Kate O'Brien in Corofin, Co Clare
In Corofin there is a lake and by the lake there is a house and in the house there is a room and in the room there is a book and in the book . . .
The fairy-tale illusion seems appropriate as a summer twilight deepens the shadows of a sitting room where for generations the bag-book was the main topic of after-dinner conversation. Clifden House on the edge of Lake Inchiquin was the centre of a sporting estate where fishing and shooting and hunting were the main purposes of life for at least two centuries. And it is in the bag-book, worn now but with its copperplate entries still legible, that the visitor will find O'Brien's Glory, a fly fashioned from a lock of hair from the head of novelist Kate O'Brien. The fly was tied here on September 26th, 1945, while she was finishing That Lady. On publication, the novel, arguably her more important book, was dated October 1945, Clifden House, Corofin.
Clifden House sits where the river Fergus flows out of the lake and was built in 1750 for the Barton family, who lived here until 1890. It was then sold to the Pattersons, who in turn sold it to the Studderts, keepers of the bag-book and hosts for many years of weekend sporting parties joined by enthusiasts from Limerick, Dublin, London and elsewhere. Limerick-born Kate O'Brien was one of these, and stayed here more than once, fishing and writing and adding a lure to the sport. She was in good company, for the house was so famous that local maps disguised its location and F.D. Burke, author of An Anglers Paradise; Recollections of 20 years with with Rod and Line in Ireland (London 1929) called it merely The Grey House.
The bag-book records the visitors and their pursuits: it notes the death in 1935 of Rowland Southern, Department of Agriculture Inspector of the Fisheries Branch, whose correspondence with Harvard's Peabody Museum includes details of the stomach contents of a River Fergus trout (18 small newts, one caddis fly, 80 caddis fly pupae, 16 beetle larvae, 14 nymphs of the blue-winged olive and three nymphs of Baetis). Another letter from Harvard just says thanks "for the last of the bones".
The book records the renowned ghillie Martin Egan, as well as the death in 1945 of Thomas Studdart and, in 1953, of his daughter Barbara, shown in the photographs as trim and pretty in a hacking jacket on her chestnut hunter. And here, among the occasional descriptions of the rat-tailed maggot beloved of fishermen, is the obituary of "Rabbit, the great hearted and wonderful dog". There is an honesty to all these entries which pierces any disbelief that Kate O'Brien might not have been at home here, among people speaking the language of her father's horse-breeding life (when the Empress Elizabeth of Austria came to Ireland she hunted on horses supplied by Kate O'Brien's father).
The bag-book mouldered with the empty house for 25 years until the arrival of Jim and Bernadette Robson. By then the sluice-gate on the Fergus was broken, the fish-ladder choked with weed, cattle were housed in the basement and a tree was growing out of the roof. But the Robsons, members of the Hidden Ireland country house accommodation group, saw Clifden House for what it is, a place with no sense of time but a great sense of magic.
It was to that timelessness and magic that Kate O'Brien responded when she left in the bag-book the fly, O'Brien's Glory, and wrote there the verse in which she promised to remember "September, shooting stars, and Corofin".
Clifden House, Corofin, Co Clare, is open to guests from mid-March to early November