Quinagh, Co Carlow

Today we are staying with my cousin, Kay Stanley and her husband, Alan. We woke up to sunshine through the shutters of their house in Quinagh, just outside Carlow town, an hour’s drive southwest of Dublin. 

  

My mother was born in Carlow in 1917, and Kay is the oldest child of mom’s brother, Michael Bergin. In Elizabethan times, Carlow had the distinction of being the southern edge of The Pale, the area around Dublin under English control. (Thus the phrase, “beyond the pale” means outside the bounds of acceptable behavior, i.e., where the wild Irish were.) Kay and Alan’s house isn’t quite that old, but Alan estimates it was built between 1780 and 1800 and might have been the house of the gamekeeper to the landlord and member of the local gentry, named Henry Bruen, who in the 1700s owned vast tracts of land in the area. 

              

Bruen’s grandfather had come to Ireland with Cromwell’s army and stayed. Bruen himself became rich as a deputy quartermaster in the British army during the American Revolutionary War, skimming profits off the provisioning he did of horses, food, and other supplies for British troops. Alan’s father bought the house and small surrounding farm in the 1920s from a family that had been tenant farmers of the Bruens, until one of the Irish Land Acts gave them ownership. Alan, in turn, bought the house and land from his father not long after he and Kay were married in 1968 (a marriage considered scandalous at the time because Alan was Protestant and Kay Catholic).  In the 1970s, Alan and Kay made the last payment on the 99-year deed that had granted to that long-ago tenant farmer.

In the afternoon, we drove south to Kilkenny with another cousin, Breda Bergin, and her husband, Tom King. Like me, Breda just retired from her job at the end of last year, and she and Tom are getting used to being home together. Tom retired from his job as Librarian for the County Carlow libraries six years ago. We had lunch together at an Italian restaurant in Kilkenny and then went back to their house to catch up. They have a collection of thousands of books and when I mentioned the Bruens, who had owned the Stanley land, Tom was able to pull down a book about States Dyckman (an American loyalist at the time of our revolution), which contained the information about Quarter-Master Bruen.