Tuesday, 4 May 2021
On the way to the Clare Glens on the borders of Co Limerick and Co Tipperary, I stopped briefly in the small east Co Limerick of Ahane to see both the former barracks and the interesting parish church.
The former barracks fronts onto the road directly, and at first sight it looked like an abandoned former market house. It is a challenging sight, because I wondered why such a small village could have once needed a market house.
Instead, this former barracks, built in the early 19th century, has been a barracks, a dispensary, a Famine soup kitchen, a school, political meeting tooms, and, more recently, apartments.
The barracks was first built in 1825 to protect Sir Richard Bourke (1777-1855) from ‘the so-called Republican elements of Irish society,’ according to the Ordnance Survey Field Name Book. However, Bourke is reported to have expressed ‘no need for protection from his own people.’
General Sir Richard Bourke was born in Dublin and was a cousin of Edmund Burke. A year after the barracks was built, Bourke became acting Governor of the Cape Colony (1826-1828) before becoming Governor of New South Wales (1831-1837).
As a lifelong Whig, he encouraged the emancipation of convicts and helped to put an end to penal transportation to Australia. He also gave Melbourne its name in 1837, in honour of the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne.
Bourke returned to live at Thornfield House, Ahane, on the other side of the road from the barracks. He died while he was at church on Sunday 12 August 1855. He is buried in All Saints’ Church, Stradbally, near Castleconnell, Co Limerick, where his burial vault was designed by the Limerick-based architect James Pain (1779-1877).
When Bourkee returned to Ahane, the barracks became ‘a dispensary connected with that of Castleconnell’ in 1837. Within a decade, it housed as a soup kitchen at the height of the Great Famine (1845-1849). Later, in the 1880s, it was a woodcarving school producing fine examples of work, including the staircase at Glenstal Castle, now Glenstal Abbey.
After the War of Independence, the former barracks served for some time as a meeting room for the Ahane Cumann of Fianna Fáil. It then became apartments for two local men, Henry ‘Harry’ Pond and James ‘Jimmy’ Spuddle, who were veterans of World War I (1914-1919) and the War of Independence (1919-1921).
Although the barracks has had a number of additions over the years, the main building is now vacant and has an abandoned look about it.
It is built on a compact rectilinear plan form. The arcade makes the building look like a market house, and good quality workmanship can be seen in the deep grey limestone. The openings on each floor diminish in scale, producing a graduated, tiered visual effect.
This is a detached, two-bay or five-bay two-storey barrack, built on a rectangular plan, with single-bay, two-storey side elevations.
The building has a replacement hipped artificial slate roof with ridge tiles, and paired cement rendered central chimney stacks that have concrete capping supporting terracotta pots.
The rubble stone walls are part-covered in creepers and ivy, but originally they were rendered, with hammered limestone flush quoins at the corners.
The arcade is composed of a series of five elliptical-headed openings on tooled hammered or rough-hewn limestone piers. These have benchmark-inscribed tooled cut-limestone plinths with lichen-spotted tooled limestone ashlar voussoirs.
There is a square-headed central door opening in a camber-headed recess with lime-washed red brick voussoirs framing a timber boarded door.
The square-headed window openings in the camber-headed recesses on the first floor have shallow sills, and hammered limestone voussoirs frame the replacement timber casement windows.
Although this was only a barracks for about a decade, it is an important part of the early 19th-century architectural heritage of Co Limerick and its restoration would acknowledge the political and social history of Ahane and this small part of east Co Limerick.
During the Season of Easter this year, I am continuing my theme from Lent, taking some time each morning to reflect in these ways:
1, photographs of a church or place of worship that has been significant in my spiritual life;
2, the day’s Gospel reading;
3, a prayer from the prayer diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel).
Sunday (2 May 2021) was Easter Day in the Calendar of the Orthodox Church, and this week is Easter Week. I miss the opportunity of being in Greece at this special time of year, so my photographs this week are from churches in Crete.
Until the pandemic lockdown, I have been visiting Rethymnon almost every year since the 1980s. My photographs this morning (4 May 2021) are from the Cathedral in Mitropolis Square, the first church I visited in Rethymnon four decades ago. The cathedral is dedicated to the Eisodia Theotokou or Presentation of the Virgin Mary.
Although Rethymnon is centuries old as a city, with classical, Byzantine, Venetian and Ottoman buildings around every corner, I know of no surviving remains of Rethymnon’s mediaeval cathedral, which was destroyed in a raid by Algerian corsairs in 1571.
The Cathedral of the Presentation of the Virgin Mary is a relatively new building. It occupies most of Mitropolis Square was first built in 1834 on the site of an earlier church.
The second cathedral was badly damaged during World War II and was rebuilt as a miniature of Evangelistria, the great basilica on the island of Tinos, so that the present cathedral is refreshingly modern in appearance, both inside and outside.
The tall bell tower beside the cathedral was built in 1899 as a response by the Christians of Rethymnon to the tall minaret built beside the nearby Nerantzes Mosque. The money to build the bell tower was raised through selling postage stamps and a fundraising drive by the wine merchants of the town.
John 14: 27-31a (NRSVA):
[Jesus said:] 27 ‘Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid. 28 You heard me say to you, “I am going away, and I am coming to you.” If you loved me, you would rejoice that I am going to the Father, because the Father is greater than I. 29 And now I have told you this before it occurs, so that when it does occur, you may believe. 30 I will no longer talk much with you, for the ruler of this world is coming. He has no power over me; 31 but I do as the Father has commanded me, so that the world may know that I love the Father. Rise, let us be on our way.’
Prayer in the USPG Prayer Diary:
The Prayer in the USPG Prayer Diary today (4 May 2021) invites us to pray:
We pray for the work done at Bollobhpur Hospital, run by the Church of Bangladesh. May we continue to offer our support to initiatives which not only heal people, but to teach them to heal others.
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org