It is a small tomb, table-topped and railed, the inscription now faint. Yet it reverberates beyond these hollow walls, this long, harrowed cornfield, this landscape of simple farms and tree bordered meadows. If the landscape has a timeless quality, so in its simplicity does the tomb's inscription.
Lo! Arthur Leary, generous, handsome, brave,
Slain in his bloom, lies in this humble grave.
There is an atmosphere here. It's not just the epitaph and its stark condensation of loss. The friary ruins stand unmediated in the field. The oak-lined avenue described by Charles Smith's History of Cork (1774) is now merely a path between grassy banks which are no longer formed by piles of human bones "cemented together with moss". Even without this detritus of the charnel house, Kilcrea seems to sigh with emanations of a vast and cruel history.
The friary is what remains of a Franciscan foundation built on a sixth-century cell by one of the mighty lords of Munster, Cormac Laidir Mac Carthy, whose own grave is within these walls. Although his most famous landmark is the great castle at Blarney, a few ditches away from here stand the ruins of Kilcrea Castle, also built by Cormac Laidir. All this land of Muskerry, cut through by the road from Cork to Macroom, was held by the Mac Carthys for centuries, their time ebbing at last with the Earls of Clancarty. Tranquil now, for many years these meadows and copses must have been bloodied by the internal battles, with Cormac Laidir slain in 1495 by his own brother and nephew only a few miles away at Carrignamuck, near Dripsey.
A soldier himself, Arthur Leary probably cared little for the medieval feuds of the Mac Carthys. His life was dominated by the Penal Laws, which he took pride in flouting when he could. He raced a forbidden horse (Catholics could not own a horse worth more than £5 which, at the time, would have bought a fairly decent animal) and wore his sword in public in defiance of Abraham Morris, High Sheriff of Cork. Art had served with the armies of Hungary and both horse and sword were important symbols of his status. He had also defied her family to marry the black-haired Eileen O'Connell (Eibhlin Dhubh Ni Chonaill) of Derrynane: her nephew was Daniel O'Connell, winner of Catholic Emancipation for Ireland.
It is Eileen's response to his death, her keen for Art O'Leary, which makes this small and dusty tomb so important. Determined to kill Morris, Art rode off on his bay mare but was ambushed and shot dead in May 1773 on the road at Carriganima, between Millstreet and Macroom. Eileen was the first to realise the disaster when the mare returned "with the reins beneath her trailing / And your heart's blood on her shoulders / Staining the tooled saddle . . . "
In Repossessions (Cork University Press, 1995) Sean O Tuama notes that both Eileen and Art were unusual in their lifestyle for 18th-century Ireland, minor nobility living "or endeavouring to live as if the old Irish aristocratic order had not collapsed nearly two centuries previously". And here in this graveyard - where the historian Philip O'Sullivan Beare is also buried - what comes to mind is the care with which, in her famous lament for her husband, Caoineadh Airt Ui Laoghaire, Eileen lists a kind of defiant inventory of their possessions - the tooled saddle, the bright sword, the fine suit of clean, noble cloth, the coat of broadcloth spun overseas, brooch fastened in cambric, the painted rooms, the embroidered bed-spreads, the five-ply stockings, the herds, the fields, the hounds. And lo! All to end in the place she describes in her Caoineadh as the "dark school" where Arthur Leary was brought, not to learn wisdom or music, "But weighted down by earth and stones" - here, at Kilcrea Friary, in the valley of the Bride, in the barony of Muskerry.
The generally accepted translation of Caoineadh Airt Ui Laoghaire by Eibhlin Dhubh Ni Chonaill is by Eilis Dillon