In my recently published memoir, Not Making Hay, I mentioned how the fields on our Monaghan farm all had names, usually borrowed from the nearest neighbour: “Lennon’s”, “Cassidy’s”, “Kerley’s” etc. An apparent exception was the drumlin-topping “Cornfield”, which seemed rooted in the soil, although as I said in the book, “I never saw any corn in it.”
Well, every day is a school day. And as I now know, thanks to the indefatigable Joe Callan of the Patrick Kavanagh Centre, our Cornfield should also have had an apostrophe-s. For it turns out that the Cornfields were people too. On the local landlords’ estate maps from the early 1800s, one of them is the listed tenant of the field in question.
It’s an old English surname, derived from proximity to cornfields or from work as a harvester. And either way, it’s very rare in Ireland. But the Carrickmacross Cornfields were a colourful crop who flourished for a time in the middle decades of the 19th century.
A William Cornfield appears in newspaper archives as a witness in an 1829 murder trial. Almost half a century later, another William was a noted athlete on local sports days, finishing second in a 100-yard sprint of 1875 and performing creditably in a sack race before falling over.
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Then there was “Billy Cornfield”, who became a media celebrity for a time as a sportsman of the hunting, shooting and fishing kind. He was also an occasional feature of court reports in the Dundalk Democrat newspaper, where his address is sometimes given as “Versailles”.
There is no Versailles on any map of Carrick, old or new. The name appears to be a jocose reference to the suburb officially known as Mullinary, whose greatest claim to modern fame was producing Fr Dougal, or at least his alter ego Ardal O’Hanlon.
But its grandiose pseudonym in the Democrat serves as a key to decode the work of a satirist who wrote for the paper circa 1875 under the byline “Frederick”.
Frederick’s regular columns included “An Hour in Carrickmacross Courthouse”, which treated the workings of the law as vaudeville theatre, in which the same beloved characters turned up every week to play their parts. The typical crime was being “on the ran-tan” – one of many euphemisms for public drunkenness – or occasionally participating in a “mill” (ie a fight).
Frederick reported these in high-flown language, laced with classical references and poetry. A case involving one Phil Clarke, for example, inspired him to quote the following verse: “Colder than the wind that freezes,/Founts that but now in sunshine played,/Is the congealing pang that seizes,/The trusting bosom when betrayed.”
Returning to prose, that report concluded: “Phil left next day for Her Majesty’s Royal Hotel, Monaghan, where he will be the guest of Mr Temple for the next six weeks.” There was, of course, no Royal Hotel in Monaghan. Phil was for the county gaol, where John Temple was governor.
Anyway, Billy Cornfield featured in the reports, too, once just for shouting “Bravo” from the public gallery, which earned his removal by the sergeant-at-arms. He and Frederick were good friends, clearly. Hence the latter’s affectionate essay, also in the Democrat from 1875, headlined “A Night’s Bobbing with Billy Cornfield”.
This described fishing for eels with a man said to have “whipped every stream and thrashed every lake within 12 good miles” of Carrickmacross. On the evening in question, Frederick visits him at his Versailles home, which is full of bird cages and various “implements of field sports”, all with epic stories attached. The room also holds a four-poster bed, “the roof of which was adorned with the electioneering addresses of the liberal candidates for Louth and Monaghan”.
Billy is tying white moths for “night fishing on Creevy”. He also digs worms from the back garden, throwing the ordinary ones (“slobs”) in a bucket, for the eels, while putting selected others (“first class black heads”) in his waist pocket, to be temporarily replanted in soil pending a later assault on the trout of “Donaghmoyne river”.
As he works, he sings The Orangeman’s Daughter, a party piece performed in tribute to “the respectable Protestanùts who joined Farney’s Tenants’ Association, and who are not ashamed of their brethren of the green”.
For sustenance, he packs his pockets with cake and a bottle of poitín, while also arming himself with a stick he calls “Larry”, a whack of which will put struggling eels out of their misery. Billy’s speech is sometimes poetic. Looking out the door at one point to check the moonless (and therefore fishing-friendly) sky, he declares: “My soul to glory if this is not the most beautiful night that ever darkened the earth.”
A French poet, reflecting on the fleeting nature of life, once asked: “Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?” It means: “But where now are the snows of yesteryear?” We might ask the same about the Cornfields of Carrickmacross, who have long since disappeared from local life and whose colourful surname is now merging back into the landscape on which they once walked.
