Day 16 Sunday June 7th 2009 Meeting with historian Harry Hume

by Conor Kelly, 9 Jun 2009

I had the opportunity today to meet with local historian Harry Hume, former Chairman of the Glens of Antrim Historical Society, and keeper of an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of the townlands within the Glens. After breakfast in Cushendall he kindly gave me a tour of the area surrounding Ballymena, where a young Roger Casement schooled at Ballymena Academy before beginning his career, first in Liverpool, before joining the Foreign Office for the first of many consular appointments. The Academy has unfortunately been demolished making way for the Fairhill Shopping Arcade, the now thriving commercial centre of the town. Ballymena also possesses one of the few streets in Northern Ireland named after Casement, ironically situated in a predominantly Loyalist part of town.

Whilst discussing my interest in the image of the once mutilated cross above Murlough, Harry mentions the practise of erecting truncated columns in Church of Ireland cemeteries. On his advice we visit St. Patrick’s Church in the Parish of Ballyclug outside Ballymena. In the Ballyclug cemetery there is a monument in the form of a truncated column erected by former tenants of a local landowner O’Hara, who died of heart disease in middle age. Traditionally, this type of memorial was erected to symbolise the premature death of a nobleman/woman, a life cut short, so to speak. In place of the complete column topped with an urn, the truncated column is marked with an aggressive diagonal slice across the shaft leaving the absence of the upper half. In some cases it is also said to mark the end of a noble genealogical line. The similarities between this practise and the former cross at Murlough are both striking and particular. Aside from Casement being 51 and childless when he was executed, there is something quite poetic in this mark given Casement’s unlikely and short-lived contribution to political and cultural events in Ireland.