Ireland: Day 6 – Wednesday, July 4, 2007

Today I woke up around 10am and biked to Delia’s house. It’s about 20 miles give or take. On the way, between Beltra and Dromard a kind gentleman from New York by the name of Pat Boyland was walking on the road and we chatted and he invited me in for a cup of tea and a ham sandwich (this must be a pretty typical lunch around here). He spends his summers here and his winters at his home in New York, although he was born a county over in County Leitrim. His wife wasn’t coming over from the states for a few more weeks so he was living alone and enjoyed the company. We talked by the fireside about differences between the states and here.

Down the road in Skreen I took the detour to see Adamnan’s Holy Well and the 14th century Church of Ireland founded by St. Adamnan himself. The guide book said it was a ruined church, but it clearly was still being used for weekly service.

For the past couple days my leg muscles have been killing me from the cycling so you can bet I was pretty exhausted by the time I got to Easky. I stopped in Easky first because I wanted to see if I could find the graveyard where my great-grandfather was buried. Turns out that I did find it, but I didn’t find any Feeney’s in it on first glance and continued on down the road to examine the other graveyards in the town. I found a few Feeney’s in the other ones, but not the Feeney’s I was looking for.

So on to Delia’s I went. A little red car drove by as I was on her road, and as it turns out the driver was Ivan, Delia’s son. So I got to meet him today. They invited me in to relax with as much pure spring water as I wanted (their house has a nice spring well attached) and some more ham sandwiches, which I dared to try with some Irish coleslaw on top. The time was a quarter to six in the evening: it had taken me nearly 8 hours on my journey because I was in first gear most of the way, walking up hills, not to mention all of those little stops along the way.

Ivan was nice enough to drive me around a bit. We went to see the stone watchtower ruin on the Easky beachhead and the ruin of Dowd Castle, and stopped for drinks in Inishcrone. Inishcrone, much like Easky, has various ways you can “correctly” spell it. We then went to the Roslea graveyard where I had stopped earlier and he showed me some of the family plots, although we missed my great-grandfather’s again, getting him mixed up with my great uncle by the same name. We also stopped at the Feeney Farm which hadn’t been remodeled too much to my delight. There were even some trunks in the barn that I was able to rummage through.

It gave me a good feeling of what life would have been like for my family back then. The primary school was next door, so you can imagine the kids walking through the yard to get there in the morning. It is not the same school it was when they were there – a fire burned it down in 1966 – but it is still in the same location, and it’s where Delia and her brothers and sisters and her children all went.

We then had dinner – scrambled eggs and toast – and started filling in the blanks on my family tree. I got the names of everyone living (i.e. I filled downward since I filled sideways last time I was here) and then we discussed as much upward as she knew. I still couldn’t break my great-grandfather, but I was able to confirm that John Connolly was my great-grandmother’s brother and that she had another brother named Michael. We also got Jerry Toher, the guy who drove me back to Sligo the other day, onto the tree through Delia’s mother’s side and discussed the origin of the Feeney name. The two told me that it was a 100% Irish name, deriving from the Gaelic word “fenian” meaning rebel, the people who fought against the English invasions back in the day. They supported my westward migration theory, saying that the Feeney’s were driven out of their past homeland by the English.

We also discussed a great many non-family things, from Bush and drafts to accents and rural life. Ivan and I got along well, talking for a few hours past when Delia went to bed. We didn’t retire for the night until 2am. A makeshift bed was setup for me in the unfinished bathroom.