An Irish Diary

‘A garden of gardens’ – An Irishman’s Diary on Ilnacullin (Garinish Island)

Ilnacullin, also known as Garinish or Garnish Island, played host to many artists and writers. Photograph: Courtesy of Office of Public Works – Copyright OPW

Oliver O’Hanlon
Mon Sep 3 2018 - 17:55

Nestled in Bantry Bay in west Cork and benefiting from a natural barrier against the wild Atlantic Ocean, Ilnacullin is a veritable haven. Also known as Garinish or Garnish Island, it has played host to a great troupe of artists and writers over the years, who went there to relax and draw inspiration from its charms.

The island was transformed from a barren rock to a verdant isle by the Belfast-born Liberal MP John Annan Bryce and his wife Violet.

They bought it in August 1910 and employed the services of Harold Peto, who was one of the leading architects and garden designers of the time. They had big plans to build a seven-storey mansion alongside the Martello tower on the east of the island.

However, the financial downturn after the Russian Revolution soon put paid to their grand scheme.

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Instead, the Bryces converted a modest gardener’s cottage that had existed on the island into a modern humble family home.

Over the next few years, soil was transported from the mainland, rock was blasted and trees were planted around the island as a shelter belt. Rare tropical plants and trees from as far afield as Tasmania, China, India and New Zealand were also planted. They survive to this day in the unique surroundings of Ilnacullin.

Not only did the flora flourish on the island, but so too did writers and artists. Long before Annaghmakerrig or Cill Rialaig were ever thought of, Ilnacullin was the retreat of choice for a host of creative people. The year 1923 seems to have been a particularly busy one for guests. That year, the artists Letitia Hamilton and George Russell (AE) both visited. They left behind paintings that they drew during their time in the area.

Hamilton, who went on to win a bronze medal for art for Ireland at the 1948 Olympic Games, captured the nearby mountains on canvas in a landscape painting entitled Hungry Hill. Her oil painting picks up all the colours of the surrounding jagged hills, fields and seashore. It a lively mix of green, grey, brown, purple, lilac and mauve.

Hamilton also painted many scenes in the nearby town of Glengarriff, which gets its name from the Irish Gleann Garbh, meaning rough glen.

The subject of AE’s painting is similar to Hamilton’s but with some slight exceptions. He has included the Sugarloaf and other nearby hills in his painting.

His technique is also slightly different to hers in that his painting is much more detailed and far less abstract. These wonderful paintings can today be seen in the Bryce house, which was tastefully restored by the Office of Public Works in recent years.

Another visitor to the island in 1923 was George Bernard Shaw. Shaw was photographed standing in the Italian garden. This exotic garden with its Casita, a tea-house built of Bath stone, Connemara marble and Carrara marble, together with its sunken pool and statue of flying Mercury, has come to be seen as the very essence of the island.

While he was staying on the island, Shaw wrote some of his play Saint Joan, which premiered in London in December that year. Shaw's trip to Ilnacullin took place during the Civil War, but he was keen to tell his friends back in England that it was still safe to travel to Ireland on holidays. He wrote to the Times of London saying "The truth is that Cork and Kerry are much safer in respect of both person and property than the administrative County of London".

Shaw even joked about those who might have considered holidaying in France, Germany and Italy, or the “revolutionary Continent” as he referred to it, over making trips to Ireland.

In terms of the quality of accommodation and food on offer in Cork and Kerry, Shaw said that “there is plenty of room in the hotels, and the quality of the potatoes, the butter and the milk is such as to make one feel that one can never eat the English substitutes again”.

Shaw once described Ilnacullin simply as “paradise”, while another visitor to the island, Padraic Colum, described it as “a garden of gardens”.

The fertile island continued to draw writers in the following years. PL Travers, known as the author of the Mary Poppins books, stayed in the guestroom of the Bryce house.

In later years, the renowned crime writer, Agatha Christie, also stayed in the house.

I wonder if Christie was ever tempted to use Ilnacullin as inspiration for one of her books? Murder on the Island of Holly, perhaps, where the ever resourceful moustachioed Belgian detective, Hercules Poirot, has to find his way through a jungle of subtropical ferns, palms, pines and conifers on an island in West Cork in order to solve a crime and save the day. Stranger things have happened.

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