Aside from a couple of rows of higgledy-piggledy, brightly painted, street-side houses, the village consists of a pier, a little sailing clubhouse, two pubs, a restaurant, a grocery shop, and a chipper. The detached residential houses in and around the harbour are summer places for the wealthy and well-established, mercifully discrete for the most part, and tucked away amid the rock-crops and cockle-rich sand-marshes.
On the way into the village you pass the little church of St Brendan the Navigator. This Christian temple has but a partial-life nowadays: it is open for business only eight weeks in the year – just for the months of July and August. Even then, however, it doesn’t offer the full product range of the Anglican Communion, only the thanksgiving service of Compline, at 8.30 on Sunday evenings.
Preserve us, O Lord, while waking, and guard us while sleeping, that awake we may watch with Christ, and asleep we may rest in peace . . .
However, this old-fashioned (almost extinct) service in this out-of-the-way place is often surprisingly well-attended. There aren’t enough people in Crookhaven to fill St Brendan’s, yet the little church is frequently full, or very nearly full, for this simple eventide thanksgiving ritual. In addition to holiday-makers in the Crook Haven and Barley Cove areas, attendees travel from outside the parish bounds – even from as far away as Skibbereen (50km) – not all of whom would be orthodox church-goers by any means, some of them (your Diarist, for example) not any class of Christian at all.
Compline at Crookhaven is one of those things that can make a west Cork summer a unique experience: a thanksgiving service at the end of the world as, beyond the ocean horizon, the evening’s brilliant sphere of orange effulgence liquefies and melts away . . .
[And] We all of us sigh, a thousand sighs as one for such
a ruthless drowning of the
light . . .
Deirín dé. Deirín dé.
May we sleep sound till round of day. *
The popularity of this service-series may be simply that the journey west along the Mizen peninsula is a pleasant drive on a Sunday evening, or maybe it’s the remoteness of the situation (at Crookhaven one is further west than, say, Finisterre, which as its name indicates is an Old World end-point), or it could be because of that sense of being some place stranded by time and imperial tide – the little church of St Brendan has no heating or electricity – it is candle and gas-lamp-lit – or it may be a blend of some or all of the
above.
The charter of Our Lady’s College of Youghal (1464) included the livings of the parishes of Schull (Skull/An Scoil) and Kilmoe (Kilmolagga) – Kilmoe parish is Toormore, Goleen, and Crookhaven, a trinity of little settlements west of the town and parish of Schull. Kilmoe continued as a college benefice until the 1600s when Sir Richard Boyle (later to become first earl of Cork) bought the college grant from Sir Walter Raleigh.
The west coast of west Cork was infested with piratic havens at this time and, in an effort to make inroads on these cultures of lawlessness, Boss Boyle had a garrison deployed to Crookhaven, so beginning the long association between Crookhaven and the strategic services of the British authorities – an association that would continue with excise-men and watchtowers and lighthouses up until the surpassing of Marconi’s wireless telecommunications technology in the early 1900s.
Between 1610 and the 1630s Crookhaven was an industrious English-plantation fishing colony, some hundreds strong. In addition to Wilkinsons and Wilsons and Burchills and the like, the colony included Nottors (Germans from Herrengberg) and Roycrofts and Camiers (French Huguenots), lichen-coated headstones for whom tilt and totter picturesquely in the church graveyard. This first Protestant colony was wiped out in the Counter-Reformation-sponsored ethnic cleansing of the 1640s.
In 1699-1700 Dive Downes, the Anglican bishop of Cork and Ross, visited every parish in his episcopal territories. On June 6th 1700, he day-tripped by boat (from Schull) west to the parish of Kilmoe. At Crookhaven he found the ruins of a church at the edge of the village “dedicated to St Mullagh”; “part of the Chapple”, he judged, much “older than the rest”. There were no books or registers for the parish, but he found nine Protestant families living in the area, among whom were John Prouce, the parish clerk, Thomas Dyer “the Tide Waiter” (customs and excise-man), Thadeus Coughlan, Pierce Arnott, and a Mr Mahon. On the fourth Sunday of the month Mr Vyze preached at Mr Coughlan’s house.
Dr Peter Browne, bishop of Cork and Ross from 1710 to 1735, had the church rebuilt at his own expense – the bishop’s coat of arms, in stone, may still be made out in the west gable of the building.
The church was rebuilt again in the 1840s, the new building re-dedicated to St Brendan the Navigator (the carved stone bearing Bishop Browne’s coat of arms reset in the west-facing gable-wall).
Nicholas Cummins, rector of the Kilmoe union of parishes back in the 1980s, provided the following collect for St Brendan’s, which is appropriately simple and direct: “Almighty God, / You inspired your servant St Brendan the Navigator to sail across the seas in a voyage of discovery / Grant that we following his example withstand all the storms of life and arrive at the safe haven of your eternal kingdom, / Through Jesus Christ Our Lord.” Amen.
* Lines from Last Light over Europe, a poem by John Wakeman
Trevor Lester, the present rector of the Kilmoe Union of Parishes, leads the Compline at Crookhaven service on Sunday evenings, inviting guest preachers to preach a sermon. Guest preachers for August include Rabbi Dame Julia Neuberger on August 5th, Rt Rev Paul Colton, bishop of Cork, Cloyne, and Ross on August 12th, and the Most Rev RL Clarke, bishop of Meath and Kildare on August 19th. Reverend Lester takes the pulpit himself on August 26th for the last service of the 2012 series.