chapel jumped over [to] the other side of the river”.

The river in question is unidentified. But it can hardly have been the Lingaun, a tributary of the Suir and the nearest waterway to Faugheen known to Google Maps. However modest a tributary that is, it patrols the border between Tipperary and Kilkenny and must therefore be of Mississippi-like proportions, at least in the minds of hurling fans.

More likely it’s a smaller, local stream the chapel is supposed to have jumped. Even so, bank to bank, that would surely exceed the leap of the wall in Louth.

Subject to ratification by the AAI (Architectural Athletics Ireland), we may have a new record.

On a tangential note, I've just started reading a wonderful book called Landmarks by Robert MacFarlane. It's about the connection between literature and landscape in Britain and Ireland, including the way topography is revealed in place-names. Naturally, Irish and its cousin Scots Gaelic feature extensively.

And noting the “exceptional specificity” of Gaelic place-names – with, for example, “twenty different terms for eminences and precipices, depending on the sharpness of the summit and the aspects of the slope” – MacFarlane suggests that merely to utter a succession of such local names can also be a description of the journey.

Getting back to Faugheen, it strikes me that the list of Irish runners at a race-meeting like Cheltenham could also, often, describe a journey.

On this year’s opening day alone, apart from Faugheen, there was also Clarcam (a townland in Donegal), Annacotty (Limerick), Barrakilla (Kerry), and Ballyculla (Laois, I think). Stringing all those together would make a very interesting road-trip (all the more so if you could claim the mileage).

Clearly, horse-owners and breeders share the general Irish love of place-names and take pride in putting them on the map – something a big win in Cheltenham or Aintree can do forever. Take the now-famous Caughoo. Nobody outside that little corner of Cavan ever heard of it, probably, until the eponymous horse stole out of the fog in 1947 to win the English Grand National at 100-1.

As I write this, Faugheen has just joined the racing immortals. So doing, he gave yet another Cheltenham win to jockey Ruby Walsh, adding to the 40-odd he had already (which I somehow forgot when claiming here last Saturday that Barry Geraghty’s 31 was the record). And the result was probably inevitable because, after all, even the horse’s name was a Suir thing.

[ @FrankmcnallyIT ]