Corpus of Electronic Texts Edition
Pococke's Tour in Ireland in 1752 (Author: Richard Pococke)

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Introduction

The reader will find in this volume an exact transcript of Dr. Pococke's Tour through Ireland in the year 1752, as it is contained in the original manuscript now deposited in the Manuscript Room of Trinity College, Dublin. That document was often asked for, but was always reported as lost till a few years ago, when the Assistant Librarian, the late Mr. French, discovered it lying concealed among the treasures of that great collection.1 The occasion of the present publication was as follows. In December last I contributed an article to the Christmas supplement of the Daily Express, describing some tours through Ireland, taken and recorded in the earlier part of the eighteenth century. Among others described by me was Pococke's Tour, into which I had dipped from time to time. That article attracted the notice of a well-known and respected citizen of Dublin, who recognised the value of the long-lost document, and generously offered to bear the expense of its publication. It is much to be hoped that his example may stir up others to publish the numerous and valuable Irish records which are at present lying hidden and useless in


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our manuscript collections, such as the Liber Niger Alani, the Crede Mihi, and the great Registers of Christ Church Cathedral, which would throw more light upon the history of mediaeval and feudal Ireland than any other documents with which I am acquainted.

The Tour here printed is, as I have said, an exact transcript of the original. I have printed all the mistakes in grammar, in geography, in the spelling of names, whether of towns or persons, making no attempt to correct them. This narrative illustrates one point most clearly. Pococke was a learned man, an F.E.S., and a Church dignitary; but spelling was not a fixed quantity in his mind. His spelling of the same name often varies three or four times on the one page. It has more interest, however, than a merely orthographical one. This Tour is a most interesting contribution to Irish social history during a period which is remarkably dark, and deals with a district of country—the sea-coast line all round Ireland—of which very little is known at that precise period. Pococke started from Dublin, went north to the Giant's Causeway, penetrated the extremest wilds of Donegal, entered the farthest recesses of Erris, Achill, and Belmullet, at a time when Belmullet was two days' journey west of Westport, and when no wheeled vehicle had ever entered that district, or was to enter it till seventy years later. That circumstance did not trouble Pococke, for he always travelled on horseback, with outriders, as Richard Cumberland, in his chatty Memoirs, tells us he met him in Wales. Pococke's observations and notices about this part of Connaught are specially important, because he came just half-way between Cromwell's period and our own. His notices illustrate the effect of the legislation of Cromwell. The Roman Catholics of Ireland had been, as all know,


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transported into Connaught; but it is not as well known that while Cromwell wished to cut them off from the rest of Ireland by the Shannon, he also tried to cut them off from the sea, by forbidding any Roman Catholic to settle within a certain distance of the coast—I forget the exact distance—and then settling Protestant colonists all along the coast-line. Cromwell tried, in fact, to place the Roman Catholics within a ring-fence. The result is that even to the present day the sea-board parishes contain a more numerous Protestant population than those more inland. It will be easily seen by anyone acquainted with the west, that Pococke followed the coast-line very exactly, and seems to have found good congregations all along the coasts of Sligo, Mayo, and Galway.

This Tour, again, illustrates the social state of Ireland in another aspect. It shows the stable, fixed character of its population belonging to the upper ranks, notwithstanding all the changes we have experienced. Pococke's position gave him access to the higher ranks of the gentry and I would venture to say, that representatives of much more than one-half of the families mentioned by the Archdeacon would be now found occupying much the same position as then. Peppers, Hamiltons, Stewarts, Wynnes, Shaw Taylors, Browns, Boyds, O'Donnels, Burys, Pallisers, Nunns—to take but a few specimens—these are all mentioned by Pococke, and are still all well-known family names in various parts of Ireland. Manners and customs—the state of civilisation—the operation of the penal laws and of the Charter School system—the names and emoluments of the clergy—the condition of trade, commerce, and manufactures—the rent of lands and houses—the state of architecture in country parts—all these points and many others find illustration in the pages of this Tour. The


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theological position and ritual of the Irish Church and its dignified clergy in Queen Anne's time are, for instance, illustrated by a passing notice on p. 132. Bishop Milles was a learned churchman of the Laudian and Caroline school. He came from Oxford to Waterford, introducing altar-pieces, separation of the sexes in church, and other customs of this kind, now regarded as modern ritualistic innovations.2 Pococke seems to have made a point of observing the natural history, the botany, zoology, and geology of every part of Ireland. This fact renders the Tour of interest to the student of natural science; while the careful notices and descriptions which he bestows upon our ancient buildings, ecclesiastical or secular, deserve the thanks of every antiquarian student, as more than a hundred years ago they engaged the careful attention of that celebrated Irish antiquary, the Rev. Mervyn Archdall, who made a copious use of the manuscript which we here print, in the notes to his Monasticon Hibernicum. I have already said that the manuscript of this Tour was long regarded as lost, and only came to light by chance. This tour of 1752 was not the only tour through the West and South made by Pococke. Travelling was for him the great end of life; and he seems to have made a tour through Connaught, Clare, Kerry, and Cork in 1749, the manuscript of which is now unknown. He several times refers in the text of the present Tour to the observations he made on that occasion; and from a notice in a note in the Kilkenny Archaeological Society's Journal for 1852, I conclude that fifty years ago some persons knew of the existence

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of the manuscript of the earlier tour, and had used it. It is possible, indeed, that the document in question may be in Oxford. Pococke by his will left all his manuscripts not expressly disposed of to the ‘Ratcliffe Liberary,’3 including the original Minute Book of the Proceedings between 1683–89 of the celebrated Dublin Philosophical Society, established by Sir William Petty, Dr. Molyneux, and Archbishop Marsh, which used to meet in Trinity College. The value of these tours is very great from an historical point of view. They preceded Arthur Young's tour4 by a quarter of a century, they penetrated a part of Ireland he never visited, and they leave us a truthful record of what Ireland was then like. How hard, for instance, it is for a modern Irishman to realize the state of this country when Pococke saw, as he mentions in his Donegal tour, a priest celebrating Mass in the open air, upon a large rock on a lofty mountain's side.

I shall conclude this brief introductory notice with a sketch of Pococke's life. Richard Pococke, D.D., LL.D., was the son of the Rev. E. Pococke, of Southampton, where he was born in 1704; his eldest sister, Dorothy, having been married just two years earlier—that is, in 1702—to the celebrated Rev. Joseph Bingham,5 the


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author of the Antiquities of the Christian Church. Pococke was educated at Corp. Christ. Coll., Oxon., where his uncle, Thomas Milles, was Regius Professor of Greek. Milles was a learned man, the author of a well-known edition of the works of St. Cyril of Jerusalem, and a politician very acceptable to the Government of Queen Anne's time. He was accordingly made Bishop of Waterford and Lismore—a post which he held for more than thirty years. He was probably the most learned Bishop of Waterford that ever ruled that See. By this means young Pococke got his foot on the first rung of the ladder of ecclesiastical promotion. As soon as he took Holy Orders, Bishop Milles appointed Pococke Precentor of Lismore— a post the duties of which were so light that he had ample time to indulge his wandering propensities. He began his travels in the east in 1737, where he spent five years. He returned in 1742. In 1743 he published the first volume of his travels, in a splendid folio shape, embellished with numerous plans and engravings, which was followed two years later by two other volumes6—one continuing the narrative of his travels, and the other giving an account of the Greek inscriptions he had discovered. These volumes are of importance even to the present day, as Pococke penetrated into a part of Syria which was never again visited till our own time, when Count De Voguë explored it, and published a work, beautifully illustrated, telling of its marvellous ruins, under the title of The Architecture of Central Syria. In that work, which I have described at some length in Ireland and the Celtic Church, pp. 289–242, De Voguë tells

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us a great deal about Simeon Stylites and his pillar, helping to make that strange character a living personage for us moderns. De Voguë gets the credit of this, but Pococke preceded him in the work by more than one hundred years, and in his neglected folios gives us splendid plates of Simeon's church and pillar, and other ruins of that district, which De Voguë reproduced some twenty years ago. In the enthusiasm for eastern travel and research which now exists it would be well to keep an eye on Pococke's volumes. Professor Ramsay has lately published an Historical Geography of Asia Minor. It is well worth while to compare the Bishop's account of Ancyra, Galatia, and the River Halys, with the investigations of the modern scholar and traveller. He also published several papers in the Philosophical Transactions for 1748 and 1753, dealing with the Giant's Causeway, which gave rise to considerable scientific discussions, which will be found duly set forth in Hamilton's Letters concerning Coast of Antrim, where a different view is taken. He took a great interest also in Irish antiquities, and in the second volume of Archaeologia, gave an account of some ancient graves and ornaments found at Carn, seven miles west of Mullingar, on the estate of Keedah Geoghegan, Esq. He was appointed Archdeacon of Dublin by the Crown in 1745, on the promotion of Dr. Synge to the See of Killaloe. During his occupation of that office, he held in St. Patrick's the last Archidiaconal Visitation of the clergy which the Irish Church ever saw, though the practice still continues as vigorous as ever in England. He was made Bishop of Ossory in 1756, where he carried out considerable restorations and repairs in the cathedral and palace at his own costs. He was translated to Meath in 1765, where he died suddenly when

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engaged in the duties of a Visitation, after a three months' tenure of the See. He found time, however, to leave a mark of his oriental travels in the demesne at Ardbraccan, planting the seeds whence sprang the splendid cedars of Lebanon, which still stand on the southern side of the pleasure-grounds behind the palace. Bishop Pococke deserves to be remembered by the public at large for one reason. He was the first who discovered Chamonix, and revealed its beauties to the travelling public; and to this day, as his successor, the Right Rev. W. P. Walsh, D.D., told in a letter to the Kilkenny Moderator of Nov. 20, 1886, his name is graven in large letters on an immense boulder near the Mer de Glace, with the date, 1741, in commemoration of the fact that Pococke was the Christopher Columbus who in that year found out Chamonix. Pococke was a perpetual traveller. He made extensive tours throughout England and Scotland. These have been already published: the English tour by the Camden Society, and the Scotch by the Scottish History Society. The present publication proves that he was not neglectful of the country where he lived, and where his memory is still perpetuated in the useful Pococke Institution which he founded in the city of Kilkenny. Many other details concerning him, his appearance, mode of life, travels, hospitality, and learning will be found in Vallancey's Collectanea, vol. ii., Antiquities of Irishtown and Kilkenny; in Mrs. Delany's Autobiography; R. Cumberland's Memoirs; and in Prim's History of St. Canice's. Pococke when Archdeacon of Dublin entertained Mrs. Delany and a large company at an afternoon party at his residence. That lively lady did not, however, at all appreciate the learned traveller, but confesses on more than one occasion that she found him and his entertainments extremely dull.


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I have tried to find out where Pococke lived when Archdeacon of Dublin and Rector of St. Peter's, but have failed. Perhaps some reader may be able to throw light on this local problem. About two years ago, the remains of an Egyptian mummy were found in Marsh's Library. It is possible that it may have been deposited there by Pococke upon his return from Egypt. The priced auction catalogue of his coins and medals, dated 1766, is in Trinity College Library. There were several portraits taken of Bishop Pococke. One hangs at present in the Board Boom of the Incorporated Society in Harcourt Street; while again, Nichols, in his Literary Anecdotes, l.c., tells us that there was a full-length portrait of him, in full Turkish dress, possessed by Pococke's first cousin, Dr. Milles, Dean of Exeter.7

George T. Stokes.


All Saints' Vicarage, Blackrock,

2nd April, 1891.