The Woman Who Saved A Celtic Festival

Céad Míle Fáilte, and you are very welcome to this week’s Letter from Ireland. We’re into the second week of August, and here in Cork the barley is turning colour in the fields around us. The evenings are drawing in by a minute or two each night, though you would hardly notice it yet. How are things in your part of the world today?

We have passed through the turning point in the year that gave this month its Irish name: Lúnasa. Lúnasa is still the Irish word for the month of August, and that goes back to the old Celtic word Lughnasa, the great festival that once marked the beginning of the harvest across much of Ireland.

I’m having a cup of Barry’s tea as I write this morning, and I do hope you’ll have a cup of whatever you fancy as we start today’s letter. Given the time of year, I’d like to share a story about a woman from north County Dublin who gave the best part of her life to making sure that the festival of Lughnasa was not forgotten.

A Festival Hiding in Plain Sight

For many of our rural Irish ancestors, the beginning of August brought a particular kind of relief. July was always the hungry month, when the old potatoes might be running out and the new crop was not yet ready. Then came the first of the new potatoes and the promise of the grain harvest, and people could begin to breathe a little easier. In many parts of Ireland, they climbed the hills to mark it. They picked fraughans (wild bilberries) on the high ground and gathered for courting, music and dancing before the hard work of saving the harvest began.

The customs varied from place to place. Some gatherings took place on hilltops or beside holy wells. Others became fairs, pilgrimages or days when people simply came together at a place that had been important for longer than anyone could remember.

If you’ve ever heard of “Reek Sunday”, the climb up Croagh Patrick in County Mayo on the last Sunday of July, then you may already have met one of the most famous survivals associated with Lughnasa. Folklorists recognise in that Christian pilgrimage a continuation of the much older tradition of gathering on high ground at the beginning of the harvest.

By the early years of the last century, however, many of the smaller gatherings were dwindling, and the older meanings attached to them were becoming harder to recover. Customs that had once been carried in living memory were being reduced to fragments: a day on the calendar, a climb up a hill, an old name whose meaning nobody quite remembered.

Máire MacNeill and the Long Walk Through the Archive

Máire MacNeill was born in Portmarnock, County Dublin, in 1904, a daughter of Eoin MacNeill, a scholar of early Ireland. She grew up in a house where history and mythology were not just academic pursuits but were discussed around the dinner table each night.

In 1935, she became office manager of the newly formed Irish Folklore Commission, and somewhere in the years that followed she set herself the enormous task of gathering every surviving scrap of information about the Lughnasa festival that could still be found. She searched through folklore collectors’ notebooks and old written accounts, and gathered the memories of country people. Then she traced the places where the customs had once lived.

She found surviving traditions and associations at some 195 sites across the country. They included mountains and pilgrimage trails, holy wells, lakes, rivers and fairs – each preserving some fragment of the season’s older meaning.

The book she compiled from her research and travels was called The Festival of Lughnasa, and it came out in 1962. It is one of those rare books that catches a world while it is changing. Because she gathered the evidence and shared it in her book, we still know something of what people in many parts of Ireland did around the beginning of August and the meanings they attached to it.

Máire married an American poet, John L. Sweeney, and spent a number of years living near Boston before coming home to Ireland to spend her final years in Corofin, County Clare. She died there in 1987. Her name never became as widely known as the world of knowledge she helped to capture, as is often the way with Ireland’s preservation heroes.

What Slips Away in a Single Generation

So, in preparation for this article, I’ve been thinking about her all week, and about how quickly these things can change. Máire MacNeill worked at a moment when the living memory of many local customs was dying out. People still remembered the gatherings, the names and the old practices, but often only through a fragment here and a fragment there.

But Máire recognised that what was ordinary knowledge in one generation could become a mystery to the next.

I guess the customs and traditions within our own families are no different. So much of what makes your people themselves – the sayings, the small customs, the reason behind a name or a habit, or a story always told at a certain time of year – tends to live only in the memory of the oldest person at the table.

When they go, it often goes with them, unless somebody thinks to write it down. Máire MacNeill did for a nation what each of us can do, in a smaller but equally important way, for a single family.

So, let me leave you with one question this Lúnasa:

Who is the Máire MacNeill of your family – the person making sure that its stories, customs and small truths are not lost?

Maybe it’s you. Maybe it is a role you inherited from someone else. Or maybe there is another family member whom everyone turns to when they want to check a family fact, remember an old story or understand why something was always done in a particular way.

Do leave your answer or a comment below.

Thank you for reading and sharing this letter.

Slán for now,

Mike