Paul Harron discovers two recently published
books featuring County Down’s natural and historical treasures.
Travel east, travel west … County Down can be as magical and beautiful as anywhere on the planet, and you don’t need to get on a budget airline to go there. Now, thanks to the Ulster Tatler’s own arts contributor, well-known journalist and broadcaster Ian Hill, not just one but two excellent new publications have arrived to help persuade both Ulster residents and visitors alike of this truth.
Well informed
When abroad, it’s always a pleasure to discover a locally written and well informed guidebook of an area beyond the kind of standard tourist offering with its hyperbole and superlative language. These alternative publications usually follow a pattern of a personally guided, enthusiastic tour of significant places – usually going well beyond the main tourist spots – by a person with a real passion for and connection with the place; they are usually liberally sprinkled with idiosyncratic observation and snippets of local myth and legend. The tour guide can’t help themselves from sharing their favourite places and stories with you. They lend a richer experience to the visitor who goes on a journey round the place in question.
Hill knows all about the romance, mystery and heritage of both Strangford Lough and its hinterland and the Lecale area, which takes in Downpatrick, Greyabbey, Killinchy. Ardglass and Strangford Village among other places all close to the story of Ireland’s patron saint, Patrick. The writer is a resident of picturesque Strangford (indeed, he can be seen in one of the photographs enjoying a lazy morning reading the papers overlooking Horseferry Slip in the Strangford book) and his maternal and paternal ancestors hale from the Lecale. His text in both books provides exactly the kind of enthusiastic insight only found in those good local guidebooks usually found elsewhere.
For instance, in the Strangford book, Hill gives us this on the well-know landmark that is Scrabo Tower: ‘Her English coal mines, plus lands inherited from her mother the Countess of Antrim, were amongst bounties brought by Frances Anne Vane-Tempest to her marriage with a Londonderry. She protested but a chaste intimacy with Tsar Alexander of Russia and was a confidante of Prime Minister Disraeli. She funded schools and raised follies, including Scrabo Tower – built in 1858 over what was locally called the house of “the king of the fairies”, with its silver Viking hoard, and designed by Sir Charles Lanyon – to her spouse Frederick, the third Marquess. Their son, named “Young Rapid” for his antics, went mad. Below, downhill, from the ancient earthworks, in the sandstone which yielded the friable Scrabo building stone, were the footprints of reptiles from Triassic times, 200 million years ago, who walked the earth long before the Jurassic dinosaurs.’
Built and natural heritage
As evident from this extract, Strangford: Portrait of an Irish Lough not only reveals the stories and anecdotes connected with the place but is rich in its coverage of both the built and natural environments. The author – a longstanding member of the Historic Buildings and Historic Monuments Councils – is knowledgeable on the historic built environment, so he is a good guide in this regard and includes notable structures such as Mount Stewart, Grey Abbey, Nendrum, Killyleagh Castle, Inch Abbey, Down Cathedral, Castle Ward and perhaps slightly less well appreciated Kilclief Castle and Newtownards’ Dominican Priory; but on the natural environment front it is the co-creator of the book, photographer Alain Le Garsmeur, that we owe special thanks. His photographs of the natural world reproduced here are truly delightful. From seals at Bar Hall Bay to pale-bellied brent geese on the lough to a mass of golden plovers on the sand to an exquisite mass of frost-covered bladder-wrack in winter, the beauty of Strangford’s shoreline, landscape and animal life is fittingly served. Le Garsmeur – a resident of Portaferry who won a World Press Award for his photographs – is clearly both talented and just as passionate about Strangford Lough as his writer colleague.
Outstanding Beauty
The collaboration by the two has brought about a superlative publication. Praise must also be given to the Environment & Heritage Service for its support in realising such an informative and attractive publication on the area (there is a foreword by Environment Minister Arlene Foster MLA which outlines its status as both an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and a Special Area of Conservation, fitting for the largest Marine Nature Reserve in the UK) and to the publishers, Blackstaff, which has done a nice job on the design and print (and it’s great to have such a good index and bibliography included too). It is, as its back cover strapline – set across a photograph of the lush grounds of Castle Ward with the famous Portaferry boat in the foreground – says, a glorious celebration of one of the most beautiful parts of Ireland.
In Patrick’s footsteps
Lecale: St Patrick’s County Down, meanwhile, is a collaboration between Hill and Minerstown-based artist, storyteller and singer/songwriter James G. Miles, whose colourful paintings in a charming, somewhat naïf style complement the text and bring picturesque places such as Saul church, Struell Wells, Down Cathedral, Ballyduggan Mill and Ardglass’s harbour and castle to life. The book is one of Cottage Publications’ enjoyable series of local books, which have included, for example, South Belfast and East Belfast and Omagh, Cookstown and Fermanagh.
This is a bit of a dander around the Lecale area, in the footsteps of St. Patrick and perhaps a few of Van Morrison’s too, Coney Island getting a special feature spread. The text is jaunty and anecdotal, good on both information on the natural world and wildlife and the people of the area, especially the cultural luminaries over the years who are listed on the spread about Downpatrick’s distinctive Venetian Gothic-style Arts Centre dating from 1882 originally and rebuilt in the 1990s with the patronage of Henry, Lord Dunleath. We learn that painter Colin Middleton lived in Ardglass and that Leslie Montgomery came from the area – that’s Leslie Montgomery who took the pen name Lynne C. Doyle … ‘from the successful cricket club where linseed oils the bats’.
Lecale is a nice and worthy addition to this series of books and it will especially appeal to people from around County Down for whom it would make a welcome gift. Even better than that, though, the quality of information and the lively way it is presented in both word and image (and, again, congratulations to the publishers for including a useful bibliography) means that, as with Strangford, it offers visitors a guidebook to a rich and beautiful part of Ireland that is well worth having and, even better, keeping.
Strangford: Portrait of an Irish Lough is published in association with the Environment and Heritage Service by Blackstaff Press. Available in hardback it is priced at £20, and is available from all major bookshops (ISBN 978-0-85640-805-2) www.blackstaffpress.com
Lecale: St Patrick’s County Down is published by Cottage Publications and is available from all major bookshops (ISBN 978 1900935 58 6)
www.cottage-publications.com.
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