A new book salutes the contribution of a fine antiquarian, and the importance of amateur historians, writes Eileen Battersby.
Professional archaeologists and historians are well aware of their debt to the interested amateur, as well as the sources gathered by the local archaeological or historical society. In Ireland, there is a fine tradition of gentleman antiquarianism as personified by the surgeon and polymath, Sir William Wilde, or an even earlier figure, Austin Cooper - tax collector and artist. It endures today in distinguished field walking societies, such as the Sligo Field Club.
Field monuments have a geological as well as archaeological context, while a ruined church or great house will at times offer as much folklore as architectural detail to the discerning visitor. A question put to a local person about a mound or a conspicuous hawthorn tree can begin a flood of story, including anything from a furtive burial to the revenge of the fairies. All of these elements, the random and the factual combine to tell the story and assemble the pieces of a culture.
Liam Price (1891-1967) was one of Ireland's dedicated interested amateurs. He had a passion for the past, knew the importance of documenting evidence and collected data with the zeal of a private investigator. His name is not as well known as that of Sir William or Robert Lloyd Praeger, he does not have an entry in Boylan's A Dictionary of Irish Biography, although his book on the place names of Co Wicklow is important.
Elected to the Royal Irish Academy in 1933, he was by then already a member the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, having been elected to it in 1926, and eventually became president of the society, twice editing its journal - from 1935 to 1949, and again between 1957 to 1963.
Price, who served as a district justice in Co Wicklow for close on 40 years, produced what amounts to Ireland's first county archaeological inventory. He also made an immense contribution to the study of place names and the methodology of collecting those names. His study, The Placenames of County Wicklow, was published in seven volumes. Most interesting of all, he kept a record of his field observations through Co Wicklow, parts of Co Kildare and touched on Co Carlow, in 28 field notebooks, spanning the years 1928 to 1966, and more than 700 pages, complete with his drawings and a useful index. This valuable record has been carefully edited by working archaeologists Christiaan Corlett and Mairéad Weaver.
These businesslike, concise and carefully illustrated notebooks have been stored in the Dúchas archive. Their publication is inspired. Material such as this reveals a great deal, not just about the sites, but about the attitudes and approaches to research and indications as to the increasing use of cameras and, of course, cars.
Not a man to be accused of purple prose, Price kept his notes brief and to the point. Nor was he gossipy, although passing references as to who accompanied him on various expeditions confirms he was clearly respected. RAS Macalister, Harold Leask and Françoise Henry were among his companions on field trips, and Frank Mitchell is also mentioned. It is difficult to determine Price's attitude towards law - it appears he saw himself as more of a civil servant than a lawyer - but as he was humane and kindly, although tough on drink driving, he could hardly be described as a typical career lawyer. For all his habitual politeness there is a ratty reference to Ordnance Survey hero John O'Donovan's fieldwork. On the way back from Arklow Court, Price explored a ruined castle site near Kilpipe. "O'Donovan's letter on Kilpipe parish is as bad as any he wrote: he did not even take the trouble to go and look at the castle . . . It is a great misfortune for the historian that O'Donovan was sent to investigate the antiquities of this area," (Notebook 23, entry August 15th, 1949).
The first notebook, dated March-August, 1928, begins on March 26th with the entry: "At Dunlavin Court examined Tubber old graveyard, fairly recently walled. No sign of a church. I did not see the ogham stone. The large mound appears to have been shaped artificially: it rises in terraces and at the top is a circular platform (grass) about 7 or 8 yards in diameter. On the NW side it is most easily approachable, there being only three terraces there. The old ruined house looks at though it dated from late-18th century - there is a long shallow reservoir at the bottom, with place for a sluice, or a water wheel? A fish pond?
"There is a field in Knockpatrick which goes by the name of 'Glownshod', the scene, it is said, of a battle ages ago article by Lord Walter Fitzgerald."
Price continued making such notes, recording observations, facts and venturing the odd speculation until the year before his death in 1967.
On July 22nd, 1929, he was in the company of Patrick Walsh, a national school teacher of whom Price writes, "he took full notes." The entry records that both men were showed a field by a local man. "His father demolished it for top-dressing 50 years ago, after asking the pries at Dunlavin, who said he might take it down, as it was only a pagan who was buried in it. In the centre was a chamber four and a half feet long, three upright stones - with one on top - two chambers, bones in the E one, and 'like knives and forks' in the W."
On his way to various court sittings he often made detours, climbing into fields to look at a tomb here or a stone cross there. He was meticulous and careful. Years of sitting on the bench developed his skill for extracting information out of people.
At times he would digress during a cross-examination to ask a defendant the origin of a name. No one knows a locality as well as a local - and Price knew this and seldom missed a chance to find out something. "A man named Cornelius Kelly of Moorstown was giving evidence at Bray Court," recorded Price. "I took the opportunity to talk to him, and asked him about the standing stone at Moorstown." Elsewhere, on July 4th, 1929, he writes: "Rathdrum Court. A garda giving evidence said he met a defendant from Kilmacoo at 'Tippercoo'. Is this a name from Kilmacoo, or is it Tobernaclo, Tigroney? Kilmacoo and Kilmacoo Upper are in Cronebane D.E.D., Rathdrum Court area, and Tobernaclo is in Tigroney West, same D.E.D. I suspect there was some mistake about this name."
It is easy to imagine the good judge attending to the court while sneaking the odd glance at an ordnance survey map under his desk. For all the detail and careful weighing of information, he is not pedantic, just intent on accuracy. Every person he met was treated as a potential source of information. St Patrick's Day, 1930, saw him photographing the Castletimon Ogham. "Peggy Earl aged 9 knew the marks on it were letters - she said they were the name of a giant who was buried underneath it."
Page 58 features a photograph of two children posing at the Brittas dolmen (above). He records being told about a watch-tower erected at a church with the purpose of "watching the graves to prevent bodies being stolen." Incidents leaning towards the supernatural are recorded with the same detachment afforded to measuring a monument. The "mote" at Kinsellastown has its story: "Goggin said the old people say a young man once went to put potatoes on it, and as soon as his spade went in he fell down in a fit, and died soon after." The notes accumulate, and the years pass with Price often revisiting a site and noting the changes. He was alert to the destruction caused by poor planning and haphazard development. Neither crank nor eccentric, there are no jokes, no little personal detail included, although, in the later entries, he makes the odd references to being tired or to the additional effort a walk across a field now seemed to require.
Of the man himself little is known and much is owed to the writer Leon Ó Broin, who knew him. Corlett, a young archaeologist with the pioneering sensibilities of the earlier generation of antiquaries, who has written good books oncounties Wicklow and Mayo, provides a good introduction, complete with Ó Broin's quotation describing Price as a "very fast and rather alarming driver".
William George (later Liam) Price was born in a Dublin Protestant family, his father was a barrister and Price, following an English boarding school education, also went to Trinity College to study law. While serving with the Army Pay Corps in Cork, the young Price went to Dublin for the weekend and was trapped there by events that developed into the Easter Rising. Price was a natural witness with an eye for detail, a characteristic that defined his life's interest.
In 1925 he married Dr Dorothy Stopford, an impressive individual who worked hard in the fight against tuberculosis, particularly in children. She became a national authority on the disease. However her own health became undermined by stress and from 1950 until her death in 1954 she suffered partial paralysis. Price lived on for a further 13 years.
As Cortlett points out, Price's field work spanned a 60-year period, during which "there were very few full-time archaeologists or historians working in this country" and Wicklow's physical and social landscapes were very different from today's.
These are fascinating books, local and specific, minutely detailed and often expressing one man's curiosity and quiet wonder at the legacies of the past.
Best of all are the passages in which Price records a story won from a conversation with a local, illustrating the way a yarn becomes legend: "A fairy funeral: two men saw a funeral pass through 'Ballemurraroe' (behind Moyne) and on for Sheilstown - saw the horses running wild about the field; the procession was carrying something." And there are many instances, in the middle of measuring a monument or checking a compass point, in which a turn of phrase is caught and recorded like a trout being landed. Liam Price said relatively little, had no gift for small talk, but looked at everything, searched well and missed nothing.
The Liam Price Notebooks - Volumes 1 and 2, edited by Christiaan Corlett and Mairéad Weaver, published by Dúchas, €50