It may seem like an unseasonal hobby. Seeking out graveyards and searching through their long damp grass of a summertime in Ireland. No beach for me with its tedious horizon and throbbing ennui. Give me the name of some historical figure and send me to find his or her grave. It has its rewards. On this trip to Ireland, I had two names in mind, John Palliser and William F. Butler.
Palliser was born in 1817, descendant of a Protestant clergyman who had arrived in Ireland in the 17th century. Though born in Dublin, Palliser’s family roots lay between the Galty and Comeragh Mountains. The area forms part of the Goldenvale, the richest farmland in Ireland. If his surname rings a bell, its because the prolific English novelist Anthony Trollope borrowed it for the main character in his ‘Parliamentary’ novels that were popularised by a BBC dramatisation in 1974, The Pallisers. (Trollope’s fifteen year stay in Ireland saw him develop as both a public servant and novelist).
Palliser shared in the outdoor pursuits of his landed peers, in which horsemanship was a prized skill and hunting an obsession. His love of hunting took him to the prairies of North America in 1847. Longing to return there, his proposed expedition to British Northern America was sponsored by the Colonial Office as a scientific one that also had the ulterior purpose of projecting British sovereignty above the yet to be defined border of the 49th parallel separating British North America from the United States.
Palliser’s report of three years’ exploration between 1857 and 1860 was a landmark, opening the way to eventual settlement of what became Alberta. Irene Spry’s history of the expedition details the thrills, dangers, and hardships of the expedition, led with exemplary diplomacy and tact on the part of Palliser (The Pallister Expedition, The Dramatic Story of Western Canadian Exploration 1857-1860 (Toronto, 1963)). His leadership skills were tested in territory that suffered lawlessness and much conflict between Indigenous communities and interloping hunters and traders, including those from the United States. Whiskey as a trade commodity caused untold social damage. Palliser’s hunting skills were put to good use helping to feed the expedition members with bison, deer, wapiti, mountain goat, sheep, wild fowl, fish and just about anything else edible. His knowledge of horses ensured success in trading for replacement stock from the local Cree and Blackfoot.
After further adventures, notably hunting in Russian territories, Palliser spent the end of his days in Comeragh House, trying as best he could to manage his heavily mortgaged estates. I was keen to find the grave of this consequential but largely forgotten figure.
According to the RIA’s online Dictionary of Irish Biography (DIB), Palliser was buried in 1887 in Kilrossanty Church of Ireland Cemetery. Google Maps put it northwest off the N25, west of Kilmacthomas and near Lemybrien. It was a fine sunny day. Under the Comeragh Mountains, the narrow roads with their high hedgerows and overarching trees wound gently uphill. After a bit of back and forth, we found the gates across from a cottage (the Sexton’s house, said a sign) that led to the chapel and graveyard. The grass was lush and deep, though generally the graveyard looked well kept. The chapel was locked, with tell-tale cobwebs across its keyhole. Inside, the pews were still there as if waiting for the return of the local gentry in carriages, horses, and Sunday finery. Beneath tall pines we found the Palliser grave, a low crypt enclosed by a modest railing. A bronze plaque had been placed there. The legend said that it had been presented in August 1977 by the Province of Alberta to honour Palliser’s expedition as a significant contribution to the development of the Province. Lingering at Palliser’s grave brought a sense of intimacy with the vivid accounts of his adventures in the prairies of the Northwest.
Next on my list was the final resting place of William Francis Butler. He was born in Golden, Co Tipperary in 1838. While the Butler was a prestigious and storied one in Ireland, his family were a cadet branch without much wealth. His father was a substantial farmer though he rented far more land than he owned. Butler had to make his own way in the world and his thirst for adventure brought him to a career in the British Army, despite the disadvantages of being a Catholic and without the money to buy an officer’s rank. Though a Catholic and a Home Ruler, his adventurous life as an officer of the British Army had not only taken him to Canada but involved him in some of the seminal colonial events of the British Empire in the latter half of the 19th century: rebellions in Burma and India, attempting to rescue General Gordon in Sudan via Egypt (where he recruited Canadian voyageurs to man a fleet of boats), fighting the Ashanti in West Africa, and reluctantly countering the Boers in South Africa.
In 1870 Butler had been engaged as an intelligence officer by the leader of a military expedition to confront Louis Riel, the Métis leader who had led the resistance to settlement around the Red River settlement (today’s Winnipeg). Riel’s provisional government was instrumental in creating the Province of Manitoba, but the Act establishing it contained no amnesty for his actions. The expedition was led by Dublin man Garnet Wolseley, regarded as the most capable British Army officer of his generation. Public opinion in the US gleefully assumed failure. Wolseley proved his mettle by successfully leading 1100 troops supported by 400 voyagers from Lake Superior to Fort Garry, building 40 miles of road and undertaking 47 porterages. Riel had fled to the US by the time Wolseley arrived at Fort Garry, but the expedition was a key event in the colonisation of the prairies. Butler’s role had been to explore the territory in advance of Wolseley, in the course of which he met Riel (it is fair to say Butler was unimpressed). He was then commissioned by the Lt Governor to continue his explorations. Butler’s recommendations led to the creation of the Northwest Mounted Police, later the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Through it all, Butler kept up his writing. His account of his adventures in the prairies of the Northwest, The Great Lone Land, had been a bestseller. It remains today an immersive read, full of descriptive gems, and suffused with much admiration for Indigenous life and sorrow at its inevitable extirpation by white settlers. Butler’s sympathies were influenced by his upbringing. His father had impoverished the family by charitable donations during the Great Famine. He had brought his young son to see the terrors of evictions which left an indelible mark on Butler and a sympathy for the oppressed and the doomed. In his writings, Butler is clear about the savagery of the white settlers and his doubts of the true values of Victorian progress, however inexorable its course. He seemed happiest travelling alone in the untamed wilderness of the Canadian Northwest. Butler’s novel, Red Cloud, The Solitary Sioux, was on the syllabus of Irish secondary schools up to the 1930s.
On retirement from his successful military with the rank of Lt General and a knighthood, Butler lived at Bansha Castle, Co Tipperary, near his birthplace at Golden and purchased for him by the British Government as a house of favour. He died there in 1910, and was buried locally with an impressive military escort. The DIB noted his burial at Killardrigh (from the Irish for church of the high king). This proved hard to find because the cemetery is locally called Killaldriffe. However, find it we did, with the lavender backdrop of the Galty Mountains resplendent under a bright blue sky. A stone plaque cemented into the wall of the cemetery reads: “This is the burial place of Lt Gen William Francis Butler…famous soldier, author, Irishman.” It quotes a poem by Butler found among his papers with the plea to “give me but six foot three (one inch to spare)/ of Irish ground, and dig it anywhere/and for my poor Irish soul say an Irish prayer/above the spot.”
We found his grave beneath a modest Celtic Cross at the far end of the graveyard, overlooking the rich pastures of the Goldenvale. There is a heavily overgrown early medieval church ruin in the graveyard but it was clear too that the cemetery has been in use continuously to the present day.
Nearby, I found Bansha Castle but circumstances meant I could only see it from the outside. We repaired to our accommodation at nearby Bansha House, run by the marvelously hospitable Mary Marnane. In the sitting room, surrounded by memorabilia of the grand old house’s horse-rearing and horse-racing legacy, which continues to this day, we met another guest, Claire from the US, whose great, great, great, grandfather was Darby Ryan. In two hours’ time, his famous 1830 lyric ‘The Peeler and the Goat’ was to be commemorated at the local Church of Ireland in the heart of the village. (The Wolf Tones put its mocking lines to music in a rousing, tongue-twisting rendition, available on YouTube.) We couldn’t resist Claire’s invitation and joined the large crowd at Ryan’s grave and later in the church, now a community centre, packed for talks about Ryan with a keynote address by Tipperary historian Denis Marnane. It is one of the wonderful features of many small Irish towns and villages that local history generates both expertise and popularity.
The historical connections between the southeast of Ireland and Canada are deep. In the 17th century, fishermen from Waterford and Wexford were the first Irish in Newfoundland, there for its great shoals of enormous cod. After the rebellion of 1798 and the dissolution of the Irish Parliament, there was a virtual exodus from south Wicklow and Wexford, many Protestant farmers. Recession in Ireland after the end of the Napoleonic Wars boosted emigration, and the religious balance shifted to Catholic emigrants in the 1820s, drawn by employment on Canada’s canals and fortifications, and available land for farming. Irish soldiers fighting in the British Army were settled in British North America to help deter any thoughts of invasion and annexation by Washington. This strategy of fortification and settlement was devised by Irishman, the Duke of Wellington whose influence on the development of Canada in the 1820s and 1830s was profound. Irish Catholic tenants from Wicklow (such as the Coollattin estate of the Fitzwilliams) were subsidised to emigrate to Ontario in the late 1840s and 1850s to speed the switch to pasturage.
John Palliser and William Butler were just a part then of the very significant Irish contribution to the development of Canada that stretched over three centuries. While some 109,000 Irish Famine refugees arrived in Canada in 1847, twenty percent of whom would die in the process, the year marked the end of major Irish emigration to Canada. Much of the Irish contribution to Canada has been forgotten, as has so much of what happened in Ireland in the decades prior to the Famine. It was also obscured by the centrality of the US in emigration from Ireland for the second half of the 19th century. This is the way of things. History moves on and contemporary events and concerns rewrite history. What was significant previously loses relevance, just as the obscure can gain significance and prominence in official narratives, the stories we tell ourselves.
The next morning, we set out find two nearby sites that in their own way illustrated this point. Knockgraffon proved elusive, though I knew it was near Bansha. Our drive spiraled into a tightening circle on our target, a tree-covered prominent hill. Suddenly a finely preserved Norman tower sprung into view. I knew that the Butlers had built one at Knockgraffon. A short drive further along the road revealed a stumpy hill, not looking at all significant with its thick hedging. Yet that was Knockgraffon. The name means the Hill of the Rath of Fionn. In Gaelic Ireland, for centuries before the arrival of the Normans in 1169-70, this Hill was central to the O’Sullivan rulers of the area. It was the site of the inauguration of their kings. As I climbed the short, sharp slope to its top, I could see why. The summit presented a fine 360-degree view of the surrounding land, rich and fertile all the way to the slopes of the Galty mountains. Part of the regnal inauguration in Gaelic Ireland was the candidate holding a white wand and pointing to all points of his kingdom. The emergence of nearby Cashel as the centre for the kings of Munster and the defeat of the O’Sullivans by the Normans robbed Knockgraffon of its role. The O’Sullivans were forced to decamp to the wilds of Kerry. The Butlers claimed the land and built their tower at Knockgraffon, part of the defensive network that spread out from their famously impregnable castle at Cahir.
Heading north toward Golden, we found Athassel Priory. Across a dung-strewn field that was mercifully dry underfoot, we crossed a delightful stone footbridge and through the stone-arched ruin of a gatehouse. The extent of the site was unexpected and impressive. Even more so were the ruins of the many magnificent buildings that had comprised the Abbey complex. I had not expected anything on this scale, though Athassel had been Ireland’s largest priory. It was founded by William de Burgh right at the outset of Norman colonisation. The sheer height of some of the remains was stunning (photos on my instagram account, eamonnseye). I tried to imagine the priory in its heyday. It must have been magnificent: So large and well endowed it generated a sizeable town in its environs. When it was dissolved in 1537, the lands went to the loyal Butlers.
Athassel has been ruins for centuries and its significance lost, its fame eclipsed in the modern imagination by earlier Christian monasteries like Clonmacnoise. The latter fit the official narrative of Independent Ireland in a way that an Augustinian priory at the heart of Norman Ireland could not. The de Burghs became Burkes, now regarded as indisputably Irish, just like the Butlers. What we remember is a matter of selection, how we remember a matter of choice.
I left the beautiful area of the Comeragh and Galty mountains satisfied with small objectives achieved. I mentally checked the possibility that at some future point the graves of Palliser and Butler will feature in an Irish-Canadian heritage trail. I wondered too about how we designate so many of them and their peers as Anglo-Irish, not simply Irish, or even in some references as British. The so-called Anglo-Irish had been in Ireland for many generations, even centuries. The Butlers had been Old English, descendants of the Normans and other early English colonisers, but had kept their Catholic faith. So, William could be Irish but Palliser, a Protestant, Anglo-Irish: Questions of history, historiography, even of philosophy but hardly irrelevant to the politics and future of our island.
Thinking about the Irish in Canada, about the imperial Irish, Protestant and Catholic alike, I find to be endlessly enriching. It is a gateway into our own history and role in the British Empire. The imperial Irish far outnumbered those aligned with republicanism, in careers and activities if not beliefs. As I have written elsewhere, Canada was the future Ireland never had, displaced by the dramatic paradigm shift triggered by the Easter Rising in 1916 and all that flowed from it. After a hundred years of Independence, I think we are ready to embrace the complexity of our past. We are free to choose to find a place for figures like Palliser and Butler.
Eamonn
Rathfarnham, 28 August 2023
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