The Madman's Window & Other Tales of the Antrim Coast

The Madman’s Window

& Other Tales of the Antrim Coast

Colin Urwin

Dedicated to the memory of my mother, Agnes Urwin,

who was my first storyteller,

and to my wife Carol,

who has a faithful, listening heart.

Published by Orkneyology Press

Stromness, Orkney Islands

www.orkneyology.com

ISBNs:

978-1-915075-12-3 – hard cover

978-1-915075-13-0 – paperback

978-1-915075-14-7 – ebook

Book sales:

https://shop.orkneyology.com/collections/orkneyology-press-books

Text © 2024 by Colin Urwin

Artwork © 2024 by Katherine Soutar

Cover photography © 2021 Jacky Smith

All rights reserved.

The contents of this book may not be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publishers, except for short extracts for quotations or review.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Introduction

1. The Seal’s Skin

2.Swans

3.Marie and the Angels

4.The Hired Lad

5.The Foster Mother

6.Tale of Two Friends

7.The Drunken Piper

8.Marina Jane

9.The Madman’s Window

10.The Whuttrick, the Poacher and the Gamekeeper

11.A Poacher Turned Stick-Maker

12.Away with the Faeries

13.The Last Wolf

14.The Last Man

15.The Farmer’s Bull

16.The Wreck of the Enterprise of Lynn

17.A Bird in the Hand

18.The Galboly Highwaymen

19.The Wise Woman of Ballyeamon

20.John o the Sea

21.The House Maid

22.The Salmon Man

23.The Coaleyman and the Tinker’s Daughter

24.The Golden Hare

25.The Rathlin Farmer

26.The Rathlin Mermaid

27.Cloch Mhór Fhearghusa

28.Cuilén Bán

29.The Disbelieving Farmer

30.A Christmas Miracle

31.A Christmas Wish

32.The Miracle of Christmas 1918

33.Old Comrades

Acknowledgements

My heartfelt thanks go to the lovely Rhonda and Tom Muir of Orkneyology Press – for their encouragement, friendship and love, which is all so freely and sincerely given, and for welcoming me to their beautiful and fascinating island home. In the process they have fulfilled more than one of my long-held dreams. I will always be grateful and hope to be able to repay at least some of their kindness.

Many thanks also go to Katherine Soutar for her wonderful artwork and to Maura Johnston for allowing me to use her beautiful poem, The Storyteller. I am deeply indebted to both.

Foreword

Whilst growing up as a child in rural Glenarm, County Antrim, over fifty years ago, my generation and I were, without realising it at the time, witnessing the final throes of a transition from the old order to the new. We were moving from a time when the ancient folklore, musical and oral traditions of the Antrim Glens had all but given way to the modern world. The society we inhabit today bears very little resemblance to that old world – for better or for worse – and without becoming too sentimental and nostalgic about it, there is no question that important and valuable aspects of our cultural heritage have been eroded.

This wonderful book brings to life a time before the tyranny of modern technology, when storytellers and musicians were still an integral part of our rural communities. Stories, poetry and recitation had been embedded in our towns and villages as part of an evolving continuum for millennia. This aspect of people’s lives anchored them to their locality and fired the collective imagination of old and young alike. They are the reason why myths and folkloric tales told around the hearth of every home from generation to generation were enjoyed and venerated so much. A fascination in these tales and oral traditions persists to this day, and even now, after so much change, the stories and verse in this book still resonate in exactly the same way.

I have known Colin Urwin for many years. I first knew him when he was demonstrating his remarkable skills as a falconer at Glenarm Castle some thirty years ago and now he has emerged as a professional folk singer, songwriter and storyteller. In this book he has created original stories built around fragments of folk and family lore using the motifs and conventions of an ancient story-telling tradition. I rather like the description of them by one observer as folktales of the future, as it seems to encapsulate their timelessness. Crucially, these stories retain that vital element of mystery, suspense and haunting spirituality that captures the reader’s imagination at the beginning and hooks them firmly in until the very end.

Randal McDonnell

15th Earl of Antrim

Chief of the Antrim McDonnells

Introduction

In the creation of these stories, I have drawn freely from the wells of historical events, family anecdote, personal experience and local folklore – rarely straying far from the Antrim coast in that regard. With each one I have attempted to merge these elements, to varying degrees, to craft something resembling an old folktale – perhaps more accurately a new folktale!

The ideas for some of these stories have been swirling around in my head since boyhood, mostly put there by my mother and other family elders. Later I was inspired by my future father-in-law, Tom O’Hara who I first met as a timid sixteen-year-old courting his daughter. Although I did not recognise it at the time, and nor did they, people like my mother and more especially my father-in-law were the last vestiges of the oral storytelling tradition.

During the ongoing lockdown of 2020, I had the time to develop some of the ideas I hoarded over forty years. I experienced an avalanche of creativity and wrote dozens of stories, songs and recitations – many of which are included here. Almost nightly I shared them with online audiences from around the world. My writing gathered momentum and other ideas rushed to my mind during daily walks to my favourite local beauty spot along the coast – The Madman’s Window.

Yes, The Madman’s Window is a real place, as are all the locations mentioned in the stories. To me folklore is most potent when it is rooted in the landscape. Indeed, it is by being so rooted that traditional stories and songs have the best chance of survival, otherwise they are at risk of being blown away on the wind and forgotten.

Many of the characters in these stories are also real, though they have been given different names to protect their identity. I have tried to honour the memory of many of the people I have loved and known or been told about by placing them in the stories. I hope my regard for these people, and for the often-harsh lives that they led, is apparent.

I hope too that my love for where I and my maternal ancestors come from shines through. The Antrim Coast is without doubt one of the most beautiful places in Ireland. The land, sea and skyscapes are sublime, and the wildlife is thankfully still relatively abundant and diverse. My great love for the natural world will also be obvious to the reader, but more than that I have tried to illustrate how our ancestors lived in greater harmony with their environment and had an inherent and better understanding of its rhythms.

It has been an absolute pleasure to write these stories: to go back over the lore and history contained in them; to revisit the beautiful settings and absorb their essence again; to breathe life into the characters who inhabit the paragraphs and pages; and to remember those who inspired me on this journey. Along the way there have been so many remarkable experiences and strange little coincidences.

At Nappin Cemetery, in a cool and overgrown nook near Garron Point, my wife and I were trying to locate the mass grave where the dead of the Enterprise of Lynn, wrecked at Ringfad, nearby, were said to have been buried almost two hundred years before. We were treading softly through the few weathered, tilted headstones and crypts when suddenly there was a tremendous crashing sound and a rush of wind, almost like an explosion. We ducked instinctively and one or two oaths slipped out.

It was a rockfall. Through the overhanging trees from the precipice above our heads a shower of limestone came tumbling down. It split the serenity of the late summer afternoon in that ancient burial place. We took it as a sign that we had outstayed our welcome.

On another occasion I was reading the final draft of The Whuttrick, the Poacher and the Gamekeeper to my wife Carol. I uttered the last word and then became aware that the expression on her face was one of astonishment. Slightly puzzled, I realised she was looking over my shoulder. I turned slowly to see a stoat (a whuttrick) peering at us through the window of my study. It was an enchanting moment of happenchance.

It is always a privilege to share these stories in schools and libraries, with community groups and at storytelling festivals the world over. I am continually struck by how some of them get under the skin of audiences and arouse genuine emotion. It pleases me greatly that they are often mistaken for traditional tales – which of course in many ways they are or, I hope, will become.

In 2020–2021 I recorded and produced a trilogy of albums combining some of the stories here with beautiful fiddle, harp and uilleann pipe music to create a rich and evocative soundscape. It is truly heart-warming to receive messages from people who have fallen in love with them. I am honoured when people ask if they might tell the stories themselves. I always say the same thing and I repeat it here...

Of course! Stories are for sharing. Please feel free.

Colin Urwin

Glenarm

2024

The Storyteller

The magic of the storyteller

Lies

In the spark-flight and hand-sleight that flings

Words to settle soft as a selkie’s skin.

The wonder of the storyteller

Lies

In the moons of nearly-known worlds

Where sorrow sings and souls’ edges are blurred.

The allure of the storyteller

Lies

In the music of wild coloured charms

that weave through echoes new-born.

The power of the storyteller

Lies

In reflection and mirrors and spells

That whisper of us to ourselves.

Maura Johnston

The Seal’s Skin

In the North Channel between Ireland and Scotland lie a pair of rocky islets four miles off the County Antrim coast. Known locally as The Maidens, they have been the site of a lighthouse since 1829. It used to be that two keepers were ferried out from Larne every month to relieve the home-coming crew. During bad weather, however, it was often too dangerous to attempt a landing. One month could easily drag into two.

In September 1834, a Scotsman then settled in County Donegal was sent to join a local keeper – an Antrim Glensman by the name of McAllister. Near the end of their stint, the weather blew up and they were stormed in for another two weeks. When the relief crew finally arrived, they were a little surprised to find neither the Scotsman nor McAllister on the small quay to welcome them. They landed their gear and still no one appeared. Together with the skipper of the ferry, they made their way up the steps with a strange sense of foreboding weighing on them.

When they reached the lighthouse, they found the door wide to the world. They went on into the mess room and the grisly sight that met their eyes haunted those men for the rest of their days. Slumped in a chair at the table was one of the keepers. He was barely recognizable as McAllister. His face was misshapen. His skin was black and purple. On his scalp was a deep gash and a cut was over his left eye. His nose had been broken. He was as dead as a stone.

The lighthouse and its curtilage were searched. In an outbuilding, a fresh seal pelt was discovered but nothing else out of the ordinary. Neither hide nor hair of the other keeper was found. Out around the island they went looking and eventually, huddled between two boulders, the Scotsman was discovered. His clothes were saturated and blood-stained, his boots full of seawater. He was barely alive. They half carried and half dragged him to the lighthouse and lit the stove. He was stripped of his wet garb and draped in blankets. His feet were placed in a basin of hot water. Not a drop of liquid nor a morsel of food could they get into him, and not a word of sense could they get out of him.

The deranged Scotsman, the gruesome corpse of McAllister and all their gear, including the seal pelt, were loaded into the boat and taken back to Larne. It was, to say the least, an unnerving trip for the lone ferryman. The Royal Irish Constabulary District Inspector was informed, and the Commissioners of Irish Lights dispatched a man from Dublin to investigate the strange incident. His name was O’Donahoe. He questioned the Scotsman in his hospital bed who was by now more talkative but making even less sense. After a long and difficult interview, the Scotsman asked for a priest. He died before he could finish his last confession.

Testimonies, such as they were, were taken from all the witnesses and O’Donahoe wrote a report for the Commissioners stating, It appears the two keepers met in violent altercation resulting in McAllister’s untimely death. The balance of the Scotsman’s mind seems to have been disturbed, in all likelihood, by the consumption of poitín, there being a half empty jar found amongst his belongings. In view of the Scotsman’s incoherent ramblings and fanciful claims, the exact circumstances of the incident cannot now be determined.

With both keepers dead, the coroner’s inquest was brief. Next of kin were informed and the incident was discreetly written off. It would become the stuff of lighthouse legend and just another strange tale told in the mess or public house by the men who tended those lonely outposts of civilisation.

Some years later, O’Donahoe, now a retired man, was travelling in the Glens of Antrim. One evening he had occasion to take lodgings in a local hostelry. He found himself in a smoke-filled kitchen-room lit only by the flame of a peat fire and an oil lamp. Present were a few locals – fishermen mostly – and an old travelling woman taking shelter for the night in a nook by the chimney, which was not so uncommon in those days.

Come in stranger. Sit yourself down and heat your feet by the fire. You’ll take a wee colour of whiskey. O’Donahoe had a drink set before him. What brings you to this part of the world?

Well, says he, I am not altogether a stranger in these parts.

Oh, said one, have you kin hereabouts?

And bit by bit, O’Donahoe’s inquisitors pieced together his breed, seed and generation, making any connections they could, however tenuous. Before another round of drink had been called for, they had discovered the reason for O’Donahoe’s previous visit. By the next they were discussing the strange occurrence of so many years earlier.

And so, what did pass between you and this Scotchman? he was asked. And whether it was the passage of time or the whiskey or the genial company that loosened O’Donahoe’s tongue, he gave this account:

"Well, on his off watch the Scotsman drank some poitín. Feeling a little restless, he took a walk around the island just as the sun was slipping down behind the Antrim Hills. It was low tide and down by the water he saw what he thought was a young naked woman. He