 That is, well, it's the biggest book that I've ever come across on the show that I've ever had a cause to read and review and discuss on the show. It's called The Road to Glen Law, as in Glen Law, Glen Collin Kill. And it's written by Chris D. Gillespie, who I think is originally from, I don't know, I find out now in just a segment, I think originally from that part of the world, but lives here, just practically down the road here at Corleys or across the road. Anyhow, Christy's here in the studio with me. Christy, good afternoon to you. Hello, John. How are you? Good. You are originally from Glen Collin Kill? No, I'm not. No, I'm next door and killed car. And if you had to say that years ago, when the football was gone, that would not be a good start. But close enough, close enough. Yeah, fair enough. The Road to Glen Law. Now, let's let's deal with the issue of the size, first of all, because, you know, I'm looking at this book and I'm thinking, you know, you need to be mad to bring out a book that size. But, but then I was looking through it yesterday and it's very accessible because to the casual observer, it looks daunting. But you know what, even if you have a passing interest in the area, in Irish history, in art history, and, you know, a couple of the subjects I've dealt with, like Rockwell-Canton's won't. This is perfect because I don't know what it, maybe it's the writing, maybe it's the photographs, maybe it's the way it's all laid out. But it is, it's for a huge book, it's very accessible. Yeah. Well, it's actually when you put numbers on it, it's 684 pages and there's 900 images in it. And Una Matheson, the head librarian, said to me last week, now, I don't know whether this is right or not, but it's the biggest book was ever produced on EGLE. But well, believe it. Yeah. But I mean, the history of the valley is so vast and so interesting that it had to be done a certain way. And I suppose the central character in the book is Rockwell-Canton, who was in the 20s and 30s, maybe the most famous and saleable artist in America. And one of the big things for me when I started out in the book was to try and track his Irish artworks from all over the world. There was around the hundred. And so, you know, it was important to get all of those into the book. But a fellow called Anthony de Lap, I'm sure a lot of the listeners would know him well, Anthony came up to collect his book last week. He couldn't wait for the book launch. And when he lifted it, he said, God, the last time I lifted a book this heavy, I was an altar boy. Well, give people an idea of just how big it is. Yeah. And the last, the only book you were mentioned there, just off the only book, like in person in size, would have been the one that came out and two years back for the the what is it called revolution? One of them was the Atlas of the Revolution. The other was the Atlas of the Irish famine. Don't be the Cork University press. And in that same stable, you would have you would have the likes of the Atlas of Donegal as well. So it's it's in that size. And it's also in that style as well, you know, a very uncluttered style where the images had to be high quality. And I suppose what I was always trying to do with the designers of the book at the time was to make sure that the images flow with the text because what drives me crazy. I don't know about yourself, John, but you know, when you're reading a book and you come on a couple of pages of photographs and then they're telling you to go back and look at that refer to five pages. Well, that just drives always drove me in sale. It is annoying. Yeah. So none of that. None of that, Gary. None of that at all. And you've got a you've got a lot of pictures, obviously of Rockwell Kent's art, but you also have a lot of pictures from from the area from, you know, Glenn Law and just the wider area, Tealon and Glen Columnkill from way back from like the the thirties and forties and even earlier. I mean, Rockwell Kent himself took some photographs when he was there. He did. Well, I suppose when we set out on the book first and I worked very hard with brown printers from day one and Seamus Brown and all there were fantastic. But I worked with the designer, Annapolec, and we kind of felt for moment one that the book had to be very visual and for two reasons, really. To my mind, I think Glenn Law's the most beautiful place in Ireland. It's very inaccessible, but it's on the kind of the same scale as Sleeve League, but the only difference being it's two hours from the nearest world. So, you know, accessibility is not easy, but when you get in there for the first time ever, you have a huge glacial lake up at the top and then there's a river coming from that that falls and steps out into the sea at what's known as Prince Charlie's Cove now in deference to the supposed royal visitor that came in the 1700s. But then when you move around the bay a bit as well, then you've got the largest raised beach in Ireland and out from you, you have a set of sea stacks, including the biggest in Ireland, the Tormor. So you're selling it. You're definitely selling it. Yeah. I've been down to Port, but never, never over there. So when you park at Port, then you're talking another two hours walk and over the mountains. So when you get in for the very first time ever, what kind of shocks you is the fact that there are remains of two houses there. There must be easily the most remote in Ireland. So people were living there for two centuries and coming and going. So when they were coming out of the place, they were carrying stuff. When they were going back in, they were carrying stuff. But the other reason I wanted very much to be visual is because the central character was a consummate artist. And so there was no other way. If you had to write this story and left the images out, it just wouldn't have been the same because one kind of compliments the other and a brilliant artist. He was as well and writer and you feature both his artwork and and some of his writings in the book. You devote a lot of time to Rockwell Kent. We'll get to him in just a second, but also Bonnie Prince Charlie. Yes, that that's the big mystery of the book in that 1746 was a seminal year in Great Britain. You had the steward uprising where Bonnie Prince Charlie came to Scotland and gathered the clans there to try and get the thrones back for the steward family. And they did very well for a time, attack down through England, got as far as Derby, but then his chiefs wouldn't go any further. And so they retreated back to Scotland and they were very roundly beaten in at the Battle of Culloden outside of Inverness. And so so started then the biggest manhunt in British history where they were trying to locate him. And there was 10,000 pounds on his head at the time, which was a huge amount of money. And his followers brought him out onto the islands and there was a real game of Captain Mouse going on there for a long time. But eventually he was spurred back on to the mainland and it's here that the Irish in English or sorry, the Scottish versions diversify in that in the Scottish version, he goes back to the mainland, which to my mind was tantamount to suicide. In the Irish version, you have him coming in at his own, works his way down through Glen Swilley. And eventually, this stranger turns up with his manservant in Glenlaw 1746, never reveals while he's in the in the parish who he is. And eventually, after a month, he's he's he's rescued by a friendship and taken back to mainland France. Now, you might ask, well, why a friendship? But at that time, Glenlaw was the centre of a lucrative smuggling adventure where tobacco used to come in from the continent. And it was landed in Glenlaw because it was so remote and then it was dispersed right throughout the county. So once the stranger left about maybe a month or two later, news even came into that remote valley about what had happened in Scotland. And suddenly the realisation came on the people that they had been graced by the presence of royalty for that month before. And so at night time, sitting around the hearth and that, there were really stories about how he had been helped in the harbour. And then a Protestant minister called Valentine Poole Griffith came to the parish in 1852 and he interviewed all of these families that, you know, had a connection with the stranger. And he wrote it all down in a very long letter that he sent to his Archbishop in Dublin. So it's all recorded. So it was many years later, but there was still people who remembered him or. Yes. So I mean, it'll it'll be probably a mystery forever. But when you realise things like what I've discovered since that during the rebellion, his secretary was John Murray of Broughton. And the Murrays of Broughton were the landlords of Kilkar and Killie Beggs around England, Column Hill. So when you start to look at facts like that, you suddenly start to think, well, hold on here a minute. There's even even was even a famous coin that he gave him payment and offered payment. It wasn't that he was tight or anything or didn't expect it to be to be given great lodging and service for for nothing because he offered up and this payment passed down to the generation. Yeah. On the very last night, and again, this was recorded maybe 150 years ago now, this tale, where he went to a house and mean a crush, which would be on the way back into Glenloch. And the lady of the house had no great English. So she put him to bed and what she she tried to converse with him. She said bed, bed, I'm a sleep that which means bed, bed, sir. I have sorted out a slumber down for you. And then to the neighbours who had gathered into the house. She said, Tasha and the Lee and the sugarcane, you're a bear, let me across you as the corpus in the sea or is she he's now in bed. And there's not enough English in me across. They would waken him again. And the following morning, he gave a gold coin to the family and that passed down through the generations to the last of the name Paddy John, why a McGinley and he used to take it out proudly when you go to the pubs and that and the the the locals rather good humor, but disparagingly used to call it, Liffing John Paddy or his hepany. He did very good. Well, Rockwell Kent, the the artist, well, well known artist and writer in the United States, one of the one of the most important of the early part of the last century, made his way to Glenloch. How did he how did he ever find Glenloch? Well, his modest operandi always was was to go to very remote areas around the world, the likes of Greenland, Alaska, Newfoundland, Terra del Fuego, and he goes far from the Madding crowd as he could and live with locals, live with the locals, try and find an area that was very monumental where you had the cliffs, the sea and the more monumental, the better. But then when he would be there, he would live the life of the locals. And once he would understand their lifestyle a lot better, he would then commit it to canvas. And he was a realist, I suppose, in the purest terms. And while he was in Glenloch, what took him to Glenloch was he was on the second honeymoon with a second wife, Frances. And I suppose it was a bit of a compromise, really. He was well used to Spartan life and he enjoyed it. Whereas for for for Francis, she was probably a wee bit more delicate. So the compromise was was to come to Ireland. Beautiful as it is, not the first place you think off for a honeymoon. No. But, you know, it wasn't planned in any shape or form. They got as far as Glentys, which was real's end. So what you're saying is he might not have known about it until he got here. Oh, not a clue. He got he just went north, which was always his inclination. And then when he he took the rail, as far as it went that time to the station in Glentys, they climbed a hill outside of Glentys the following morning. They saw Glen Head for the first time. He thought, that's where I'm going. So on their first night staying in Glen Column Kill, they were talking to the locals and the locals told them to go to Port, the wee fishing village of Port that you you were talking about a while ago. And when he met the McGinley family there and he became very friendly with them eventually, Dennis was a fisherman and the famous poaching maker of the area. But they they advised them, no, if you go in to the next valley, we think that's that's where you're looking for. So they landed into Dan and Rose Ward and Kent often described it afterwards as the happiest time of his life, where there was no other accommodation there, but he was a trained architect. And so he fixed up a cow shed that Dan had been using. A buyer. A buyer. And then he fixed up another one as a studio. And so there they live for the next five months. Lived in one. This is the newly married couple. Lived in one and worked in the other, worked in the other. And then he, like as you were saying earlier, he did the usually he really seemed to tune in to the people of the area very easily and tuned into their right sense of humour. And straight away, he was helping them with their gathering, his sheep and their shearing. He was helping the building of Dan Ward stack. He will go out to do the lobster fishing, all of that. And you can see that realism in the paintings that he produced at the time. And a lot of experts would now agree that, you know, his Irish oeuvres among the very best that he ever did. Dan Ward stack, very famous one. And also a famous picture of Annie McGinley. Annie McGinley, yes. Well, Annie, his wife went back a month early to America because she had the source and apartment in the studio because they were just newly married. He decided to stay on to finish his work. But now he needed somebody to do the washing and the cleaning and the tidying up on, suppose, female company and so on. So Annie, who was Dennis's daughter, became, I suppose you could say in a sense, a replacement for Frances. And of course, straight away, the rumours started that there was an affair. Which there's no basis to it whatsoever. But it wasn't helped, I suppose, when he did this tribute painting of her. She never sat for the painting, but he did it in tribute to her. And it's on the cover of the book. And it's definitely one of the most beautiful of the paintings. Absolutely, absolutely. She looks beautiful. You got a lot of information from chatting to Francie Gillespie. No longer with us, but he was a mindful of information. He was a character in every way. I mean, to go up to Francie for an afternoon, it was just, you know, a great experience in every way. And Fran... How old was he when Rockwell Count was there? He was ten. And, you know, I suppose when you put into perspective now, you're nearly talking a century. And that's why the, you know, not just the paintings, but the writings and the photographs are so important now, because really what they, when you take them all together, it's a wonderful depiction of Ireland, just as we were taking our first steps towards autonomy after the Civil War. But Francie was a gas character. And when I was interviewing him, he was in his early nineties. And one of the days I took... I was telling Francie about the photographs, and I took him in and he was pointing himself out in the photographs and everybody else that was there at the stack that day. And later on then, I brought him up, a finished... The finished product, you know, a copy of the painting itself. And of course, it features six adults, you know, putting the finishing touches to a stack. And I showed it to Francie, gave it to him as a kind of a wee present. And Francie studied it for a while, and then he looked up and he says, the bugger, he never put me in. So he did the boy out. He had taken the boy out. But Francie could be very, very funny, because as I told you, Kent's accommodation was a couch head. And he waxes lyrical in one of his autobiographies about how beautiful it was. And people were coming from all over to see the beautiful little house and so on. So I asked Francie about it, because Francie would have seen it at the time. And Francie says, no, I didn't think much of it. It was easy to please him, really. To be honest, he says she wouldn't have put a cow in it. Oh, yeah, because I'm just getting the picture. About how remote it is. And, you know, here's the newly married couple. And the basic of basic is what they would have had to survive on. Very much so, yeah. How many months did you say, six months? Well, for Francie, it was four, for him, it was five. And just to sort of round out the story of Rockwell, Kent, he did come back, but it wasn't easy, because in the intervening years, he was a socialist and a communist, and this was the McCarthy era. And at one stage, he went looking for, and you tell all this in the book, he went to get his passport renew to come back to Ireland. Well, you see, what happened is, and it's a misconception that a lot of people have. Kent was an ardent socialist, but he was a socialist in terms of trying to make sure that poor people were well looked after and that they were getting an honest wage for an honest day's work. And often that wasn't the case in America. Some people then kind of append to that, he was a communist. But he said on oath on quite a number of occasions that he was never a communist, and he didn't like it as an ethos, because it was a whole country thing, and he didn't like the... He always liked the idea that a person had to be... Have freedom, and in communism, you never had freedom. But what had happened was that in the 20s and early 30s, he was the most famous and saleable artist in America. He worked beside Dennis Hopper, and he was out selling Hopper at that time, and Hopper's last painting went for 75 million. So Kent fell off the face of the earth as far as being a known artist. Now, why? Because he was a socialist, which was kind of accepted right up until the end of the Second World War. But then what happened after the Second World War was you had the Cold War started, where Russia and America were trying to assert themselves in the new order. And so if you were a socialist, then you were a communist. And if you were a communist, then you were supporting Russia. So people like Rockwell Kent and other people that not alone were they a socialist, but also trying to work for peace in the world. And anybody that was in that situation... All got labeled as communists. Yes, and what happened then was that your right to travel was taken from you. So Kent got communicating with the owner of the valley, Dan Ward in 51, and Dan told him that himself and his wife were leaving the valley because they were getting too old and they couldn't get... They need to be closer to a church and shops and so on. So he told Kent that he would take 200 pounds for the whole thing, and Kent jumped at this opportunity, made an application for what he thought would just be a routine application for a visa. But like thousands of others in America at that time, he was refused his right to travel, and so started a long legal case that went the whole way to the Supreme Court. And eventually he won, and he was the first person ever in America to take his country for the right to travel. And it's a very important case to this day because you or me can't be refused the right to travel because of our politics, our religion, or our ethnicity. And that's written into the legislature now of all countries in the world. And as soon as he got his passport back, he came back to Ireland one last time to meet Dan Ward, to meet Annie McGinley of the painting, to meet all his old friends. But by then, the valley had been sold, and so that great opportunity was gone, sadly. Sadly is right. Time was very much beaten. Dylan Thomas, very briefly. Dylan Thomas, the Great Welsh Port, also spent time... He did indeed. He came in as a 20-year-old, his literary agent brought him there, trying to get him as far away as he could from the bright lights of London. Little did he realise he was taking him into the potchee making capital of Donegal. But again, he spent a summer there, and despite everything, he used Glenn Loch and the inspiration and quietness that it gave him to produce a second collection of poetry, including some very famous poems like And Death Shall Have No Dominion. So, but then at the end of the summer, as was going to be his pattern for the rest of his life, he kind of got bored and lonely, and he decided he would head away and up he left one morning, and I detail all this in a chapter that I call Welshing in Glenn Loch, where he up and left without even saying goodbye and without paying, and headed away with no intentions of coming back. OK. It's all detailed at great length in the book, and it is a wonderful book because not only had all that information and so much more about Glenn Loch and some of the characters that visited there down through the years, but also brilliant photographs and illustrations and reproductions of Rockwell Kent's art. Just a mention for the launch, there's a launch actually tomorrow night. There's one tonight first. Tonight, at half-six down here in the Central Library. OK. And then tomorrow night in our draw in the Perochial Centre at eight o'clock. And the reason why I'm kind of getting it out and written around that way is it is so big, it is kind of hard to post and so on. So if you can bring it out where people can come, get their copy and take, it's kind of nearly the only way to do it. Well, I'm telling you, when you see it and you flick through it, you'll be won over. Christy Glassby, author of The Road to Glenn Loch. Thank you very much. Listen, thank you so much for having me, John. Around the Northwest, brought to you by Eregal Arts Festival, Donegal's premier summer event on the Wild Atlantic Way from July 8th to 23rd, visit eaf.ie. Best enjoyed on holiday. Tiree, live happy. Are you tired of how you feel? Despite diet and exercise, are you struggling to lose weight? Do you need help to achieve your weight loss goals? At Leta Kenny Medics Private Clinic, we are offering a free consultation to ascertain if you are suitable for treatment on our weight management programme. 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The clock most definitely has beaten me. David's up next and my thanks to Christie and thanks for listening. Back again tomorrow at 12 on Around the Northwest and thanks to Niamh for producing the show today. As always, chat to you tomorrow at 12. Bye. Around the Northwest, brought to you by Erigal Arts Festival. Two weeks of music, dance, theatre, visual arts and circus. July 8th, 223rd. Visit eif.ie. McDade's Bathroom, Plumbing and Tile Showroom in Bunkrana is your one-stop solution for all your bathroom, plumbing and tile needs. We offer a wide range of top-quality plumbing fixtures, tiles and accessories, all at the best possible price. Our experienced plumbing experts will help you choose the right products for your bathroom, renovation, new construction or remodeling project. Visit McDade's Bathroom, Plumbing and Tiles in Bunkrana and see why we are the best choice for all your bathroom and plumbing and tile needs. Are you tired of working from home with constant distractions? 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