THE GHOST OF BALLYFAIR AND OTHER STORIES

The ghost of Ballyfair and other stories 

Liam Kenny

Local history can take one to some intriguing places. And into some good company too. Both sentiments were alive one summer’s evening when your columnist found himself up to his waist in wet grass deep in the mid-Kildare pastures south-east of Suncroft.

In the company were Curragh historian Michael Rowley, mapmaker Pat Healy, local resident Donal Duggan, and yours truly, all gathered with one purpose – to contemplate the site and remains of the once feted Ballyfair House and estate.

Although a modest house in terms of scale, and not an architectural showpiece, Ballyfair has a footnote or two in the story of twentieth century Ireland. It was from there in March 1914 that General Fergusson, one of the cooler heads in the Curragh Crisis of that month, wrote key letters, many of them prompted by the actions of one of the hotheads in the same crisis, General Hubert Gough who lived up the road at Brownstown House.

Ballyfair House comes into its own again in February 1922 when the vanguard of the Free State troops tasked with the nation-building mission of taking over the Curragh from the British Army lodged at Ballyfair some days before moving to the Camp proper.

As our quartet looked around the site in the May evening light there was little or no trace of the house itself but beneath layers of summer overgrowth there were sturdy remains of a fine set of stable blocks whose brick and stone once echoed to the bustle of horses and grooms making ready for a day’s hunting. On the site too was a walled garden whose apple and pear trees had long stopped fruiting.

Nobody mentioned that the house was said to have been haunted. But such a superstition is mentioned in a rare book by one Colonel Sir Thomas Montgomery –Cunninghame who in the course of his memoirs entitled “Dusty Measure – A record of troubled times” (published in London in 1914) paints a vivid picture of his spell as an officer in the Curragh Camp in the years from 1908 to 1911. In many ways the likes of Cunninghame – who fulfilled all the stereotypes of the Edwardian imperial officer – were more exotic than the ghost said to have haunted the old Ballyfair House.

He began his recollections of his service on the Curragh with an observation which shows the sheer scale of the military machine accommodated by the camp in the years of high empire: “In the spring of 1908 I was gazetted to the staff of Sir Herbert Plumer on the Curragh. Those who see the Curragh now [after 1922] will not recognise it as it was when three infantry battalions and two cavalry regiments were cantoned there and the station was the most popular in the British Empire.”

He went on to say that there was sport of every kind available to the military and magnificent facilities for the training of troops. And writing from a British officer class viewpoint years after the camp had been handed over to the new Irish State, he adds a wistful if rather politically incorrect note: “Whatever the Irish may think, I feel that we lost much when we were deprived of the Curragh.”

And it is not hard to see why good old General Cunninghame had such fond memories of his time on the Curragh. He was posted there in 1908 when the world was in a peaceful state and there was nothing for the thousands of troops to do only engage in war games, mock-battles and other ways of fighting off the monotony of peacetime army.

One of his commanding officers seized the situation and let his imagination flow by organising parades and shows and jamborees of all kinds. According to Cunninghame, the halcyon days of the Curragh were at their apex under the command of General Sir William Pitcairn Campbell who choreographed an annual showpiece display of military might on the Curragh plain which the junior officers dubbed the “annual saturnalia”. This involved assembling on the whole Curragh plain the whole 5th Division which included thousands of troops from the camp and from the Dublin barracks. Moving the hundreds of soldiers from Dublin to the Curragh was a significant logistical operation – made all the more difficult when the railway company refused Campbell’s request for special fares for transporting the men on their trains to Kildare. Undaunted Campbell turned to an older form of transport and negotiated the use of canal barges to transport the Rifle Brigade from Dublin to the Curragh environs. Although not stated in the memoir it is possible that the troops disembarked at the remote Corbally Harbour, four miles to the east of Athgarvan. However, not everybody was appreciative of Campbell’s enterprise in embarking his troops on the canal boats with an “Irish Times” reporter who covered their departure on the barges from Dublin writing rather sarcastically that “the difficult process of embarkation was carried out without the loss of a single man.”

 While Cunninghame enjoyed the social whirl of the peacetime Curragh there was one downside to living in camp which was that the accommodation was far from salubrious.  He recalled: “At the time I lived in one of the old wooden huts on the Curragh which dated from the Crimean times and had been patched and patched …” 

The huts had been condemned every year by the army accommodation inspectors but had never been demolished. A strange state of affairs for a well-funded military but there was a little bit of self-interest to explain why the huts remained on site. Cunninghame explained that many officers would prefer a condemned wooden hut because it was free of rent in contrast to moving into the recently built redbrick messes where they would have to pay a substantial rent. Even so life was not easy for the denizens of the huts: “They were bitterly cold in the winter and the sanitary arrangements were of the most primitive order.”  In fact so bad was the structural condition of the huts that the floorboards gave way under the weight of a burly General who fell with a thump on to the sub-soil below.

Clearly a middle-ranking officer who had ambitions to be at the centre of a social circle could not put up with that sort of thing and Cunninghame records that before long he had “left the uncomfortable hut on the Curragh and leased a house about two miles to the south of it called … Ballyfair.”

And thus we must end this instalment of Cunninghame’s memoirs before he deals with the ghost of Ballyfair. We will leave the aforesaid supernatural being to flit around the rookeries of the Cutbush until a later column. In the meantime my thanks to the quartet of historians who stood in the wet grass of Ballyfair in deepest mid-Kildare and shared generously of their knowledge of its occupants, real and unreal, in bygone days. Leinster Leader 17 June 2014, Looking Back Series no. 386.