Cel­eb­rat­ing sin­gu­lar voices that savoured the memor­ies and melod­ies of this place

Explor­ing the ties between people born into very dif­fer­ent worlds, yet whose works still res­on­ate

Paul Cle­m­ents dis­cusses the con­nec­tion between the writer Bene­dict Kiely and the Clogher Val­ley nov­el­ist Wil­liam Car­leton

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Benedict Kiely was born on August 15, 1919 at Drum­skinny, near Dro­more, Co. Tyr­one, as the young­est of a fam­ily of six. His birth came just weeks after the sign­ing by the Allied Powers and Ger­many of the Treaty of Ver­sailles at Paris on June 28, fol­low­ing the end of World War One. It was a tur­bu­lent sum­mer with Ire­land embroiled in a war of inde­pend­ence that had star­ted in Janu­ary that year. The fol­low­ing year, the fam­ily moved to live at Gal­lows Hill in Omagh, and in 1921 the Anglo-Ir­ish Treaty was signed, lead­ing to Par­ti­tion – a sub­ject that Kiely would later come to write about.

After his primary and sec­ond­ary edu­ca­tion at schools in Omagh, Kiely began a job as a sort­ing clerk and tele­graph­ist in the town’s post office. He listened well to yarns, anec­dotes and scraps of verse, under­stand­ing what they evoked in his­tory, cul­ture and myth­o­logy and the pos­sib­il­it­ies they opened up to the future writer; they were, for him, a cru­cially import­ant badge of Irish iden­tity.

After gradu­at­ing from uni­versity in 1943, he began his pro­fes­sional lit­er­ary career in Dub­lin, writ­ing stor­ies for news­pa­pers and journ­als. Aside from his journ­al­ism, an ener­getic and cre­at­ive impulse had taken hold and his mixed port­fo­lio included review­ing books and plays, while at the same time com­plet­ing two non-fic­tion books from the 1940s, reflect­ing his interest in cul­ture, her­it­age and his­tory. His first book, ‘Counties of Con­ten­tion’ (1945) was an ana­lysis of the ori­gins of the cre­ation of the Bor­der in May, 1921. In 1947, Kiely’s widely acclaimed bio­graph­ical and pion­eer­ing study of Wil­liam Car­leton, ‘Poor Scholar’, came to fruition.

Car­leton was one of Kiely’s lit­er­ary fore­fath­ers, who pur­sued a writ­ing career in Dub­lin and became a prin­cipal fig­ure in his work. Born in 1794, the son of a small tenant farmer in a white­washed cot­tage at Pril­lisk near Clogher, one of his stor­ies was, ‘The Legend of Knock­many’. The bio­graphy opens with a lyr­ical, cine­matic and pre­cise descrip­tion cap­tur­ing the drum­lins and vil­lages of the Clogher Val­ley coun­tryside:-

“It is not moun­tainy land. It is not flat land. The tarred roads, link­ing the little towns together, rise and fall reg­u­larly over round rich hills, farmed to the top, held in place by a net­work of deep whis­per­ing hedges. Here and there the prim­it­ive force of the earth revolts from rich green­ery, from fruit­ful fur­rows drawn by the rigid coulter; rises up into sombre moor­land, or a ridge covered with coarse heather, or a hill planted with straight trees.”

‘A Bene­dict Kiely Reader: Drink to the Bird and selec­ted Essays’ with an intro­duc­tion by Paul Cle­m­ents’ is pub­lished by Turn­pike Books (2024).

ULSTER VOICES

Paul Clements is a native of Augher, Co. Tyrone who grew up in the village not far from Carleton’s Cottage in Springtown. The writer and former BBC journalist will be the main speaker at ‘Ulster Voices’, organ­ised by the Wil­liam Car­leton Soci­ety in asso­ci­ation with Lib­rar­ies NI, being held in Fivemiletown Library on Fri­day, August 8th at 10:30am. This day-long event will continue with talks about the links between Carleton and Patrick Kavanagh by Shaun O’Boyle from the Kavanagh Centre in Inniskeen and about W.F.Marshall by William Anderson from Sixmilecross.

FREE admission but places should be reserved in advance by emailing: wcarletonsociety@gmail.com and indicating whether you wish to be included for lunch at the Valley Hotel for £15 (two courses).