In early December 2022, William Bulfin’s grandson Michael and I made our way by car from his home in Dublin to visit the ancestral home of the Bulfin family, Derrinlough House in Co Offaly. I had first read of it some decades previously, and now, finally, I was en route to visit it for the first time.
It had special significance for me because I had recently completed a biography of William Bulfin, author of Rambles in Éirinn, and the house in which he had been born and lived, in both his earlier and later life, and in which he died, figured prominently in its pages.
Bulfin left Ireland for Argentina in 1884, aged 21, and did not return on a visit until 1902. During those 18 years he worked initially as a sheep herder and foreman at an estancia (ranch) in Buenos Aires province. But then, having discovered a talent for writing, and encouraged by his fiancee, Annie O’Rourke, he turned to journalism, in 1892 joining the staff of local English-language newspaper The Southern Cross, of which he became manager and assistant editor.
As a working journalist, Bulfin wrote his descriptive, illuminating and socially critical Sketches of Buenos Aires, depictions of life in the city at that time, as well as many articles and editorials.
In January 1896 he bought out the previous incumbent and took over as editor of the newspaper. He used the earlier experiences he had working on sheep runs and as a ranch hand to compose short stories initially printed in The Southern Cross, and then as material for his collection of short stories, Tales of the Pampas, published in London in 1901, which was a critical success but sold disappointingly.
The following year, shortly after his return to Ireland, he began his bicycle trips around the country. He had become interested in cycling in the late 1890s and described in one of his sketches how a “bicycle parade” took place every Sunday morning in Palermo Park, Buenos Aires. Perhaps anticipating Myles na gCopaleen in style and content, he declared: “The bicycle is the sort of affair from which a man like Swedenborg, for example, would have extracted 12 or 14 volumes. I calculate, too, that had Herbert Spencer known the wheel, he would have constructed a synthetic library out of its endless sensuosities.”
Bulfin had left his newspaper in the hands of an inexperienced assistant editor but in order to continue contributing from abroad, “with the sole object of sharing the writer’s thoughts and feelings with certain Irish exiles on the other side of the world”, he conceived the idea of cycling around the country and describing his sorties in articles sent back to the newspaper.
He was not the first of the Argentine Irish to compose such material. According to Thomas Murray, whose knowledge and presentation of matters Hiberno-Argentine was encyclopedic, Edward Mulhall, Irish editor of the Buenos Aires Standard, visited Ireland in 1875 and wrote a very interesting series of travel articles for his paper, some of which he headed Rambles in Ireland. Murray asserts that Bulfin followed pretty much the same course but called his work Rambles in Éirinn.
Lest he give the impression that Bulfin plagiarised the idea, or even the work, Murray adds soothingly: “The latter was probably quite unconscious that he was in many places following in the footsteps of the former and sometimes almost copying him.” Given that Mulhall’s articles were published when Bulfin was 12 years old, it is unlikely that he ever read them.
A considerable number of Bulfin’s tours were undertaken on his 1902 trip, and more on a second visit to Ireland in 1904–05. On his first sojourn he visited locations in Counties Offaly, Westmeath, Longford and Roscommon, and along the Shannon, but he also made longer forays to Dublin, Sligo, Galway and to the north.
He did not always travel the full way to his destination by bicycle – as, for example on his Galway trip, when he described how he was “met off the train” by Douglas Hyde. He took his bicycle with him on occasion to use it on arrival, as on his Ulster trip, where the weather defeated two attempts to get there under his own power.
The articles were already making their way back to The Southern Cross during his 1902 stay and he spent Christmas that year writing up more at Derrinlough, working eight or nine hours a day. On his return to Argentina his articles continued to be printed in the Cross for several months.
During his second trip, Bulfin went “cyc-rambling” again and composed further articles. He combined this Irish sojourn with a side visit (from and back to Ireland) to the United States, and while there, owing to a previously expressed interest, because The Southern Cross was read in North America, he visited the offices of the New York Daily News and arranged for the serial publication of 20 to 25 of his Rambles articles.
[ Irish in Argentina: Not always a successful diaspora storyOpens in new window ]
On his voyage back to South America he was busy describing his recent experiences in Ireland, writing on board RMS Panama off Pernambuco to his wife, Annie, that he had finished his Limerick article, was ready to start on his article on Charles Kickham, and hoped to finish another six before reaching Uruguay. As the ship entered Montevideo harbour, he confirmed that he had succeeded in finishing the sixth article, “all but a few folios”, which was “over 70 columns of matter for the S Cross and all original material”.
The publication in the US newspaper led to readers suggesting that his Rambles be published in book form, and there were similar suggestions from Ireland and Argentina. An offer, which included an American edition, came from Gill in Dublin, which he accepted, finalising the work for publication and checking the proofs in Derrinlough on his visit home in the winter and spring of 1906–07. Publication followed in July 1907.
Reaction from the Irish nationalist press at home and the emigrant press in the US was highly favourable, though the local unionist press does not appear to have reviewed the book. Gill’s edition went into seven impressions, an Irish-language translation – Cam-chuarta i n-Éirinn – came out in 1936, and a new edition, in two volumes, was published by Sphere in 1981.
The best notes are not the ones that people jot down on paper. The best notes are the ones that soak into you
— William Bulfin
On his final return to Ireland in 1909, Bulfin continued roving and writing – paying a special visit back to the north in September 1909, where many had complained that he had not done justice to the province of Ulster, with his emphasis on its industry and commercialism and “business, business, business”. He was assisted in this by the antiquarian Francis Joseph Bigger, who showed him around key locations.
“Sean Ghall” (Henry Egan Kenny) states in his introduction to the 1907 Gill edition of Rambles in Éirinn that Bulfin’s new and more positive vision of the north never made it to paper because it was crowded out by other work, but Patrick Callan assures us that the work was published as further instalments of Rambles in the Sinn Féin weekly edition.
Patrick Keohane, manager of Gill and a personal friend of Bulfin, who travelled with him to Ulster on his second visit, wrote that Bulfin had a marvellous memory, which enabled him to recall incidents and personalities “with the greatest minuteness and accuracy after the lapse of years”, and he never found it necessary to make a single note of the scenes and events “so graphically portrayed in his Rambles in Éirinn”.
When Bulfin was on a long horse-riding expedition under primitive conditions to the far west of Argentina in 1905, one of his fellow travellers, an uneducated Genoese who had learned with surprise and even suspicion that Bulfin was a writer and who had previously understood, or heard, that those who write take notes, remarked that he was making none. Bulfin answered that he was making notes.
“How can that be? You have not touched paper since we left San Rafael [several days previously].”
“What of that? The best notes are not the ones that people jot down on paper. The best notes are the ones that soak into you.”
“Soak into you, eh?”
“Aye, just soak in. Those are the essential things. The other things – the unimportant and valueless things – do not soak in. They stay out of your mind and do not trouble you when you come to write. And so, buenas noches.”
“Buenas noches, and may you rest well, eh,” the other answered, intrigued by this idea that all the mountains and rivers “and tales and breakfasts”, and the travellers themselves and the people in whose humble home they were then in, were all “soaking in” to this man.
The Rambles are not presented in chronological order but in an order that Bulfin felt would give variety and interest to the reader, which the book certainly provides. Whether extrapolating on the Ireland of his day or on its history, ancient or modern, or on geographical and agricultural, social or literary aspects of the places he visited, or on his encounters with people of various social levels, the charm and humour is mixed with a biting criticism, particularly of landlordism and the Anglo-Irish, of “shoneenism”, and of the political and economic systems of his day.
Bulfin himself believed that his “wild cycling trips” in Ireland contributed to a bout of rheumatic fever he suffered in 1906 in Argentina. On his final return to Ireland in 1909, he again took up residence in Derrinlough, having settled back in Ireland to devote himself and his pen to the cause of Irish nationalism, though he kept his interest in The Southern Cross, of which he was still proprietor.
Sadly, following a trip to the US to raise funds for Arthur Griffith’s newspaper, the Sinn Féin daily edition, Bulfin, who was well over six feet tall, had a commanding, though benign, presence and was of an active, martial and muscular appearance, fell ill with a second bout of rheumatic fever and died in Derrinlough on February 1st, 1910.
Readers of the 21st century deserve to read Bulfin’s work. Therefore, let his impressions of Ireland “soak in” to you, as the rain may soak in to those cyclists who take to the roads to follow in his wheel tracks, though cyclists are generally better outfitted nowadays than in his time.
Cycling in Ireland, whether as sport or recreation, instead of simply getting from A to B, has become increasingly popular, and there is room here to perpetuate Bulfin’s memory. A Bulfin Heritage Cycle Rally, In the Wheel Rims of William Bulfin, has taken place several times over the past few years as part of National Heritage Week. One such rally, in 2021, had to be postponed due to inclement weather, an echo of Bulfin’s own experience, and suggesting, rightly or wrongly, that the weather in Ireland, at least, has not changed much since his day.
Michael Bulfin and I reached Derrinlough in about two hours, with stops, from Dublin, something that took his grandfather a full day by bicycle. There it stood: a very large two-storey farmhouse dating back to the end of the 18th century, the main facade looking much as it did in William’s time.
Rambles in Éirinn by William Bulfin is published by Merrion Press
