offalyhistoryblog

Banagher, County Offaly has associations with two well-known writers of the nineteenth century – Anthony Trollope and Charlotte Bronte.  Up to recent years nothing by way of notice of this was to be found in Banagher, but that has all changed as Banagher, now hard pressed along its main street, looks again to embrace tourism in a way that it did so well in the late nineteenth century and in the 1960s. The plans for the former hotel at Banagher will do much for the promotion of the architectural heritage of the town as did the voluntary work by the co-operative at Crank House. Pope Hennessey’s description in 1971 of Banagher in September would be music to Failte Ireland anxious as they are to extend the holiday season.  He wrote:

‘The month of September in Banagher, and all along the Shannon banks, is visually a glorious one, with golden autumn mornings, the low sun making long shadows of the houses in the street.  At dusk the whole river reflects the varied sunsets as the days draw in – effects of palest pink, for instance, striped by cloudy lines of green, or an horizon aflame with scarlet and orange light.’  And

The bridge at Banagher affords a splendid view over the level reaches of the river, which here flows glassily between a countryside as flat as that in some Dutch picture.  In winter-time the flooded river spreads across these meadows to create an inland sea. In spring and early summer kingcups bloom amongst the sedge and reeds along the Shannon’s bank, wild yellow irises abound and cowslips also.  In early summer, too, plumes of mauve and purple lilacs hang over the white walls of the yards of Banagher, and the whole countryside beyond the town displays brilliant variations of the “forty shades of green”. 

Many have tackled Trollope’s life, but none immersed himself so much in Banagher as the late James Pope Hennessy.

John McCourt in his 2015 study of Trollope Writing the Frontier: Anthony Trollope between Britain and Ireland ‘offers an in-depth exploration of Trollope’s time in Ireland as a rising Post Office official, contextualising his considerable output of Irish novels and short stories and his ongoing interest in the country, its people, and its always complicated relationship with Britain’.

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