We arrive once again at Wexford’s south coast and the little outpost of Cullenstown, navigating a network of small roads, passing the scattering of small castles and forts that the Normans and their descendants left in the wake of the 1169 invasion. The landings are described in Giraldus Cambrensis’s book Expugnatio Hibernica, where the author notes that “Robert Fitz Stephen did not forget his promise nor value lightly the pledge he had given. Having made his preparations, he put in at Bannow in three ships – or Tribus Navibus – about the kalends of May, with thirty knights from among his nearest relations and dependants, and also a further sixty men wearing mail, and about three hundred foot-archers from among the military elite of Wales."
We are on Wexford Time, as I call it – slipping into a different dimension of historic awareness in a landscape so textured, from its strands and rocky outcrops to its small towers and fortresses, that I feel as if I become a privileged part of this tapestry, with its weave of old Wexford and Norman families and the gradual genetic accretion of intermarriage with Celt and Viking. Every visit to this tidally unpredictable coastline brings a freeing up of the imagination as my eye is drawn to the view westwards from Cullenstown, towards Bagenbun Head.
I’ve heard stories over the years, one about a sunken village beneath the sea at Bannow Island beach, and a lone swimmer – a modern and unsuperstitious man – crossing over and back in the deeps parallel to the shore, who speaks of smelling wood smoke rising from within the water, a folk memory perhaps ignited in his subconsciousness during the swim. Perhaps something lingers in places that are, for want of a better word, invaded suddenly by courageous men in search of territory to dominate on behalf of a king.
The king at the time was Henry II who arrived on October 17th, 1171, a year and a half on from the first invasion. Within two years he would become the first reigning English monarch to set foot on Irish soil in one of the most far-reaching events in Irish history. Invasion and territorial takeovers were regarded as a matter of service and reward but, as so often in history, became something else: local attachment occurs, someone likes the air in the new place, the land looks favourable, then there’s intermarriage and all that follows.
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When we are on Wexford Time, meaning once we leave behind our Kildare lives, it’s as if a blade drops and a gentle time out of ordinary life descends. I almost forget my regular life, I almost forget where I was once reared, as thoughts and feelings dovetail into a different set of internal mythologies. They arise when I struggle into a wetsuit for some harmless swimming at Bagenbun, where, even on the greyest of days when the swimmers, the kayakers, the beach walkers are out, it’s impossible not to imagine those three ships incising the tide and coming to land. Impossible, too, not to imagine the men on board, men in mail, ready for the fresh conquest.
Further inland, the remains of Barrystown Estate survive to this day. Historian Máirín Kenny describes in an essay how the old estate takes its name from Robert de Barry, son of William de Barry of Pembrokeshire, and one of the first Anglo-Norman knights to land at Bannow Bay in 1169.
The remains of Barrystown Castle survive to this day, as indeed do hundreds and thousands of castle remains throughout Ireland. But for me, these are the first architectural elements that came to mark the collectively traumatic invasion that would change the Irish sensibility forever as Norman rule gave way to English rule and a race of people on the outskirts of the continental land mass was gradually subjugated.
[ Marking the Norman invasion of Ireland: more than 850 years onOpens in new window ]
My affection for the fortifications and brave constructions that define the Norman period remains undiminished. I can’t help but imagine those first days, first weeks, first years, when so much was contested, not merely the expansionist gratification of King Henry II, but the question of how some of these new people would decide to live among the native Irish.
And when I look out to sea and watch the Saltee Islands, or the treacherous little Ciarachs in any and all weathers, and then scan along as far as Bagenbun Head, I know I am seeing what the Normans also saw at the start of their journey of attachment to a new and bewildering culture.
