On Friday, April 12th, I was delighted to be the guest speaker at the Annual General Meeting of the Waterford Archaeological and Historical Society where I offered a personal perspective on my family’s connection to Curraghmore Estate…
Good evening, everybody. To speak to you tonight about a place which means the world to my family is as unexpected a pleasure for me as it was to have the Sunday Independent’s Life Magazine positively reply to a pitch I made to its Editor last summer when it came to writing a profile about my Grandfather, Jimmy Keyes, who spent the majority of his working life tending to sheep across the vast expanses of Curraghmore Estate.
In the introduction to the excellent guidebook to Curraghmore written by Julian Walton and Robert O’Byrne which was published in 2019, the ninth Marquis of Waterford’s opening message struck a chord as I prepared this particular text:
“From medieval knights to Georgian ladies, you will find every era left a mark on Curraghmore. But one thing that has remained consistent is the delight expressed by people who have come here…across the centuries, Curraghmore has attracted countless visitors, the long wings of the courtyard in front of the house looking like two arms extended in welcome.”
Curraghmore’s welcome to Jimmy and Catherine Keyes in the mid-1940s, where they would raise my father Johnny and my aunts Noreen and Kathleen, began an association which now proudly extends to over nine decades.
Were either of them still with us, neither Granny or Grandad would consider themselves to have been in any way extraordinary.
But those of us who were fortunate to know and love them, who benefited from the joy of their company, their good intentions and life-long care, we know exactly who they were and just how extraordinary they and so many of their contemporaries were. So to receive a positive hearing from Life Magazine provided me with a huge opportunity and the great privilege to honour them both, focusing on my Grandfather’s working life in Curraghmore.
So what I’d like to do now is to give voice to both my words and the thoughts of those who knew Grandad intimately in a way that I, who was nine and a half years of age when he died in 1988, could only dream of.
This is the most personal piece I’ve ever had published and sincerely feel that the best way I can capture both the essence of my Grandfather and his place of work is to share my profile in full with you…
Looking out across Curraghmore Estate in County Waterford, the world as my father Johnny and my aunts Nono and Kay first knew it lies before me. Each and every time I stand here, I fall under this astounding place’s spell.
As I turn my back on the expanse of the Comeragh Mountains, with Slievenamon to my left, I look uphill beyond a rubble stone boundary wall towards the semi-detached two-bay house, built 160 years ago.
The house is where James Keyes of Glenacunna, Grangemockler and Catherine Strang of Toor, Ballypatrick lived. Jimmy and Kit, as my grandparents were widely known, were married in Kilsheelan on July 31st, 1940 and would spend the rest of their lives on the estate.
They first lived in Sallyhene Cottages just beyond the estate wall, two and a half miles from the village of Portlaw before moving to Tower Hill on the opposite side of Ireland’s largest private demesne.
A kilometre from the Tower Hill property lies Clonegam Church - built in 1741 and replaced in 1794 - the mortuary chapel of the Beresford family, part of the dynasty which has held the seat of the 2,500-acre estate for almost 800 years.
In the mid-1960s, Jimmy and Kit made what proved to be their final move, down the Farmyard Hill to Ivy Cottage, a five-minute walk from Curraghmore House, believed to have been built by Richard Power, the sheriff of Waterford, who died in 1483.
The original medieval tower house, with its 12-feet thick walls, was later upscaled by James, the eighth Lord Power, who died in 1704 without a male heir. On July 16th, 1717, his daughter Catherine married Marcus Beresford, marking the Beresford family’s formal arrival in Curraghmore.
The Beresfords added a new residence to the rear of the tower house in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, along with the imposing courtyard, widely credited to the eminent designer John Roberts, which was constructed in the mid-18th century. This expansion to the front of the tower house, wrote historian Mark Girouard, gave “a peculiar drama to the act of arriving in Curraghmore”.
Thousands of revellers have come to know these beautiful lands since the inaugural All Together Now festival was held in 2018. But for my siblings and I, whose Sallyhene homestead stands 150 yards from the workers’ cottages where Jimmy and Kit first settled 80 years previously, Curraghmore represents the most astonishing back garden in Ireland. Our very own Narnia.
“Grandad planted daffodils on the lawn that runs between our front wall in Sallyhene and the road - they must be there over 40 years now – and they re-emerge every year,” says my sister Cathy. “They bloom a little later than most daffodils, like a lovely reminder of him. Dad said it every spring: ‘We have daffodils when no-one else has them.’” Today, those flowers remain a natural monument to Grandad’s connection to this slice of historic Waterford.
As the Curraghmore-reared Jack Kelly recalled in his 2018 memoir, ‘77 Years A-Dreaming’, in the late 1940s, “more than 150 people worked on the estate, as labour was cheap and everyone had a great respect for gentry”.
The courtyard bell signalled the start and conclusion of each working day, a slightly gentler sound than the hooter which performed the same feat for Portlaw Tannery staff a mile and half from Curraghmore House between 1935 and 1985.
Among the estate workers was my grandfather. Jimmy, who shared both his father and grandfather’s Christian name, worked as a shepherd in Curraghmore for the better part of 40 years. A great deal of that time was spent alongside fellow shepherd Mick Brett, while Bill Rowe and Mossy Hickey worked as herdsmen on the estate. Their dedication was absolute.
“In our day, the courtyard used to be full of people,” my auntie Kay tells me over the phone from her North West London home. “All the houses running down either side of the yard were occupied and the estate had a fairly large staff so while Curraghmore has always been a beautiful, largely peaceful place, when we were children, there was a great deal going on.”
Working life in Curraghmore for Davy Keane began in September 1960, aged 13. “I’d often have ‘Downton Abbey’ on the telly here and I’d be nodding away at all the goings-on and the way it showed how things were done,” he says.
“But we lived through all that in Curraghmore. I’d be up to the house early every morning for eight on the dot, ring up to the bedroom and say: ‘Good morning, Lord Waterford. Are you riding out this morning?’ He’d tell me what horse he wanted and I’d go down to the yard and get the horse saddled. That was my job and I loved it.”
Today, at his cottage, on the Bog Road outside Portlaw, photographs line the narrow hallway. They feature more than a few familiar Curraghmore faces, including Jimmy’s, taken in the early 1980s. To my eyes, this is a fresh image of Grandad, who died on Christmas Day 1988, aged 74 following an illness which weakened the flesh but never annexed his spirit or dignity. I take a snap of the photo and soon share it with my five siblings, our mother and Auntie Kay on our family Telegram page. To have Grandad front and centre again in the mind’s eye makes an already sunny afternoon all the brighter.
“When I went to Curraghmore, Mick Brett and Jimmy were the two main men when it came to the sheep,” recalls Davy. “We used to see the two of them going off each morning and you have to remember that their job at that time was all on foot. Your grandfather would head for the Sheep Walk with his dog – and I often saw this when I was riding out with Lord Waterford (in this instance the Eighth Marquis, John Hubert de la Poer, who died in 2015) – both Jimmy and Mick would send off their dogs, the dogs would bring the sheep in and the sheep were counted every morning.
“Jimmy then walked out of the Sheep Walk and up to Guilcagh if there were sheep there, then he’d work his way back down to Whitestown, come back in across the Long Meadow and back to the courtyard before heading back up to the farmyard hill and home to Tower Hill. Lads doing the same job nowadays go around on quads but there was nothing like that then. Jimmy and Mick must have walked thousands of miles doing their job. But they just loved it.”
The lambing season on so considerable an estate as Curraghmore was always a busy time for Grandad. That so gentle a man was so attentive to the care of such delicate animals was of no great surprise, and they too benefited from his kind nature.
“They used to rear a lot of lambs on the estate in Jimmy’s time,” Davy says. “They were brought down from the farmyard and kept in three stables off the courtyard and your grandfather used to have them there, a half dozen lambs in each of them. He used to bottle-feed all of them and look after them and when they were old enough, then they’d be sent back up to the yard.”
Kay recalls a mutual respect between my Grandfather and the estate’s owners. “Lord Waterford used to call most people on the estate by their surname but he only ever referred to Daddy as Jimmy, which I thought was very nice.
“The ‘old family’ as you might describe them now looking back, were always very kind to us and I was always very fond of them. And the fact that they respected Daddy the way they did, I thought that was lovely.”
She remembers living on Tower Hill, provided as part of Grandad’s working terms, with great affection. “We had the most wonderful garden, full of fruit and vegetables – lettuce, spring onions, potatoes, raspberries, gooseberries, rhubarb and so on.
“Mum (pictured left, standing) used to sell the rhubarb at Keever’s shop in Portlaw. Mum often spoke about Daddy not being earning much – two pounds and five shillings. But I remember when I brought my husband David home the first few times, he thought Daddy did quite well with the free house, free milk, butter and cream, free meat – whatever was going in Curraghmore, we used to get it each week.”
“Bill Rowe was the cowman in the farmyard and he used to bring down the milk in the courtyard every day on the horse and car, a special milk car,” says Davy Keane. “Bill used to leave cans of milk for the workers at the big tree by the courtyard cross and Jimmy and the rest of the workers used to collect them going home every evening.”
And the free milk remained in place for my Granny Kit up until her death on Easter Monday, March 31st, 1997. In the years following Grandad’s passing, my three older siblings and I, each of whom lived with Granny successively, made the short walk up the kitchen door, to the left of the ‘big house’ to collect the milk. It feels like a practice from a distant era but this was barely a generation ago and it remains utterly and happily vivid.
Grandad was a meticulous man. Just as my father cleaned and dried off all his plastering tools at the end of each working day, presentation was another of Jimmy’s priorities. His wellington boots were always immaculate on those mornings when underfoot conditions made them a necessity and they were returned to a state of spotlessness once more before home fell quiet every evening
“Daddy was such a gentle, kind, hard-working man,” Kay recalls. “He loved his pipe. He loved playing his accordion. He always had plenty of sticks cut and he looked after every dog he owned so well; he used to be so thrilled coming home with trophies from the sheepdog trials he entered. Daddy loved having things just so and he was always so neat. He was such a quiet man he used to be known as ‘Mr Hear, See and Say Nothing!’ If Daddy heard any gossip, he’d never repeat it anywhere to anybody. He was so sweet. Nono, Johnny and I were very lucky.”
Grandad was also an accomplished barber and cut my hair for the last time in the living room in Ivy Cottage (pictured above) shortly after my ninth birthday in June 1988.
“A favourite visual I have in my mind is Grandad and Timmy (Ahern, a fellow Curraghmore employee and neighbour) set up beside the gas cylinders outside the bathroom window, cutting each other’s hair,” says my sister Cathy. “If he was alive now, and this goes in general for people of his generation, Grandad would be considered the epitome of a sustainable citizen.”
Kay agrees. “Daddy made all our furniture. He made our wardrobes, the table we sat at, the chairs we sat on - we even had a chez longue in our little sitting room. Daddy was a wonderful craftsman and that’s where Johnny got it from and his son John in turn. What a gift that was to pass on.”
No-one ever truly leaves Curraghmore. It’s 28 years since we locked up Ivy Cottage for the last time and every time any of us visit the estate for a concert, a play or just a time-honoured walk, feelings and memories come flooding back. Our grandparents were part of this place and we in turn are forever entwined in Curraghmore and entranced by it. It’s in our bones.
At the first staging of All Together Now in 2018 Lady Caroline, wife of the late 8th Marquis of Waterford, in conversation with historian and author Turtle Bunbury, recalled a special memory from over 60 years previously.
“We came back here to Curraghmore just after the honeymoon (in 1957),” she reflected. “We were pulled up the drive in what they call a doctor’s gig (a horse and trap which is still in the Riding School to this day) with the shepherd on it, playing the squeeze box, sitting on the back. And it was quite an effort, it was uphill all the way!”
Shepherd, I noted. Playing the squeeze box? I had to ask her afterwards: was it Grandad who was sat on the gig that happy day? It was. My heart leapt, to learn something new of him almost 30 years after his death.
“I still often recall Jimmy and Christmas Day,” Fr Seamus Ahern, another child of Curraghmore, wrote in an email to me on Christmas Day 2020. “The shepherd. Knowing the sheep. The gentle one…Curraghmore made us and we are blessed in its freedom. Of space. Of wonderful people who had very little but had heart and a sense of companionship in the community of care, affection and love.”
“I love every rib of hair on your head,” Grandad told Granny many, many times during their happy life together. He was a man of great devotion: to his family, his dogs, his lambs, his craft and the place he’ll be forever associated with.
Despite the marked changes of recent growing seasons, with, the arrival of Grandad’s daffodils have become more significant as childhood grows increasingly distant and middle age approaches.
Their annual return provides soul-nourishing consolation. Something my Grandfather was responsible for is not exclusive to the mind’s eye. The daffodils beautifully remain. So too does part of Jimmy Keyes who was, is and will always be, a Curraghmore man at heart.
In a print media environment increasingly devoted to click-friendly copy, I am so grateful to Leslie Ann Horgan and Regina Lavelle of Life Magazine for affording my piece such care and consideration.
Of course I’m only one of many visitors to Curraghmore to have committed thoughts to print over the years. Mr CP Remond, who edited the Waterford News at the turn of the 20th Century, recalls his trip to the demesne in his charming yet rather wordily titled book: ‘Beauty Spots in the South East and how to see them by Car or Cycle’ – try formatting a Twitter hashtag to promote such a publication nowadays!
In just two sentences, recalling his visit to the round tower which overlooks much of Curraghmore, Redmond illustrates the scale of the estate when stating:
“The view from this tower is one of a great extent, comprising a glimpse of the sea, near Bonmahon, a great part of County Tipperary, and the Suir separating the Counties of Kilkenny and Waterford. To the north are the mountains of Carlow, while north-east and east are the Wexford Hills, forming the boundaries to Carlow and Wicklow.”
Redmond describes Curraghmore House’s vast frontage as one of “the finest courtyards in the Kingdom” which of course the entirety of this island was still formally tied to upon that book’s publication.
As I referenced in my Life Magazine piece, I became more familiar with the courtyard in my mid-teens when I lived with my Grandmother in Ivy Cottage, literally two bends away from the ‘big house’, walking past the tree where Bill Rowe left milk for my Grandad and his colleagues to bring home at the end of their working day.
The significance of that regular milk collecting chore wasn’t one that I as a teenager fully grasped but as the years have passed by and these temples of mine have grown greyer, I've come to realise how pleasantly rare such an activity was in a much wider sense. And as someone who was happy to do anything I could for my Granny, every step taken to collect the milk from the Curraghmore kitchen grows more golden.
Incidentally, another charming nugget from Mr Redmond’s book, a very thoughtful birthday present from my partner Avril, reads as follows:
“Right in front of the main entrance to the house will be seen a magnificent fountain purchased at the great Paris Exhibition in the seventies – the 1870s, that is – Admission to the Curraghmore Demesne is by ticket, which can be obtained at the Estate Office, Parnell Street, Waterford.”
The same Parnell Street where my parents used to drop me off to catch the bus that would ferry me to Dublin for my third level studies half a lifetime ago.
Waterford’s lack of physical scale in comparison to neighbouring Cork and Tipperary means that its natives and visitors can truly get to know the lands within our boundaries more intimately than those hailing from other more sizeable jurisdictions.
The Crystal County to some, the Gentle County to others and the Déise to hurling supporters the world over, assembling this essay brought another moniker to mind: the Goldilocks County: why Goldilocks? Well, because, for me, Waterford is just right and at the heart of my Waterford story sits Curraghmore Estate, which the wider world might view as the seat of Lord and Lady Waterford and the Lord’s mother, Lady Caroline.
But to me, the Beresfords are, firstly and foremostly my neighbours: a family who are guardians to a lengthy history, a great farming tradition and conservationists of one of Ireland’s most beautiful woodlands.
And as someone who grew up literally over the wall while also having the great privilege of spending almost four years under the same Ivy Cottage roof as my Grandmother, Curraghmore will always feel like home to me.
Curraghmore, as Mark Girouard wrote in a lengthy profile of the estate for Country Life Magazine in February 1963, represents: “A kind of pocket kingdom to the west of Waterford (city), between the River Suir, the Comeragh Mountains and the sea…
He opens his lengthy two-part profile with a quote from the Elizabethan historian William Camden who said: “The Irish are so wedded to their customs, that they not only retain them themselves, but corrupt the English that come among them.”
How else can one explain why a presence which began with the arrival of Robert Le Poer, sent to Ireland by King Henry II in 1176 and maintained through the marriage of Sir Marcus Beresford to Catherine Power in 1717 still remains in place to this day at Curraghmore.
Of course the Keyes connection to Curraghmore, in historical terms, is considerably shorter than those of the aforementioned but it’s a link that I am enormously proud of and shall forever be proud of as long as my memory holds.
Over the course of my life, I’ve been fortunate to get to know many of the estate’s inhabitants as indeed my father Johnny did in an altogether more substantial way than I, a man who was as rooted in Curraghmore as the oaks that have stood inside its walls for centuries.
On the north side of the Farmyard pond, just a few minutes’ walk from where my Grandparents raised Dad, Kay and Nono on Tower Hill, there now stands a small stone which Lady Caroline kindly installed with the blessing of my mother Therese. Dad spent many happy hours by the pond, working and training his gundogs and anyone who has stood there can understand why being wide-eyed and at peace at such a location comes as easily as drawing in a grateful lungful of air.
The stone reads: Johnny Keyes, May 6th, 1948 to April 12th, 2016. To speak about my father, son of Jimmy the Good Shepherd and Kit the Gentle Mother, on his anniversary is, in the context of this gathering tonight, a coincidence on a calendar: but in keeping with the gratitude I feel to this day for growing up with Narnia for my back garden, it has truly been a heartfelt honour for me to speak about my sadly missed Dad and his wonderful parents.
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