PAN PIPES AND POETRY

IN Kate Lavin's pub they were talking about Milton, in Wynne's it was horse racing, in Mattimoe's fish. What manner of town is this?

Boyle, at the foot of the Curlew mountains, beside beautiful Lough Key, reflects our fractured history and its myths. And this week, its annual arts festival is in full spate.

It's a mannerly town, with such civility as befits a home to those diverse denominations - Catholic, Church of Ireland, Methodist, and Dissenter. On the Crescent there is a clock tower dedicated in affectionate remembrance" to Dame Frances Agnes Stafford King Harman, a member of the once dominant local family, and rededicated in 1979 to the memory of a local politician, Gerald Dodd, "in recognition of his services to the community". Side by side, side of the clock tower, remembers Captain Edward Stafford King Harman, who died in the Great War, near Ypres in November 1914. Just yards away an inscription reads: "In this court house, on February 3rd 1917, George Noble Count Plunkett, was elected Sinn Fein MP for North Roscommon. His election was the first step in breaking the Parliamentary link with England." The two traditions.

Milton's great elegy Lycidas was written to commemorate a member of the King Harman family, who drowned while a student at Oxford. He was a friend of the poet's. "Young Lycidas is dead/ Dead ere his prime."

But they were not discussing that poem in Kate Lavin's. No, they were teasing out lines from Paradise Lost, surrounding "The mind is its own place and can make a Hell of Heaven, and Heaven of Hell." By the "morose poet, as the woman behind the counter described him. They were also discussing someone who knew someone who ran a brothel in England, which was advertised in the Yellow Pages as a health clinic.

In the Royal Hotel the MacDermot clan was gathering, for the third time. This year they launched a history of the family The MacDermots of Moylurg. One of the oldest Irish families, now spread all over the world, Niall "The MacDermot", Prince of Coolavin, lives near Naas, but the family seat remains at Coolavin close to Lough Gara, near Boyle. There, Madame Felicity MacDermot tends to the inquiries of the MacDermots of the world searching for their roots. Among those at this year's gathering were Jo MacDermot McGahey from Sydney, Gerald McDermot from Los Angeles, MacDermots from Geneva, and Quebec. McDermots can also be found in Brazil, France, Jamaica, Flanders, across the US, and are even on the World Wide Web, at http://indigo.ie/ mcdermot.

ACROSS the road in Daly's bar, meanwhile, Tony Curtis - a poet himself - was announcing the results of a poetry competition. A subdued, respectful company listened to some touching pieces and some doggerel with equal attentiveness. A personal favourite were lines from Nora Gillen's Parting, in memory of a dead friend. "Your image wells up/from a discarded handbag,/or the frayed leaf of a blue notebook,/or a chiffon scarf tainted with tiger balm,/ or an African sculpture mute on the sittingroom window."

In the old Cistercian Abbey an Inca band played the pan pipes as soft rain fell. Chaski Inkas, meaning "messengers of the Inca King", are from Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador, and are on a two month tour of Ireland. They performed in the altar area of the abbey, built between 1148 and 1161. With its great Gothic windows, its high Gothic and higher Romanesque arches, the medieval and the Andean blended to the melancholy sound of those pipes and the Kena flute - a haunting resonance of the past and passing.

A toddler crawled on all fours along the gravel of the nave as its mother danced in the gathering dark. Further down youngsters chased each other around ancient pillars, fingers shaped into claws and growling. Many more sat rapt, in raincoats and under umbrellas, in the body of the abbey, while across the road athletic youths dispersed after a GAA match. Such, differing sensibilities. And their dam, the dark.

In Clarke's pub the mood was light as Patsy O'Hagan from Ardboe, Co Tyrone, told tall fishermen's tales. About apparitions in bushes, the eels of Lough Neagh, a pig that coughed up £5 notes, the man who died of loneliness in exile, and ugly Sadie who married Hugh, a man "with two buck teeth that could ate an apple through a leather bag".

And walking through the streets, with traditional, folk, and blues music carried on the damp night air from pub after pub after pub, past the house where the actress Maureen O'Sullivan (Mamma Mia - Farrow) was born (in 1911), past the tree she planted in 1988, past the stone chestnuts on Shilling Hill - an elegy by a local family to a deceased beloved brother - on to Mary Cooney's "Ceshccorran" home from home opposite the abbey, everything seemed right with the world. Boyle was a good place to be that night.