More than just bricks and mortar

In his latest column, Let The Busy World Be Hushed, Fr Jason Murphy is questioning what seems to be an Irish obsession with knocking down old buildings to make way for modern builds, and in doing so, demolishing some of the built history and heritage of our country...

I used to meet them as part of the ritual of Sunday mornings, the three women dodging up to Morning Prayer near to the strike of noon as I walked on my way home from the eleven o’clock mass. The three good ladies dressed in their Sunday best who smiled and said hello as they passed the mass goers streaming out of the chapel on a bright May morn to be first into Gilbride’s to buy the Sunday papers. You could set your watch by them each Sabbath day as one stood at the end of the little row of six single-storey dwelling houses, waiting on the other two to step out onto the street, their books of Common Prayer carried carefully in their hands as they began their short walk up the hill and in through the gate of Cecil Moran’s to cross, by the near way, through the churchyard of ancient head stones with the names of generations of Church of Ireland families etched in marble and in stone.

Only the previous evening had they stood talking across their garden fences as one watered their sweet peas and another their row of early cabbage plants growing in a long ridge the length of the narrow garden fornent their little houses; three friends brought together in their twilight years by their moving into this little row of houses, nestled in the shadow of the churches, known affectionately as the Widow’s Row.

It had stood here, this row of cottages, since at least the late 1700s when it first appeared on maps of the town, administered by the Select Vestry to give homes to widows who oft times would come in from the countryside to live in close proximity to the Church and the local amenities and, for us as children, they became part of our everyday, though all were not widows.

Tipp Sheridan lived in the end house nearest the Fairgreen school and sometimes at the end of the week after summer days a cutting garden meadows with a scythe, you’d meet him coming down by O’ Reilly’s garage singing to his heart’s content. Indeed Johnny Ferguson’s parents both moved in from Derrycark and we were called at times to do the odd message for them up the town.

But the three ladies Minnie Clarke, Mrs North and Lottie ‘Ticket’, whose real surname I never knew, having been christened by us children in the wake of the introduction of the new Lottery Ticket that Gilbride’s started selling in 1986, became the best of companions. These elders of our community held a special place in our hearts and memories as the residents of Widow’s Row.

So when it was, earlier this year, I read in the Celt of others celebrating the demolition of this row of houses and in the weeks later watched as the windows were boarded up and a planning notice nailed to the wall telling the passers-by of the erection of modern apartments and dwellings in no way reminiscent of the six cottages that stood on this site since before Griffith first took his valuation of Belturbet town, I felt my heart sink as yet another part of our built heritage tumbles to the ground.

Effaced from the legacy which we pass on to future generations, this historic street joins the long line of buildings demolished over these past 30 years, the Military Barracks of old that stood since the 1600s, the Convent of Mercy and its sloping gardens built in the late 1800s, Stewart’s Mill, which first generated electricity to the town in the 1920s and the Palais dancehall where our parents first did meet, all erased from our collective memory and like Phil Coulter in his song ‘The Town I Loved So Well’, I wonder what parts of it will remain to remind the generations that come after us of the lived history of the people who once walked these streets in times gone by. What will stand to remind of the Minnies and the Lotties and the Tipp Sheridans when it is too razed to the ground, this mere row of six alms houses that have given shelter to widows for generation upon generation past? Who will tell of all the nuns who brought education to young girls and boys a 160 ago, of the soldiers billeted in the army barracks and who died at the Bloody pass? Who will point and say that’s the mill where my grandfather scutched flax or where Bill Stewart first generated electricity with the power of water over a hundred years ago? Who will tell when there is nothing left to remind?

What seems like mere bricks and mortar to some are the walls within which lives were lived, where stories are told of ordinary people who left an indelible mark on our memories just by the fact that they lived in this time and place.

Why do we always have to knock and demolish, why not reimagine and renew and preserve the ordinary and vernacular buildings that have stood for many generations to tell the stories of lives lived in the ordinary and the everyday? Have we not done enough damage to the unique character of our little towns and villages during the Celtic Tiger era with the construction of apartment blocks that are out of sync with the streets and houses, which have stood through time and generation? Perhaps I am being nostalgic and sentimental and it’s time to let go of the memories and the faces of the Minnies and the Lotties and all the people who dwelt along this street for 250 years that come to mind of a May morning as I walk from Sunday mass.