Rural Waterscape and Emotional Sectarianism in Accounts of Lough Derg, County Donegal

James L Smith

doi:10.16993/rl.54

Abstract

The story of Lough Derg in Ireland’s County Donegal is arranged around clusters of sectarian narratives in juxtaposition, synthesis and conflict. The Sanctuary of Saint Patrick sits on Station Island, a small rocky islet set within the waters of the lake. The site became well known in the early Middle Ages as the place of Saint Patrick’s delving of a cave that led to purgatory, allowing the sinner to experience a glimpse of the torments of hell while still in this life. The island then attracted pilgrims from all over Europe and became embedded into the Catholic literary and spiritual imagination. After the Protestant Ascendency and the Plantation of Ulster began in the seventeenth century, the place became a site of tension and narrative clashes between differing visions of rural place, each with its own spectrum of affect, emotions and ideals. This essay unpacks the resonances of Lough Derg as a site of sectarian narrative by 1) situating the discussion within a distinctly rural context; 2) adding the unique properties of spiritual waterscape to the discussion; and 3) discussing the Irish sectarian narratives and identities arising from the lake and its purgatorial isle. It focuses on a case study of Protestant and establishment accounts of the lake during the nineteenth century, depicting them as internally diverse as well as part of a larger ecology of sectarian contestations. It explores waterscape and its role in influencing community responses to and shaping of place, the manner in which sectarian responses to space are internally diverse, and the manner in which Catholic and Protestant narratives of place have intertwined to shape the lake in the twenty-first century.

Highlights

Oh, would you know the power of faith, Go ! see it at Lough Derg; Oh, would you learn to smile at Death, Go ! learn it at Lough Derg; Thomas D’Arcy McGee, ‘Lough Derg’, IV, 1 (1902: 486)When the Catholic Irish-Canadian politician and poet Thomas D’Arcy McGee visited Lough Derg in Ireland’s County Donegal in the late nineteenth century, he captured snippets of place, space and emotion that ran a complex course through spiritual experience
The reverend accumulates a keenly felt sense of moral outrage that such a place is so abused as the account builds, culminating in the opportunity to use his account of the lake and its pilgrimage to expound—as Richardson did 90 years earlier—on the wider malaise of Catholicism and its pilgrimages: I well remember, while in early boyhood, to have frequently witnessed practices exceeding in folly and fraud those described [at Lough Derg], on an island on the river Shannon, by many thousands, for purposes almost identical
Rural disgust is not a natural affect, but one painstakingly fostered through an echo chamber of likeminded co-religionists. Carleton expands on his rhetorical desolation, shaped by the surrounds of rural Donegal: Lough Derg under my feet—the lake, the shores, the mountains, the accompaniments of all sorts presented the very landscape of desolation; its waters expanding in their highland solitude, amidst a wide waste of moors, without one green spot to refresh the eye, without a house or tree— all mournful in the brown hue of its far-stretching bogs, and the grey uniformity of its rocks; the surrounding mountains even partook of the sombre character of the place; their forms without grandeur, their ranges continuous and without elevation. (Carleton, 1843: 238–9)

Summary

Introduction

Would you know the power of faith, Go ! see it at Lough Derg; Oh, would you learn to smile at Death, Go ! learn it at Lough Derg; Thomas D’Arcy McGee, ‘Lough Derg’, IV, 1 (1902: 486)When the Catholic Irish-Canadian politician and poet Thomas D’Arcy McGee visited Lough Derg in Ireland’s County Donegal in the late nineteenth century, he captured snippets of place, space and emotion that ran a complex course through spiritual experience. For Lough Derg, multiple religious and class-based community identities have shaped distinct emotional nodes of power within the spiritual geography of place and its cyclical narratives.

Results

Conclusion