Errislannan

Scenes from a Painter's Life

Alannah Heather

• Publisher: The Lilliput Press
• Year: 1993
• Print ISBN:
  9781843510123
• eBook ISBN:
  9781843513278
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

Errislannan, or Flannan's peninsula, juts out into the North Atlantic on Europe's western extremity south of Clifden, Connemara, Co. Galway. The home of Alannah Heather, it gave shape to her life, and to this book. The Heathers were minor Protestant gentry and estate-owners who occupied Errislannan Manor for five generations from the 1790s to the 1960s. The author tells their story, using family diaries and letters salvaged from a coach-house loft before the auction, and enlarges upon it in this remarkable self-portrait, articulating a childhood and landscape peopled by cottagers and fisherfolk, islanders and evangelicals, and a richly eccentric body of relatives. Their history reveals Ireland's in microcosm – touching upon the Great Famine and subsequent diaspora, the 1916 Rising and civil war, the Alcock and Brown landing on Derrygimlagh bog, and the more intimate dramas of unrequited love, bereavement and isolation, in a perpetual cycle of exile and repatriation. Aslant of an Anglo-Irish upbringing, Alannah Heather's career as an artist took her to the Slade and London in the 1920s, to St Ives on her marriage in the 1940s, and to Sark in the Channel Islands, with painterly excursions to Bruges and Budapest during the 1930s, returning time and again like a salmon to its beloved spawning-ground in Connemara. The voice in Errislannan is immediate, affectionate and unobtruding – the narrative, illuminated by shards of memory, restores a personal and collective past. It is a singular journey of self discovery, and an enduring masterwork, resonant as its subject's canvases.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Chapter 1: The Fall of the Loft
• Chapter 2: Journeys to Dublin by Bianconi Car and Canal Boat
• Chapter 3: The Great Famine and Queen Victoria’s Visit
• Chapter 4: Achill Island and County Sligo
• Chapter 5: England, and the Road to Paradise
• Chapter 6: The Heather Family
• Chapter 7: The Manor Interior
• Chapter 8: Tinkers and Tenants
• Chapter 9: France, the Great War, and Back to Errislannan
• Chapter 10: The 1916 Easter Rebellion
• Chapter 11: Picnics
• Chapter 12: Alcock and Brown; Sundays at Home
• Chapter 13: The Galley, and the Lake
• Chapter 14: Johnnie Dan, Val Conneely, Anne Gorham, and Mrs Molloy
• Chapter 15: Civil War, and Leavetaking
• Chapter 16: London, Bruges; a Grandmother’s Funeral, and Brother’s Death
• Chapter 17: The Journey Home
• Chapter 18: My Father’s Death, and Departure from Knockadoo
• Chapter 19: Sark and the Slade
• Chapter 20: The Gate Lodge, and the Road to Clifden
• Chapter 21: Return to Errislannan
• Chapter 22: The Races at Omey, and Crumpaugn Boathouse
• Chapter 23: The Charlotte Street Studio
• Chapter 24: Hungary
• Chapter 25: Autumn in Sark, and War
• Chapter 26: Cornwall and Marriage
• Chapter 27: St Ives, and a Homecoming
• Chapter 28: The Connemara Pony Show, Seaweed Harvest, and Dances
• Chapter 29: The Bishop and the Baptist
• Chapter 30: Post-War Sark, Roger and Connemara
• Chapter 31: Night Falls on Errislannan; Roger’s Death
• Chapter 32: Return to the Islands
• Plates
• Copyright