Civilization, Barbarism

Jerpoint Abbey and Kilkenny

I have never forgotten the first, evening I saw Jerpoint Abbey, close
on twenty-five years ago.

I walked up the nave, and as I was entering the chancel the tower took
a pot-shot at me with a heavy lump of stone that missed me by inches.

Usually, that sort ot behaviour in buldlngs makes me cross, but I
knew it was only trying to draw attention to the state it was
in. Ennls Abbey treated me in the same way, but we are sill friends.

CLEANED UP

Whether as a result of what I wrote some time ago about it or not,
Jerpoint is no longer so neglected. It has been cleaned up, and half
of the charming cloister re-erected.

Beautiful buildings are like women in this, that the least attention
makes them smile and preen themselves.

Within a few mlnutes after I had picked up the key, the monastery was
full of visitors, many of them students from the College of Art
accompanied by their professor, and I swear the whole church
brightened up to welcome them.

IN THE PALE

One of the delights of Jerpoint is that it is an elaborately Irish
abbey right in the heart of the Pale, with Anglo-Norman buildings all
round, and it stands up to comparison with the best of them.

It may even be more Irish than I thought when I first wrote about it,
for while our photographcr was skipping happily round the tower
and the dormitory walls, I was mooning over a mass of loose stones in
the chapter house.

I suddenly noticed one that looked peculiar and took it out to the
light to examine it. I could hardly believe what I saw, so I made
another search and discovered a second stone that resembled it. Then,
because I still wasn't sure it was possible, I asked for help from
the professor from the College of Art (He was Donal Murphy).


OLDER STYLE

You can see the two stones we were looking at for yourself in our
photograph. They are fifty years older than anything else in the
abbey: they are in the Scandinavian-lrish style, and show that
Jerpolnt Abbey was the site of an Irish monastery before ever the
Cistercians came.

Which it was, among the scores of still unidentified monasteries, I
could not guess, but it is typical of the extraordinary continuity of
historic sites In Ireland from pagan to modern times.


BOLD LINES

Jerpoint was built by the same masons who built Baltinglass Abbey. By
a curious coincidence Baltinglass has lost its north nave arcade,
Jerpoint its south. Both have the same bold simple lines, so different
from the elegance of the Anglo-Norman work in Kilkenny and
Graiguenamanagh. Not that it makes much difference who built what.

The superb tower of Jerpoint is 15th century work but it matches
perfectly the church of earlier times. One good style of architecture
or sculpture always blends well with another; the only things that
never blend are the good and the bad.


FINE DETAIL

But In Jerpoint it is really the detail that captures your attention
at once. Even at the base of the rather skinny east window, which
replaced a fine bold one corresponding to the west window, there is a
beautiful angel figure. (That on the other side has been chopped away
to make room for a plaque).

There is a superb head of Christ, which was broken off some other
monument, and a strange tortured Crucifixion that has lost its arms.

Most remarkable perhaps is the wonderful “Brothers” tomb slab, to two
knights killed together in battle. Of course, we are not seeing this
as it should be seen. It is the equivalent of the contemporary brasses
in English churches and in its original form it was polished to the
smoothness of brass and the incised lines were filled with red wax.

SENUOUS CHARM

There nre several examples of work by this mason to be seen in
 Kilkenny: one broken fragment inside the west door of Kilkenny
 cathedral shows only the drapery about a pair of raised hands, but,
 like the figures from Cashel that I illustrated last week, even the
 drapery has a strange, romantic, sensuous charm.

I think this may well be the greatest gift the Anglo-Normans brought
us. It is in the contemporary poetry of the Earl of Desmond
also—
  O'Brien's harp at drinking time,
  The water lapping on the stone,
  The sound of the Ennis Abbey bell;
  These are the music I have known.

But even the cloisters, which belong to the last period of native
Irish sculpture and are sometimes crude and clumsy, were once a sort
of Canterbury Tales in stone, with knights, abbots, ladles, bishops
and clowns alternating about them, and are well worth close
study. Mr. Le Clerc’s fine restoration is one of the few virtuous
deeds of our time.

When foreign visitors ask where they should go in Ireland, I never
tell them about Connemara or Donegal, where they go anyway, but about
Kilkenny, which comes closest to my idea of what Ireland in the late
Middle Ages was like. Unfortunately, it doesn't come close enough.


BUTLER TOMB

I led our photographer into St. Canice’s Cathedral to get a photograph
of (the Butler double tomb which we reproduce, and which shows
something you would have seen in any Irish church before the
Reformation.

You don't see it much now; I know of scores of such beautiful tombs
and think I could find hundreds more, lying in ruined buildings under
the open sky with a notice to say the ruins are a /sead-chomhartha
naisiunta,/ whatever the blazes sead-chomhartha is or whatever good
the sign does to the works of art inside.


BARBARiSM 

Afterwards, we went W St. John's Church, which Is a /sead-chomhartha
naisiunta/. Our photographer needed no assistance from me.

“This it what you want, I think,” he said, and took the photograph of
the double tomb you see.

I don't think the scores of think," he
said, and took the visitors I saw In the last few _nhoto?raph of the
double tomb weeks nt placcB like Clonmacyou see. _nols, _Cashel and
Jerpoint

The difference between the two photographs seems to me to be precisely
the difference betweem civilization and barbarism.  In the athmosphere
of the second it was merely a detail that the fine east window, built
by the masons who worked on Cashel Cathredral, seemed in grave danger
of collapsing.


IN FRANCE

A few years ago in France I went to see a Cistercian abbey. It had
been in ruins, but the owners had restored it carefully and charged
the equivalent of half a crown to visitors. It was well worth the half
crown, and I amd sure the owners found it a very profitable
investment.

But as I went over it, studying the details, I kept thinking that it
wasn’t within miles of being as interesting as Jerpoint, as Kilcooley,
as Holy Cross or Boyle or Graiguenamanagh or Knockmoy.


TRUE REALISTS

I don’t think the scores of visitors I saw in the last few weeks at
places like Clonmacnois, Cashel, and Jerpoint would have grudged their
half crown to see even one Irish church as it should be seen, roofed
and floored and glazed, with the remains of its tombs and statuary
taken out of the rain and placed where they could be seen in comfort.

Or am I really only an elderly dreamer, and are the Commissioners of
Public Works who allow us to be held up to public disgrace, the true
realists who know what the plain people of Ireland are like?


Sunday Independent, 1964-06-28, pp.10,11