It takes time to decipher a Harry Clarke window. There is a white blaze on the forehead of the cow in the Nativity window over the Communion table in the Church of St Barrahane in Castletownshend, but it is not immediately obvious. Yet in decoding that simple, single detail, the clue to the continuing importance of this little building is revealed, and with it one at least of the reasons why Lord David Puttnam, architect Sam Stephenson, the Georgian Society, the Knight of Glin, Alice Taylor and Anne Crookshank are all doing their bit to make sure it keeps its roof.
The white patch indicates a Freisian cow. Edith Oenone Somerville, for 70 years organist here, was, with her sister Hildegarde, the Irish farmer who introduced the Freisian breed to this country. The three-light window is a family memorial and Edith's letters to Harry Clarke about its composition insist on an accurate portrait of the cow; it had to be black and white, but she accepted Clarke's compromise of dark purple. With the blaze.
The tourists and other visitors to this little building on a hill in west Cork don't link dairy-farming with Somerville and Ross. The hunting horn and crossed quills on a memorial tablet in the aisle seem appropriate - but cows? That's just one of the surprises here. Just one of the reasons why this place is so special and why so many people - visitors and residents - are determined to help the parishioners make good the damage done to the roof by the storms of the last two winters.
Its origin in the Church of Ireland's Board of First Fruits building programme, the 1826 design by James Pain, the windows by Clarke and Powell, the stone quarried from Horse Island at the mouth of the harbour - these all add up to what Desmond FitzGerald, Knight of Glin, describes as "a remarkable survival of the social history of Protestant Ireland".
St Barrahane's is the parish church of Castlehaven, a village which was eventually eclipsed by the growth of Castletownshend on the eastern slope of the harbour. The despotism of the early O'Driscoll clans has been mercifully replaced by the tolerant community now attempting to re-slate the roof; to this end a programme of events - including Lord Puttnam's contribution - will merge with the opening of the annual festival of classical music at the church itself. Catherine Leonard, Hugh Tinney, the Orpheus Trio and the RTE Vanburgh String Quartet will perform here on Thursday evenings through July and August, with the appropriately named All Saints Episcopal Church Choir of Arizona giving the first concert on July 15th.
Writers Edith Somerville and Martin Ross outgrew this pretty coastal environment. They were inveterate travellers. Edith had studied and worked as an artist in Paris and London; Violet (Ross) earned her living as a journalist in Dublin before succumbing to the dream of restoring her family's home in Co Galway. Both women tried to live independently of their clutching and intrusive families but again the demands of the big house - in Edith's case Drishane in this village - constantly interrupted their exile.
They lie together now in the hillside graveyard surrounding St Barrahane's Church, in the midst of the Townshends, Somervilles, Coghills and Chevasses of the district and of the people of the townland immortalised in their fiction. In a benign and beautiful landscape, the church mirrors the personality not only of its unusual location but of its two most famous parishioners. The chancel floor is a mosaic designed by Edith (who died in 1949) in memory of Violet, who died in 1915; the dense and radiant Clarke windows (especially the lancet in the chancel) and the cooler tones of the Powell glass all speak of the family web which they tried so hard to resist.
The church wardens say that St Barrahane's has an identity earlier than, and independent of, the fame brought to it by Somerville and Ross, and indeed the first rector dates from 1403; but there is a pilgrim touch to those who climb the 52 steps to the door, which is always open to welcome them.
