THE THREE AND THE FOUR

Ireland and Identity
by
Ciaran Murray

Castle Quarter Press

The Irish tradition of identification in terms of place, reaching back to Celtic concepts of sacred landscape, is here explored by the author in terms of his home area, Carlow. Signifying a fourfold grouping of lakes, the name suggests the Jungian archetype of quaternity, in which one of the elements differs from the other three: characteristically the unconscious or energising one. The history of the area is investigated in terms of the three cultural elements encountered by the author in his upbringing there: Irish, English and Latin; and these are given meaning by the fourth, the Japanese journey which revealed to him the significant association of the locality with Romanticism.

‘I sometimes feel sorry for people who know nothing of what or where they come from, or those who went before them. For history is not a burden, but an enrichment...pietas and creative nostalgia, the backward glance at the source of present and future...But back to Ciaran’s work. He explains the “Three” of the title by saying: “the town I knew was a psychic space in which Celtic, Anglo-Saxon and Latin intermingled”...The “Four” refers to Japan and how he came to find out about the introduction of its gardens to Europe, and how Temple, the person responsible, lived in Carlow...“Go ye and do likewise” for your own localities: you can win them back, and it’s worth it’ – D. Ó Maol Blagaide, Lá.

Carlow Castle

Pembroke

Courthouse

Browne’s Hill

Killeshin

Oak Park