Daibhí de Barra — Dath an Ghleanna

High in the townland of Woodstock, on the slopes above Carrigtwohill, a tenant farmer lived out his long life writing poetry in a language that the world around him was rapidly abandoning. Daibhí de Barra — known in English as David Barry, and in his own verse as Dath an Ghleanna, Davy of the Glen — was born here in 1758 and died in 1851, aged 93. He lived long enough to see the Famine that would all but extinguish the culture he represented.

A life in verse

De Barra was the son of farmers in the Woodstock townland, and he remained one his whole life — a tenant farmer working poor upland ground, writing poetry not as a career but as a calling. He composed in the strict metres of classical Irish poetry and in the looser lyric forms that were becoming more common in the eighteenth century. His subjects were the landscape, love, devotion, and the quiet griefs of rural life.

He married Eilis Ní Chaoimh, and they had four sons and five daughters. The household was not prosperous, but it was a cultivated one — the Irish bardic tradition had always been rooted in precisely such households, where learning was passed orally from generation to generation long after the great aristocratic patronage had dried up.

The long life and the long decline

De Barra's lifespan — 1758 to 1851 — spans almost exactly the period of the Irish language's most catastrophic retreat in Munster. When he was born, Irish was still the language of the countryside around Carrigtwohill; when he died, it was already retreating to the west, and the Famine was completing that retreat with terrible speed.

He outlived most of his contemporaries and saw the landscape he had celebrated transformed by poverty, emigration, and the dissolution of the social world that had supported the tradition he carried. That he went on writing at all is a remarkable act of fidelity.

Finding the place

The site is in the upper part of the townland of Woodstock (known in Irish as Bun a Stuaidh), on the hillside above the village. Nearby is the double-rampart ringfort of Lois Ameraidh — a monument to a much older past, but one de Barra would certainly have known. The view south from this elevation takes in Cork Harbour and the estuary below Carrigtwohill.

A few lines from one of his poems survive in the Schools Collection, preserved by local schoolchildren in the 1930s in their accounts of the traditions of the area. He is among the last voices of a continuous tradition stretching back to the earliest days of Irish written literature.