Ethel M. Haughton was one of those people about whom it would be hard to say anything bad.
She was possessed of a reverence for life along the lines of Eastern thought, and I well remember her first horse, allowed to live out its days. Rockspring was, for many years, run outside by sister Anne and inside by Ethel, who found time for all kinds of culinary delights for "Elsa Maxwell" - style entertaining.
Jams and marmalades were her delight as well. During the second World War, with Anne absent in London, she was the mainstay of the farm, helping her father Alfred, who was blind.
Rockspring was a Christian home - Quaker style - and the Bible was read. There was always a welcome. Ethel used to recall her peaceable great-great-grandfather, Joseph, in Ferns struggling to help victims of the 1798 Rising. If anyone was in trouble, Ethel would come to the rescue, a Universal Auntie of that period. The garden and the grounds were her constant delight.
I recall when living in Cahir, Ethel arrived on a motorbike to visit our family. Her interests in garden and birds took her to visits to the Aran Islands, the Saltees and to county Sligo, as well as attending the local bird watching club.
Sadly, recent years saw deterioration, especially in her sight. She was a resident in Middletown Nursing Home where she died peacefully on January 7th.
Born at the start of the first World War, she was educated at Brookfield School in Co Down and The Hall in Dublin. When Ethel was a young girl her friend and cousin, Hilda Roberts, later Mrs Arnold Marsh, once painted a picture of her sitting on a haystack reading a book in a field at the bottom of Corrigue. In the picture she is quietly immersed in the book, yet supremely contented in her surroundings. That was perhaps the true essence of this special woman who was at her happiest in the countryside walking with her dogs Poppy and Panny with her three cats trailing behind.
She is especially missed by her nephew John Jameson,his wife Beryl and children Sarah and Richard, and her niece Rachel Lowe, her husband Jonathan and children Edward, Rosemary, Ruth and William. C.P.