Lives of the winding banks of Erne - Artists and adventurers shaped by Ballyshannon

For most of its history Ballyshannon was the chief town in Co. Donegal, a thriving place with a rich cultural heritage and international maritime connections that stretched from New Brunswick to Norway. Key points in the town’s development can be traced through the lives and careers of some of its noteworthy sons and daughters.

Ballyshannon’s historic core is the area around where the track leading to the harbour (now The Mall) met the castle erected in 1423 by Niall Garbh Ó Domhnaill, king of Tír Conaill, near a strategic fording point on the River Erne. The town, castle and surrounding lands were granted to Sir Henry Folliott in 1607, and his descendants sold the lot in 1718 to William ‘Speaker’ Conolly, the son of a Ballyshannon miller. Conolly had studied law before cannily setting about making his fortune.

He made a very favourable marriage to the politically astute Katherine Conyngham of nearby Mountcharles, Co. Donegal. He used her £2,300 dowry to make his first investment, and she helped Conolly ingratiate himself in influential political networks.

Elected an MP in 1703, he swiftly became Ireland’s most powerful politician, maintaining his position until his death in 1729. Much of his wealth and influence stemmed from his acquisition of 20,000 acres across five counties by speculating on forfeited estates; he eventually became Ireland’s richest man.

The Conollys built the spectacular Palladian mansion at Castletown, Co. Kildare, an enduring testament to the astonishing wealth and power they accumulated. As for the Conolly lands at Ballyshannon, their descendants sold these in 1872, having attempted to improve local industry and infrastructure.

By the mid-eighteenth century, Ballyshannon’s merchant class was capitalising on the town’s maritime links and its status as a garrison town. ‘French’ Tom Barton emigrated to France in 1720, seeing a business opportunity in the long-established trade links between Ireland and France.

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Trained in business by his merchant uncles in Ballyshannon, Barton established himself as a wine factor (agent) in Marseille, Montpellier and Bordeaux, growing his enterprise from exchanging French brandy for Irish wool, to buying his own vineyard and founding, with his wife, Ballyshannon-born Margaret Delap, a grand cru viticulture dynasty that endures to this day.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries prominent local merchants invested in building maritime infrastructure like quays, icehouses, warehouses and fish stores. Attracted by the possibilities offered by the developing port, one English corn merchant moved his family to the town.

His daughter Anne Jane Thornton shot to infamy after having, at just fifteen, assumed the identity of a cabin boy so that she could travel to New Brunswick in pursuit of her lover, a Canadian sea-captain. He apparently died before she could reach him,
so she continued in her guise for a further three years, sailing Atlantic and Mediterranean routes, until her true identity was sensationally revealed. She returned to Ballyshannon, only to die of fever in Donegal Town during the Great Famine. Her adventures are remembered in the contemporary ballad, ‘The female sailor’.

Port towns could be risky places, though, for their concentration of people and pathogens. The cholera outbreak of 1832 caused an estimated 50,000 deaths in Ireland and arrived in Ballyshannon, it was thought, via a Liverpool vessel that had docked at nearby Bundoran.

It was a terrifying time – the disease can strike down even those in their prime in a matter of hours. Those with the means did what they could to avoid contagion, like the family of Sligo-born Charlotte Thornley. She was a teenager when her family fled the busy port of Sligo – the worst-affected provincial town in Ireland – to take refuge with family in nearby Ballyshannon
(her mother’s birthplace), hoping to avoid the worst of the epidemic.

Ballyshannon’s cholera victims were interred at Mullanashee, a plot of high ground at a remove from the built-up area; the Ballyshannon Herald recorded the litany of local deaths. These horrors left a lifelong impression on Charlotte, who related her experiences to her son, Bram Stoker. He harnessed the terrible images his mother had planted in his young mind when writing his now-classic novel, Dracula.

Ballyshannon’s prosperity continued throughout the nineteenth century, with a resident mercantile and professional class whose lives contrasted greatly with the labourers and fishermen of the thatched cottages crowded together in the narrow streets of The Purt on the south side of the Erne.

The children of the professional classes could avail of a classical education at Rev. Robert Wray’s school in the better part of town, on Church Lane. Wray’s alumni included Robert Crawford who, after earning an engineering degree from Trinity College Dublin in 1852, oversaw rail and waterworks projects in eighteen countries, from Montreal to Buenos Aires, Paris to Vienna.

Ending his career as professor of engineering at Trinity, he returned to Ballyshannon in retirement. But Wray’s most famous former pupil was a banker’s son, the poet William Allingham. Before finding his literary voice he worked, reluctantly, in the bank and as a customs officer. His wife Helen painted watercolour scenes in the vicinity of Ballyshannon, and his half-brother Hugh published the first history of the town.

In 1895 the locals commemorated Allingham with a memorial placed on the fourteen-arch bridge spanning the poet’s beloved ‘winding banks of Erne’.

That bridge, a stunning piece of infrastructure built c. 1680, was torn down and replaced by a single-span road bridge in 1946-47 as part of the Erne Hydroelectric Scheme.

The famously picturesque Assaroe Falls and salmon leap were also obliterated; these had been a tourist attraction since the mid-eighteenth century and were described in bestselling travel accounts, including those of Richard Twiss (1776) and Richard Colt Hoare (1807).

A major development that temporarily brought hundreds of workers and their families to live in the town, the ‘cementation’ (as it is locally known) prompted a minor economic boom, including the opening of two cinemas and the laying out of a new GAA grounds.

A Derry-born labourer named Danny Gallagher was among those who came to Ballyshannon seeking work at the time. He played the accordion in a céilí band and may have performed in the thriving local dancehalls. His son, Rory Gallagher, was born in the Rock Hospital – in the former workhouse – in 1948. While his family shortly afterwards moved to Derry and then to Cork, Ballyshannon has retained its claim on the legendary guitarist.

We shape the towns we live in, but they also shape us. Infrastructure, urban development and the social and cultural fabric of a place influence the opportunities available to us, mould our worldview, and inform our vision for our own lives.

Ballyshannon’s strategic location and port infrastructure offered a window on the Atlantic world and invited exploration of the
broad horizon for generations of merchants and mariners, artists and adventurers.

Dr Angela Byrne works at the Dictionary of Irish Biography; see www.dib.ie