AN IRISHWOMAN'S DIARY

JANE Annesley is wearing the slightly puzzled frown of someone who is beginning to, wonder if she has bitten off" more than she…

JANE Annesley is wearing the slightly puzzled frown of someone who is beginning to, wonder if she has bitten off" more than she can chew. She has not, of course, but no one could blame her for being a little abstracted, now that the date and time of the annual Elizabeth Bowen commemoration has been decided.

This ceremony is a unique hybrid it takes place in the church at Farahy built by the Bowens more or less for the Bowens and surviving so far largely due to the determination of the Very Rev Dr Robert MacCarthy, now Provost of Tuam, and of Derek Hill and the late Hubert Butler. A religious service with staunch Church of Ireland hymns.

We are at the very gates of Bowens Court, and the speech usually reflects one of the parts which make up the Bowen sum Anglicanism in Ireland, perhaps, or the Bowen genealogy or the history of Ascendancy literature (which can be flirt her expanded with the emphasis on history, or on aspects of the Ascendancy, or a mutually enriching combination of both) or the influence of landscape on the Bowen oeuvre.

Luxuriant Landscape

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Roy Foster and Martin Mansergh are but the two most recent speakers who have found themselves perhaps for the first time in their professional lives delivering their thoughts from a pulpit. The gathering is usually sparse enough for this not to be embarrassing, and indeed the material they offered, in each case, was interesting and investigative enough to justify full scale flight into a sermon, if they had felt so inclined.

And nobody would have said a word in protest, because this is a polite audience and we are all usually, delighted just to he there.

For as long as I can remember Farahy has put on its best sunshine for the occasion the town of Doneraile glistens with good health and good husbandry, the villages of Kildorrery and Castletownroche gleam with fresh paint and rustle with the verdure of their rich, riverside pastures, the meadows are shorn to a rich golden stubble and it's all just gorgeous.

This part of North Cork is a quietly luxuriant landscape, shaded by the Ballyhouras and the Nagle mountains, and Elizabeth Bowen wrote about it, especially in Bowenscourt, with a lyrical and grateful affection.

Classical Spirit

The Annesleys have always responded to that quality in the countryside which they share with her. Proprietors of Anne's Grove and keepers of several shades most noticeably, after Elizabeth's, that of Spenser who waited and suffered at Kilcolman and wrote in the meantime about the Mulla, or Awbeg river, which rackets its way through the Annesley gardens. Jane and Patrick manage these famous acres with style.

The Grove Annesley family has been in Castletownroche since 1628, and the house in which they now live was built in the early 18th century, designed in the classical spirit yet somehow quite domestic and intimate in atmosphere. It is perched with its back to a gorge through which runs the Awbeg the river garden was created along its shores, hacked by woodland and reached by stepped paths cut into the cliff. Fronting the house the lawns of the plateau give way to farmland, but on one side a walk is bordered with a wealth of spectacular rhododendrons and azaleas, stunning in springtime and of interest throughout the year.

Anne's Grove today still looks very much as it was intended when the gardens were planned in the mid 18th century, although the seven unmarried sisters of the house decided to turn the great kitchen garden into a walled flower garden in 1864. This was further enhanced in 1907 by Richard" Grove Annesley and his wife.

Now the walled areas have some formal design in the rose g&den with its pergolas and the box edged ribbon beds, but the double herbaceous border, the soft brick steps leading up to the summerhouse ornamented with twig work and the water garden with its weeping, grafted common birch reflect the characteristic gentle elegance of the house and of the neighbourhood.

Magnificent Gardens

This year, some of those who attend the Elizabeth Bowen commemoration at 6 p.m. on Sunday, August 18th will have a chance to see the gardens for themselves, which is why Jane Annesley is wearing that abstracted look. Because Victoria Glendinning is the guest speaker for the event, and because Victoria, a noted Bowen biographer as well as being a novelist in her own right, is going to talk about Bowen and gardening and/or gardens, Jane decided to offer supper and a conducted tour of the garden as a way of raising funds to repair the church roof.

Everyone wants to go. Even those who have already seen Anne's Grove perhaps especially those who have already seen Anne's Grove are clamouring for the £20 tickets. There no charge, of course, for the service or for the lecture. That can not be missed as anyone who has read Victoria Glendinning's biography of Vita Sackville West (Vita, in Penguin) will know. The sensitivity with which she writes of Vita's creation of the great gardens at Sissinghurst is an indication of her own response to the gardening passion.

If Jane Annesley has a ticket to spare, perhaps she'll send it to Cork Co Council, which has put on record (in its recent draft development plan) its intention to investigate the development of an archive centre based on the literary heritage of North Cork Spenser, Canon Sheehan, Elizabeth Bowen, Hubert Butler (at a stretch), William Trevor and others. The little church at Farahy would not be a bad place to start.