Peter Harbison's new book gives a fascinating account of the Boyne River and its environs, writes Eileen Battersby
A river cuts through a landscape; depending on its size, it can also shape it and perhaps even tell its story. The Trieste-born German scholar and writer Claudio Magris, created magic when exploring this particular thesis in his classic work, Danube (1989). In that book, he followed the course of a great European river on its 2,000 mile-long journey through central Europe, many cultures and centuries of history. The Boyne takes a far shorter trip, a mere 70 miles, from the shadow of the Hill of Carbury, Co Kildare, to Mornington, Co Meath.
It is not even the longest river in Ireland. Yet its gently meandering course, "slow, and in soft murmurs" to quote Sir William Wilde, which takes it through counties Kildare and Meath while also at times bordering Co Offaly and Co Louth, through the town of Drogheda and on to the sea at Mornington, passes by some of the most dramatic historical sites in this country and under some of Ireland's most beautiful stone bridges.
If a river may be described as a witness to history, the Boyne is that and more. The valley to which it gives its name claims a remarkable array of riches including the Stone Age passage tombs of Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth, the mighty fortress of Trim Castle, the poignant romance of Bective Abbey, the enduring mysteries of the Hill of Tara and Mellifont Abbey, once the site of the first great Cistercian monastery in Ireland and although almost entirely vanished, it remains a dignified, peaceful place.
As did Magris, archaeologist and art historian Peter Harbison has looked to a river in order to explain and celebrate a region. It is a particularly well documented place, yet Harbison, as always, has done the research, acknowledged the existing scholarship, included the most colourful stories and myths, yet also stamps his personality on the material, calling on characters such as Hugh de Lacy, architect Francis Johnston and antiquarian-artist Gabriel Beranger.
Treasures of the Boyne Valley, although so familiar in content, is fresh, coherent and brilliantly illustrated by original photographs that succeed in making us look twice at places and sites we know very well. This could well be the definitive book on the area, except that Harbison, ever alert to his masters, makes an inspired decision to bow to a writer who preceded him by more than 150 years.
With echoes of the way in which the great polymath Frank Mitchell offered his Irish pilgrimage, The Way That I Followed (1990) as a form of homage to Robert Lloyd Praeger's classic The Way That I Went (1937), Harbison's Boyne journey generously reflects an earlier work, that of Sir William Wilde's delightful travelogue The Beauties of the Boyne and Its Tributary the Blackwater. Published in 1849, Wilde's account has a charm and a grace of its own as well as originality. For Wilde's readers his lyric musings become our adventure. His 19th-century study not only contains a vast amount of pioneering antiquarian material, it also establishes the subtle, graceful Boyne as a cultural, as well as physical, presence.
Harbison's vision is similar to that of Wilde, it is that of the scholar as enthusiast rather than as pedant. So first to "the Pleasant Boyne" itself and to quote Harbison quoting Wilde: "Although this river does not burst upon us amidst the wild and stern grandeur of the mountains, with dashing torrent o'erleaping in its rapid course all the barriers of nature, or making its echoes heard among the deep hollows of dark-wooded dells; but pursues the quiet, even tenor of its way through a flat but rich and fertile country." It provides a beautiful centre around which a landscape developed and chapters of history evolved.
It is a landscape of castles and tower houses, such as the singular one at Grange, Co Kildare, with its decorative battlements. This is a diverse, multi-layered region, ranging from the lone, tree-topped motte at Clonard, once the site of a long vanished, medieval monastic university, to the area in which the Battle of the Boyne was acted out. It is a route that passes, indeed dominates the town of Trim, which witnessed the boyhoods of Arthur Wellesley, later the Duke of Wellington, and pioneering mathematician William Rowan Hamilton.
Earlier, the Normans had arrived and established themselves forever through the majesty of Hugh de Lacy's Trim Castle. Not only is this the finest surviving Norman Castle in Ireland, magnificently defying its 800 years, it is one of the most impressive sites, standing as it does on a wide ford of the river. Jonathan Swift knew this landscape as well, and believed, according to Harbison, "there was no better place to take the country air than Trim". There was also the additional advantage presented by Esther Johnson, better known to history as Stella, being in possession of Talbot's Castle - a residence at which Swift called upon her. The house later served as a school for pupils such as Wellesley and Rowan Hamilton.
On flows the river to Navan, second in size of the Boyne towns only to Drogheda. Its ever sprawling development has helped Trim preserve some sense of its medieval texture. Central to the history of Navan, which Harbison generously details, is the achievement of the Beaufort family, most particularly those of Daniel Augustus whose map of Ireland was published in 1792, and his son, Francis, inventor of the Beaufort Scale, the wind-force measurement. Harbison should be applauded for retrieving Navan's past. Why he bothered mentioning Navan-born actor Pierce Brosnan within a paragraph of the Beaufort family is the only blip in a narrative that combines mythology, archaeology, history, geography, social history and Tom Kelly's many wonderful photographs, including a mood shot of the Boyne curving beneath Ardmulchan Church after it has passed the ruins of Dunmoe Castle and a picture of the magnificent Round Tower at Donaghmore, high against a dramatic sky and flanked Christ-like by a ruined belfry and a despairing tree (above).
The village of Slane, with its dramatic setting created by a multi-arched bridge and a weir, continues the story through characters as diverse as St Patrick and poet Francis Ledwidge. The bend of the Boyne is overlooked by the three great passage graves, Ireland's oldest, and possibly - certainly in the case of Newgrange - most famous monuments.
It is to Harbison's credit that at this point he has revitalised the existing material on probably the most extensively documented site in the area, that of the great passage tombs. Cleverly, he begins his account of the monuments by taking the least explored, Dowth, first, before moving on to Newgrange and the extensive Knowth complex. He pays tribute to Frank Mitchell "who did so much to bridge the gap between the sciences and the humanities in Ireland during the second half of the 20th century, and who encouraged George Eogan to undertake his first excavation of a Passage Grave in the grounds [of the Francis Johnston-designed Townley Hall\], close to the Slane-Drogheda road." Harbison also mentions Mitchell's final great project, in partnership with Roger Stalley, the restoration of the octagonal two-storey Lavabo at Mellifont.
Drogheda merits a book of its own. A fascinating woodcut-like sketch on page 87 depicting a decorative wooden house, built in Drogheda by Nicholas Bathe in 1570, and demolished in 1824, leaving only one inscribed beam on display in the National Museum, gives some hint at medieval merchant life in the town.
The Hill of Tara, always underestimated because it consists more of earthworks than stone, is well handled here by Harbison, who defends the site's inclusion. "Though not strictly speaking in the Boyne Valley, the Hill of Tara should be seen as an adjunct to it, for it overlooks the river from a distance and fits comfortably into the valley's culture." He also refers to the antics of the British-Israelite excavators who converged onthe site, convinced they would find the biblical Ark of the Covenant; the episode is well chronicled by Mairéad Carew in her recent book, Tara and the Ark of the Covenant (Discovery Centre, €30).
Few places can offer such a choice of extraordinary sites. The literature and culture as well as the physical splendour of the Boyne Valley is recorded here in a brilliantly cross-referenced and diverse travelogue. Everyone will have their particular favourite sites. Of the many wonders, I would select the churchyard at Monasterboice, just north of Drogheda.
Treasures of the Boyne Valley by Peter Harbison is published by Gill & Macmillan at €29.99.