The Learys of Benwilt
Times Past
The Leary (O’Leary) family from Benwilt, Dairy Brae, Cootehill, were a genteel people, gifted in music and storytelling, especially the telling of ghost stories, and frightening tales of the fairies and banshees that were reputed to have scared many a child and grown-up who arrived at the house on a late night céilí. The last generation of the family to live at Benwilt were the siblings Tommy, Ellie, Mary, Paddy and Ownie. Their parents were Thomas Leary of Benwilt, and Mary Leary, a daughter of Owen McDonald from the neighbouring townland of Shubliss. A marriage record for Thomas and Mary shows they were married by Fr James Brady, C.C., on February 2, 1880. Times were simpler then and according to Tommy his parents went to Killyvaghan Lough for their honeymoon where it appears they spent the day on a boat. Their son Tommy showed a dark sense of humour stating had his parents not returned from Killyvaghan, none of them (his siblings) would have had any worries.
The Civil Register listed Thomas and Mary’s children as John (born in November 1880), Sarah Anne (1882), Mary (1884), Alice (1887), Eugene called Ownie (1889), Elizabeth (1891), Ellen called Ellie (1894), Annie (1897), Paddy (1899), and Tommy (1902). Alice was said to have taken the train from Cootehill, never to be seen again, as recalled by Arthur McCabe in 2002. Then again, emigration was always a feature of life.
On 16 April 1908, Elizabeth Leary died at the age of 17 years from meningitis. She died in the presence of her older brother John. It was said that Mrs. Lynch of the Coach Builder Lynches on the Station Road had told the Leary siblings, ‘children stay together and never marry.’ None of the siblings at Benwilt were ever married.
Leary’s house at Benwilt was a welcoming place where the craic took out and the entertainment provided by Tommy, Ellie, Ownie, Paddy and Mary, over the years was second to none, as visitors enjoyed and appreciated the tales they told. Regular visitors like Dr Brian Gallagher and Emmet Quinn would be among the callers who enjoyed the Leary’s good-humoured hospitality. Dr Gallagher said at the time, ‘Ellie is like a person from a past century, a little fairy woman with a thatch of white hair with little twinkling blue eyes’, and he thought that Tommy would have made ‘a great professor of English.’
Tommy’s working life was spent at Lennon’s Hardware, Cootehill. One of my childhood memories was of the Learys on their way to Mass at the Middle Chapel when they walked the old Mass pass running through my grandparents yard that linked the Ballybay Road to the Shercock Road. Mary aged 91 died in 1976 and Paddy died in 1980.
Superstition
The Learys traded in crockware which they loaded up on the horse drawn cart to bring to towns to sell. One morning, they left the Dairy Brae with a cart load to sell in Bailieborough when they met a red-haired lady on the road. They were superstitious and to meet a red-haired woman on the road, meant you must turn and go home. However, they chose to continue their journey. After a day’s trading, they packed up the remaining items and started back for Cootehill. But, when they reached the Skeagh Hill, the horse lost control and took fright causing the crocks to go flying and smash on the ground. Tragically, for the horse, it fell and broke its neck and died. Tommy and the family put it down to meeting the lady earlier that day and the wrong decision they made to continue to Bailieborough.
The Learys talked about a red-haired lady named Mary who jumped the front gate at Benwilt and by all accounts a room in the house shook causing all and sundry to fall to the floor in a heap. They believed it was an omen and that a supernatural happening caused the room to fall in.
Dr Brian Gallagher
Dr Brian Gallagher was a highly respected local GP and patients came from far and wide. Both Brian and his brother Charlie were revered Cavan footballers in the 1950s and 1960s. In quiet moments away from his surgery, Dr Gallagher called to Benwilt for a ceili with Tommy, Ellie and Ownie. In the 1980s, after a horrible robbery, the Learys front gate was locked permanently by a padlock and chain. The athletic doctor vaulted the gate, to be met at the door by a delighted Tommy and his famous greeting, ‘Holy jeyes fluid it’s Dr Brian!’
An hour or so, of stories and good conversation would pass until the surgery beckoned Brian back to Market Street, Cootehill. One day when Dr Gallagher stood up to leave, Ellie told him to stand his ground because the fairies had been mischievous and he wouldn’t find his way home, and with that, she threw holy water over him to keep the wee folk away. People on the Ballybay Road always knew when Dr Gallagher was coming from Learys, because you’d see him driving back to town laughing loudly to himself. Traditional entertainment was alive and well in Benwilt. They never bothered with a television.
Patricia Smyth remembers Tommy’s odd mannerism of tipping the peak of his cap with his index finger and how by the end of a visit the cap had completed a sixty degrees turn on his head. Tommy also loved crosswords in the local, daily, and national papers where over the decades he once won a major cash prize. Apart from his crosswords he was particularly proud of a Silver Star rose he planted which grew to over six feet and pointed out how it grew taller than him.
The Learys did some farming and had a field on the Cootehill to Ballybay Road across from Ned Smith’s cottage at Shubliss. In 1972, Patricia who had recently been married, was walking in her husband George’s field when she heard work going on in the field next door.
On closer inspection two of the Leary brothers were busy making hay and that would have been fine but for the fact that this was the middle of November.
In the frosty air, the whole thing looked a little strange and led a passing neighbour to caustically remark of the hay: ‘there’s not much substance in that.’
To be continued …