By Fergal Browne
Unless they happen to be visiting the Graveyard, few people when driving out of Riverstick Village, past the Community Centre and GAA Pitch, may be aware that they are entering the ancient Parish of Cullen. Certainly, when travelling on the yellow school bus to Belgooly School, having passed over Fartha Hill and rounded the sharp bend at O’Connells, it meant nothing to me. However, this was once one of the major population centres in the area, boasting a Castle and a Monastery.
Cullen Monastery
Cullen is an ancient ecclesiastical site – one of the few in Cork to be mentioned in the ‘Martyrology of Tallaght’. This is an eighth- or ninth-century Irish-language martyrology, a list of saints and their feast days assembled by Máel Ruain and/or Óengus the Culdee at Tallaght Monastery, near Dublin. In this book, we are told that January 14th is the feast day of Flann Fionn i Cuillinn i fail Corcaighe.
The Monastery at Cullen was still part of the folk memory of the area in 1938, when the Schools Folklore Collection received the below submission from Thomas Scannell at Ballymartle School:
‘There was a wall around the townland of Cullen and parts of it are visible. Where the Cullen graveyard is at present, there was a monastery, and it was a great seat of learning, and the abbot was for a long time of the Barry-óg family. It was known as Cullen na Cléarach or Cullen of the scholars. Where the monastery was is now the site of the present protestant church. There is an old road around it, part of which can still be seen, and one of the adjoining fields is still known as the moat or móta.’
According to the Cork historian Richard Henchion ‘the old walls of the monastery, and the garden walls surrounding them, were said to have been demolished to permit new buildings to be erected. Money was found when the razing was in progress. The old road went around the monastery which was built on ‘The Moat’…It continued north through Cullen to meet the old road from Kinsale at Glinny Cottage before leaving Clontead at the Togher over the Sliogga River’.
In the Taxation Roll of Pope Nicholas, dated 1291 and again in 1302, Cullen is valued at 5 marks. A 'mark' was worth two-thirds of a pound, or 13s 4d. This was never a physical amount of money represented by a coin, but was a common amount used for accounting purposes. The tax was initiated by the Pope on all Church properties in Ireland and England to fund a Crusade organized by King Edward I to the Holy Land.
Following the Reformation, Cullen came into the possession of the Deanery of the (Church of Ireland) Diocese of Cork. In 1615, the then Dean of Cork claimed that he served the parish himself, but as the distance from Cork City was too great, he had been instructed to appoint a curate. At this time there was still a functioning church building at Cullen, and by 1639 this church was still in good repair and the Dean of Cork, John Fitzgerald, was supposedly taking the services there. However, by 1700 the church was in ruins, with the Protestant population of Cullen attending church in Carrigaline or Tracton.
Cullen Castle
Cullen townland also contained a castle. This stood south of the Monastery and the present graveyard, on O’Connell’s farm and was described by Henchion as a small, compact stone-built building of which about 20ft was still standing at the turn of the 20th Century. Thomas Scannell also referred to the castle in his 1938 submission to the Folklore Commission:
‘Long ago, there was a castle in the townland of Cullen, and when the people of the place were knocking it for stones to build other houses they found money in the walls, but there are no remains of it there now, and where it was, there are some big stones sunk in the ground.’
James N Healy, a Cork based actor and author of ‘Castles of County Cork’ visited the site of Cullen Castle on two occasions: 23rd May 1981 and 17th March 1982 (incidentally a week before the present author was born!) He wrote that the Castle was located in the centre of one of the earliest Norman manors of Glyn or Glenny. He described an avenue of Easter Palms leading down a boggy lane for 70-80 yards, and stated that:
‘The castle stood in the southeast corner of a small field to the right, which was also surrounded by palms. A stream runs to a point behind the castle and is then walled in as a well which appears to have been the water supply for the building. The bawn was apparently the field to the east, around which low but strong walls still run. There is nothing left of the castle, but the buildings of the farm and outhouses across the road are of strong stone, probably from the castle – or perhaps they are part of the outbuildings which have remained.’
Healy believed that Cullen Castle may once have been in the possession of the Earl of March, but later formed part of the estates of the De Cogans, headquartered at Carrigaline Castle. By 1584 it was recorded that the Castle had been ‘intruded in by Richard Roche of Kinsale’. However, the De Cogans, as well as Philip Barry Oge were still claiming rents on the estate.
The Roche family were in possession in 1638 and in 1642 Richard Roche of Cullen joined forces with John Long of Mount Long Castle, Belgooly, during the Wars of the Confederation. When Long was defeated, Roche was dispossessed of Cullen Castle and the 480 acres attached to it. 280 acres were granted to the Earl of Shannon, with the rest going to William Pratt, Arland Ussher and Charles Hewitt. By 1659 Edward Kenney was the principal holder of Cullen, although the Castle had been abandoned or destroyed by this time. He married Mary Merrill, and their son Edward of Cullen was Sovereign of Kinsale in 1687.
Cullen Burial Ground
Despite the dissolution of the Monastery and destruction of the castle, the burial ground at Cullen continued to be used. According to a survey conducted by Richard Henchion in 1965, the oldest headstone in the churchyard is that of Michael Coveney and family, which dates from 1766, followed by that erected by John Prior in memory of his son Laurence who passed away on 2nd February 1771. It is believed that this Prior family were descended from Thomas Prior, who was appointed Constable of Clontead in 1675, and that John’s branch of the family had originally come from Nohoval before moving to Cullen. A descendant of this family was John Prior of Ballea, Carrigaline who was elected as a TD for Cumann Na nGaedhal in 1923.Some of the older stones also include that of Andrew Coleman, who died Dec 29th 1792 and his daughter Elizabeth who died April 24th 1793, aged 21 years. Robert Jeffords of Ballindinisk (now Cramers Court) was buried at Cullen in 1799 while the graveyard also contains a large tomb – the burial place of Margaret Hodnett Knolles (RIP 15th March 1807), wife of Francis Knolles of Ballywilliam (near Fartha) and her infant daughter Catherine (RIP 8th December 1807).
The 1845 Ordinance Survey map shows a watch-house in Cullen graveyard, presumably to deter body-snatchers. A known practice of the time was for freshly buried deceased to be exhumed in the dead of night and sold to medical schools for research.
Schools
In 1837, Samuel Lewis recorded in his ‘Topographical Dictionary of Ireland’ that there was a day-school at Cullen which was attended by about 20 children. The Deanery of Cork, which owned the glebe land at Cullen, had donated one acre upon which to build the school. By 1854 there were two schools, one for boys and a separate school for girls. The boys’ school had a trained teacher, Robert Dwyer, earning £34/8/3 per year. There were 139 children on the roll in winter but only 61 of these attended regularly. In the summer, roll numbers increased to 153, but only 78 were attending regularly. The girls school also had a trained teacher – earning £19/10 but with a premium of £5/6/6 due to her training level. Of 133 girls on the roll in winter, 62 attended, while in summer 92 attended out of a total of 151.
In his ‘Topographical Dictionary’ (1837) – Samuel Lewis said the following about Cullen:
‘CULLEN, a parish…, containing 1251 inhabitants. It comprises 3940 statute acres, as applotted under the tithe act. The land is generally good, but the system of agriculture necessary for a succession of crops has not yet been introduced, although, from its vicinity to Carrigaline, and the facility of procuring sea-sand and seaweed, cultivation is comparatively in a thriving state… It is a rectory, in the diocese of Cork, and is part of the union of Templebready, and corps of the deanery of Cork: the tithes amount to £253. 16. 10., and there is an excellent glebe-house, on a glebe of 21 acres. There are some ruins of the old church; the Protestant inhabitants attend divine worship at Ballymartle...
A new church
Up to 1847 the glebe at Cullen was under the control of the Church of Ireland Dean of Cork, who appointed a curate – who presumably lived in the ‘excellent glebe house’ referred to by Samuel Lewis. In 1846 the curate appointed was Thomas Olden. On May 6th 1847, the Dean of Cork licenced Cullen to be a perpetual curacy and endowed it with the glebe of 19 acres – with one removed upon which the schoolhouse stood. This made up the bulk of the enclosure of the old monastery. Construction also started on a new Church, next to the gates of the graveyard. The new church at Cullen, known as Christ Church, was consecrated on September 8th 1849. It was noted that while there were weekly Sunday services in the Church and evening services in the summer, the average attendance was just 4, with an average of 14 people attending on chief festivals such as Christmas.
Despite, or perhaps because of, his tiny congregation, Rev. Olden kept in touch with the local people in the area. When a historian of Irish Placenames, Patrick Weston Joyce, later claimed that the name ‘Cullen’ came from the Irish word for ‘holly’ (‘Cuileann’), Olden wrote back:
“Joyce is wrong. I know the place well having been Curate of the parish. It is pronounced by the country people, ‘Killing’, which is ‘Cill Fhlann’, ‘the Church of Flann’”.
Rev Thomas Olden was himself a scholar, having earned an Honours Degree in Science and a Gold Medal for Logics and Ethics from Trinity College Dublin. In 1853, while living at Cullen Glebe, he published a book: ‘The Confession of St. Patrick: translated from the original Latin; with Introduction and Notes’.
The ‘country people’ of Cullen that he referred to included a family known as the ‘Champion Murphys’, who lived halfway between the site of Cullen castle and the crossroads. It was said that during the Famine, they were among the first to get a contribution of potatoes brought from the North of Ireland to relieve starvation. These potatoes were of a variety known as Champions – which became the source of the family nickname. The family subsequently emigrated to America.
Other noted Cullen residents were Bill Ahern, a renowned jumper, swimmer and runner, and Johnny Maher, the hero of the ‘Ballad of Johnny Maher’ which contains the line ‘and down here in Tracton, where the abbey lies low’. According to local folklore, he once encountered a woman in Cullen who was planning to hire two donkeys to haul a load of sticks for firewood, and instead drew them all on his back in one go.
A forge once stood at Cullen crossroads, run by John Barry. A local tradition maintains that once when he was sick, his anvil was stolen from the forge and was never recovered.
A cross of three roads, just south of Cullen graveyard, was known as Cross na gCorp. Coffins would be rested here before a circuit of the graveyard would be attempted. Cullen Glebe also contained a holy well, known as Tobar na Sul, which was surrounded by a railing, and to which people came for cures for ailments of the eyes. The second well on the Glebe land was Tobar na mBrathar, and in the 1980s older people could still remember rosary beads, coins and crutches being left behind there.
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