Céad Míle Fáilte, and welcome to your Letter from Ireland for this week. Here in County Cork, the last of the trees are coming into leaf, and the hedgerows are filling out into their full summer growth, almost overnight, it seems. The evenings are long, with a soft, lingering light that keeps you at the gate a little longer than you intended, reluctant to go inside just yet. I have a cup of Lyons tea beside me as I write, and I hope you’ll have something to settle in with too, as today’s letter may invite you to pause for a while longer than usual.

So come with me now, and take in the view from a rock. Not a famous rock, not a place you’ll find in any guidebook, just a limestone outcrop at the top of a hill in north County Kilkenny, with a long view down over patchwork fields to where a river catches the evening light. The O’Brennan family, Ó Braonáin in old Irish, have been sitting on that rock for a very long time, and what they’ve seen from up there tells a deeper story of what it really meant for our Irish families to hold onto their place, to keep the land in their name, and to pass it from one set of hands to the next.

What Kathleen from Ohio Asked

Late last year, I received a note from Kathleen in Ohio. I have sat on it for quite a while as I was unsure how to answer at the time:

“I’ve traced my family back to County Kilkenny, O’Brennan on my grandmother’s side. When I look at the records, they appear in Griffith’s Valuation as tenants, renting from a landlord with an English name. But I keep wondering if that was always the case? Did my family ever actually own the land they farmed? I feel like there’s a whole story there I can’t quite see.”

Kathleen, there is a whole story there, and it stretches back much further than you might imagine. Now that you have given me a few months to reply, let me try to show it to you the way it was truly lived.

Cormac Ua Braonáin: Around the Year 650

Cormac Mac Airt Ua Braonáin makes a habit of climbing to the High Rock (the Ard Carraig) before any day’s work begins on a fine morning in the seventh century. The view from up there contains everything that his family possesses – or rather, everything that belongs to his people, which in his world amounts to the same thing. There are the fields below, the cattle on the upper pasture, and a cluster of homes where his extended kindred go about the business of the day.

Under ancient Brehon laws, this land belongs to the family as a whole and is held collectively by the kindred. When Cormac dies it will be redistributed among them according to rights that go back further than any living memory. The idea of a single man owning this ground, his name on a document giving him power over it, simply doesn’t exist in Cormac’s world and has never needed to.

So he stands on the Ard Carraig in the early morning quiet, looking out over land that has always been ordered this way, and feels that quiet, settled certainty that this is his family’s place. It is simply, unquestionably, theirs.

Art Ua Braonáin: 970

Art Ua Braonáin is on Ard Carraig when he notices them on the road below, a small Norse trading party out of Waterford, moving north with packhorses, heading for whatever market they have arranged in the interior. He watches them the way he can watch everything from up here: carefully but without particular alarm.

His grandfather’s generation knew real alarm. They were the years of the raiders – fast, violent, the monasteries burning, cattle gone before anyone had a chance to respond. But that world has settled into something different over the past two generations. The Norse have been in Waterford long enough now that they are simply part of the landscape, trading, intermarrying, and burying their dead in Irish ground. Some of them even speak Irish, or at least a version. Art has done business with one of their merchants at the seasonal fair, usually a fair exchange of cattle for ironwork, leaving each man satisfied.

He watches the party until the road bends them out of sight, then turns his eyes back to his own fields. The barley is coming on well in the lower ground. The cattle are fat this year and his children are healthy.

What his grandfather feared has become, in the way of things, a normal morning on the road below. While the world may keep bringing surprises to his doorstep, what endures is the farm with the long view from the rock.

Éamonn Ó Brennan: 1400

What the Normans brought with them has changed everything. They come not to raid but to own, bringing with them a trickery (what they call the rule of law) designed to make that ownership permanent. The occupy land held by charter, enforced by English law, granted by a king whose authority the Brehon tradition has never recognised. In Kilkenny, the great Norman Butler family has established itself with a thoroughness and force that is hard to argue with, and the landscape was reorganised around him accordingly.

Éamonn’s family was not significant enough to be swept aside entirely – the Normans coveted the larger Gaelic chieftainships, and a hillside farming family of modest standing has a certain useful invisibility. Éamonn still farms the same land, but pays his dues in someone else’s name, to men who answer to the Butler earls. The fields themselves are unchanged and the High Rock is where it has always been. You pay what is demanded, he has concluded, and you keep the farm, and hold onto what you can. A practical man is Éamonn.

Thomas O’Brennan: 1655

Cromwell’s settlement strips Catholic landowners across Leinster with a thoroughness that still takes the breath away. In north Kilkenny, the change takes vivid local form, as the lands around the local town of Castlecomer pass to men like Christopher Wandesforde. He then brings in settlers from Yorkshire to mine, build, and reshape the land. Thomas watches some of the great families load their carts and move west under armed escort, headed for Connacht, and he watches the new men arrive with their deeds and their certainty.

But the commissions have their sights set on the substantial holdings, and a small tenant farmer on a north Kilkenny hillside is beneath their notice – needed, in fact, to keep working the land that now appears in someone else’s rent book. The name on the deed has changed, and the man Thomas pays his rent to has never walked these fields and very likely never will. But he is still here, and the farm is still here. Some nights he climbs to the High Rock in the dark and sits for a while – reminding himself of the things that never change.

Ned Brennan: 1850

When the Griffith’s Valuation surveyor comes to the door, the man who answers is Ned Brennan, the Irish prefix of “O” long since worn away in the records. The surveyor writes it all down carefully: Edmund Brennan, tenant. Moneenroe. Landholding: fourteen acres. Landlord: Charles Wandsforde. Ned watches the pen move across the page and says nothing.

He has come through the worst years in the 1840s, when the potatoes failed and the roads filled with the dying and the leaving. While north Kilkenny did not suffer as the west did, no part of Ireland came through untouched, and Ned knows which graves in the churchyard are new and which farms in the townland stand empty. He is still here, his children are alive, and the land is producing again – fourteen acres, with a tenant’s entry in someone else’s rent book. The farm a little smaller than in his father’s time, but still the same hillside, and the same High Rock at the top of the upper field, and the same long view to the river. He closes the door on the surveyor and goes back to work.

John Brennan: 1911

The solicitor’s office in Castlecomer smells of coal smoke and old paper, and John Brennan sits at the table with his two sons looking at a document unlike anything his family has ever signed. The Wyndham Land Act of 1903 made government loans available to tenant farmers to buy their holdings. The repayments were to be spread over decades and, more often than not, less than the rent they’d been paying anyway. John has walked his thirty two acres, field by field, in the weeks since, turning the sums over in his head until he was satisfied that it made sense.

He picks up the pen and signs his name on the line. Walking home that evening, they stop at the farm gate and look up the slope to where the High Rock sits against the fading sky. He doesn’t climb it tonight, sure there’ll be plenty of time tomorrow for that, when the news has properly settled. But they stand at the gate for a long while, looking up at the same outline against the same sky their family has always known. Tomorrow it will all be back in the family in a way it hasn’t been for a very long time.

James and Aoife Brennan: Today

All the trouble in the Middle East has caused the fertiliser prices to go through the roof, and James Brennan is sitting on Ard Carrig with his daughter Aoife, looking down at the farm and doing the kind of arithmetic that modern farming asks of you – input costs up, returns uncertain, and government paperwork seemingly designed to wear you down. But he is not a dramatic man, not even remotely, and simply sees the numbers for what they are.

Aoife arrived back to her Moneenroe home after her agricultural science degree, which surprised some people in the parish but didn’t surprise James at all. She always had a grá for the land, and now has her eye on a site for a new house in the corner of the upper field. A lovely spot, sheltered from the west but with a long view south, and she and her fiancé Ciarán have decided that this is the place for them.

“I want to call the new house Ard Carrig,” she says – not quite asking, but wanting to hear the name said aloud to someone who would understand why it matters.

James looks at the limestone beneath them, and out across the fields to the river catching the evening light in the valley below, the same view that has been here longer than any record can reach, the same ground that Cormac stood on before the sun was up, that Thomas climbed to in the dark to reassure himself the world hadn’t entirely ended, that James’s great-great-grandfather stood below while a surveyor wrote tenant in a ledger. Aoife wants to put a name on it, to call the house after the place her family has stood for thirteen centuries.

“Sure that’ll be grand,” he says.

They sit together in the evening quiet, the farm spread out below them, still held.

What This Means for Your Search, Kathleen

When you found your Brennan ancestors listed as tenants in Griffith’s Valuation, you weren’t seeing the natural order of things, but the result of centuries of dispossession. The Griffith’s valuation of the 1850s merely provided a snapshot – taken just as the reversal of that dispossession was beginning.

Your ancestors weren’t tenants because they had no deep connection to the land, but tenants because the land was taken from them. They stayed anyway, because it was still theirs in a way that couldn’t be written in a deed.

Thank you so much Kathleen for a question that led us all the way back to a hillside in Kilkenny and a rock with a very long memory. How about the rest of our readers – have you found land records for your own Irish family? A Griffith’s entry, a landlord’s name, or maybe a Land Commission file?

That’s it for this week,

Slán for now,

Mike.

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