A short History of Cleenish Island
"There is no period so remote as the recent past.”
Alan Bennett, The History Boys
Nine two-storey, stone-built houses roofed with Bangor blue slates, stand
dotted along the single farm road that follows Cleenish Island’s natural curve.
Much more solid than the typical vernacular thatched and single-storey farm
house in these parts, these were built in the early 1920’s, part of a scheme to
provide homes and a parcel of land for returning veterans of the Great War.
With one exception, they stand abandoned now in greater or lesser states of
disrepair.
To those of us who live close to this island in Upper Lough Erne, the empty
houses have been little more than an accustomed feature of a landscape we
had framed as a place apart, its boundaries defined by water, somewhere for
a quiet reflective walk, where you could gaze back on the distant hills of
Benaughlin and Cuilcagh and follow the season’s casual bounties, the pink of
the hawthorne, the creamy pannicles of elderflower, the inky blackberries, the
red of the haw.
These days, besides the casual communicants with nature, it is farming
vehicles that ply the road, for the island has some of the best grazing land in
Fermanagh, continuously in demand from mainland farmers looking for extra
land to fatten their cattle. To them, empty houses that might bring hopes of
profit to the entrepreneurial eye are merely useful places for sheltering
animals or storing hay. To the Cleenish farm owners belong the workaday
sounds of cattle being overwintered in sheds, the clunk of a quad or a tractor
crossing a cattle grid, the seasonal hum of the silorater.
The written history of Cleenish island has always focussed on its early
Christian heritage. Here in the 6th century, on the western edge of
Christendom, a monastery was founded, one of a series of monastic
communities that dotted the remote shores and islands of Lough Erne.
Cleenish had its guest house catering for pilgrims along the waterway and the
island’s monastery is the place where St. Columbanus received his early
education at a school run by ‘the wisest man in Ireland’, ascetic and scholar
Saint Sinnel. A few carved stones in an old graveyard are all that remain, but
the sense of it being hallowed ground lingered so that it would become
occasionally a place of secret burial for babies born out of wedlock.
By comparison, the remains of the ex- servicemen’s houses hardly qualified in
our perception as ‘history’. Beyond the odd anecdote and the vague
generalities passed on by older people, most of us had remained incurious
about the provenance of the abandoned houses. Until, that is, topical interest
in commemorating the Great War brought them into fresh focus, suddenly
making the familiar strange.
Unlike most current WW1-related studies which seek to examine the conflict
and honour its casualties, ours looks beyond the war to uncover the
individual stories of 11 men who made it home and became part of a
resettlement scheme, coming to live and make a go of farming on an island in
Upper Lough Erne. As the story of the Cleenish men has revealed, surviving
the war was, for many, only the beginning of a new struggle to achieve some
normality in a world that had changed utterly.
The 1919 Irish (Soldiers and Sailors) Land Act empowered the Irish Land
Commission to buy land in order to provide homes for returning soldiers, each
with a plot or an allotment. Dubbed by some as ‘homes for heroes’ these
were popularly known as soldiers’ cottages. They were dotted around the
country, many built as large estates on the outskirts of cities including Belfast,
Dublin, Limerick and Galway.
The Cleenish Island scheme was different, possibly unique, in that each of
eleven veterans was provided with a sturdy farmhouse and a farm of land of
between 30 and 40 acres, the value of which they would repay through a
rental system. Local landlord Capt. Collum of Bellevue, who owned the island,
had facilitated the scheme by selling three quarters of the acreage to the
Commission.
Starting as names on an application form, eleven men were allocated to farms
on the island. Nine houses were constructed and two men were
accommodated in buildings already there, adapted to their needs. Mostly
local to the county, they had enlisted in the army for a variety of reasons and
in various regiments. Two had met in the trenches, when one saved the life of
the other. Unlike so many of their companions, these eleven men had made it
home.
But it soon emerged that there were difficulties to face. In the first years,
poor harvests and disease that wiped out livestock came as a blow to these
cash-poor men. The mid Twenties marked the beginning of a wider economic
slump. On an island with no infrastructure and no bridge, every journey to the
mainland, each trip to market, shop, creamery or school involved a hazardous
crossing in an unwieldy flat-bottomed vessel. A campaign to have a bridge
built started almost immediately, but it took thirty years to achieve, long after
all but one of the settler families had moved away.
And, as we gradually discovered, many of the men had come back from the
war bearing wounds, physical and/or psychological, which added to their
hardships - something which led us to question the criteria used to select
them for the Cleenish scheme. Some of this we gleaned from army records
but the process of tracing living relatives has fleshed out many of the human
stories.
Two had full use of only one arm, one would die in a Belfast hospital from the
effects of having been gassed in the trenches. Two men attempted to take
their own lives. Another sought solace in drink as July approached each year:
one of six pals who had gone over the top together on the first day of the
battle of the Somme, he was only one to survive. One thing these veterans
shared was an unwillingness to talk about what they had come through, so
that even their immediate families could not engage with their experiences.
Just one house on the island is still inhabited, the brother and sister who live
there forming a living link to their father Johnny Balfour, former sergeant in the
Royal Irish Rifles, a bomb lobber who had seen action at the Somme and was
wounded at the second battle of Ypres with schrapnel for an invisible
souvenir. On his mantelpiece sat just one memento of his travels, a little
replica of Cologne Cathedral, brought back from his service there amongst a
starving German population just after the war. The only one of the eleven to
live out his days on Cleenish, Johnny was carried off for burial in his 102 nd
year. As strength ebbed in his last days, his old battle wounds reopened.
Though reticent with his family, Johnny became in his later years something
of a media celebrity, giving personal testimony about his war experiences and
about the hardships of life on the island. This, together with the recollections
of his children, has provided an invaluable window into what difficulties these
men had faced on Cleenish.
Balfour’s stands closest to the main crossing point to the mainland. Only in
1956 was a bridge eventually built to replace the flat bottomed ‘float’ , a
makeshift vessel which, for some thirty years, had ferried people and animals
precariously across to the mainland and back.
The story of these eleven men is largely one of hardship, money worries,
isolation and frustration. None had come to Cleenish unmarked by their
wartime experiences but the recognition of post- traumatic stress disorder was
still some time off. The thing was just to get on with it.
Yet we are aware that, in the process of constructing a coherent narrative,
there is a tendency to blend out detail that does not fit.
And so we are mindful that, amongst the inhabitants, small contentments will
have been achieved: the comfort of the kitchen hearth, the good room next
door kept spick and span for the unexpected visitor, the novelty of a fire in the
bedroom grate upstairs when the weather turned raw, the taste of sweet tea
brought in lemonade bottles to the hayfield in summer, a bit of seasonal cheer
at Christmas, the sight of the first snowdrops. Children were conceived and
born: two Balfour daughters would, in time, get decked out in their bridal
finery for the ferry crossing to church.
As the farms were sold off, other men came as herds for the new owners,
bringing their wives and children to live in the houses. The recollections of
these children, who grew up on the island relatively unburdened by history
and adult worries about making ends meet, show that their experience was
more positive. They are nostalgic about the freedom afforded by their island
playground, and recall being well fed on rabbits and home-baked bread with
wild plum jam. One house had a ghost. The story went that the men building
it in 1922 had been short of a lintel for a bedroom window and had improvised
with a stone from the old graveyard site. The island feels like a place with a
past.
Mark Rhead’s photographs of Cleenish Island bear witness to a landscape
freighted with meaning. They are the summation of four periods of intensive
work, during which he came to know the island intimately and in different
seasons. There is integrity in Rhead’s approach, which has led him to interact
with the place in a documentary way, yet make room for the subjectivity of an
artist’s heightened response. The detail of a crumbling stonewall is abstracted
to show decay in slow motion. An abandoned interior lays bare layers of
habitation. A lane curves to a house standing lonesome in a field. The
modern bridge towers over the water. The old float lies redundant on a nearby
shore, a bush growing up through the rotting timbers of the floor.
Our brief has been to make an evaluation of the Cleenish Island resettlement
scheme. Mark Rhead’s collection of photographs has added an invaluable
other dimension to our engagement with the place and the story of the men
who came here after the Great War.
Marion Maxwell
Local historian and member of Bellanaleck Local History Group