Not everybody gets to be buried on their own land after a funeral at their own church, but then again Willie Kingston was not everybody.
Friends and neighbours gathered at his west Cork home on Sunday to share their memories of Mr Kingston and wish him a fond farewell.
Described variously as an environmentalist and ecologist before those terms gained currency, the 82-year-old farmed organically for decades, with his love of nature ensuring his 140-acre hillside farm outside Innishannon became a fertiliser- and pesticide-free sanctuary for wildlife.
“If you create the habitat, the wildlife will come,” Mr Kingston told The West Cork People last year, echoing Kevin Costner in Fields of Dreams. He had the evidence all around him to prove his thesis, with his farm long a home to rabbits, foxes, hares, badgers, otters and hedgehogs and all sorts of birdlife.
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Among the most striking features of Mr Kingston’s farm were the nine lakes he created, fed by a local spring. It was to one of those lakes that people made their way on Sunday to visit both a church and a cottage which he built on two man-made islands linked by a necklace of gangways.
“Each morning I wake, I thank the creator for giving me life, for giving me sight to see the great beauty of all living things. There is also the great joy of meeting friends and having entertainment and craic,” said Mr Kingston last year, referencing his great love for nature and good company.
Friends and neighbours recalled nights of ceol agus craic in the cottage, where the warm hospitality shown by Mr Kingston and his wife, Patricia, who survives him, often stretched into the early hours as music and song and laughter echoed across the lake.
There was a stillness on Sunday as mourners made their way from the cottage to the church on the nearby island to see Mr Kingston laying in repose. He was in an eco-friendly water hyacinth coffin he had chosen for his burial on his own farm after getting a licence from Cork County Council for the grave.
Piper Dan Lane played Mo Ghile Mear as friends wheeled Mr Kingston’s coffin across the narrow gangway to shore. They then shouldered his remains to a hillside field he had chosen to be buried in, with the spot between a round tower and an underground sun chamber he built years ago.
As the mourners followed the coffin to his final resting place, surrounded by a screen of blackthorn trees, one of the prairie dogs Mr Kingston had introduced to the farm many years ago emerged from one of the mounds pimpling the field before darting back underground, its curiosity satiated.
As the evening sun cast shadow across the field, mourners raised a tumbler of whiskey and toasted Mr Kingston to the echoes of his friend Sheila O’Regan singing The Parting Glass.
