Bennie’s book on Breaffy in olden times is a delicious read

LOVE of place and people shines brightly from every page of Bennie Scahill’s book, Living Outside the Castle Walls.

Bennie, whose maiden name was Heneghan, hails from Breaffy, Castlebar. She now lives in Mayo Abbey.

The ‘Castle’ to which her book refers was known locally as Browne’s Big House in olden days. It is now the location of Breaffy House Hotel.

Bennie, her mom and dad, Thomas and Sarah, along with her siblings, Mary, Michael, Martin and Anthony (Anto), grew up just across the road from the house/castle and gardens.

She initially began writing the book as a tribute to her father, a bacon factory worker and a musician, who died suddenly at a young age, leaving her and her family bereft and disconsolate.

Bennie, soft spoken and with a literary style not unlike that of the acclaimed Alice Taylor, was very close to her father.

“He was very kind,” she recalled. “He died suddenly. As a family we didn’t talk about him between ourselves after. We kept the pain to ourselves. We did talk about him after Mass on the 50th anniversary of his death and I decided, with the full support of my family, to put down my thoughts on paper.”

Bennie says the book started off initially about her parents and life in Breaffy in the Fifties and Sixties but she expanded the subject matter to include a sad segment of family ancestral history – an eviction at Ballyshaun, Breaffy, in the mid-1800s.

Cruelly turfed out of a primitive cottage on a quarter-acre site by a ruthless landlord was Bennie’s great-great-granduncle, Michael Heneghan, along with his wife and three children.

Michael was to die from starvation not long afterwards as the family huddled in a shelter he had dug in the ground.

Bennie’s means of bringing the dreadful episode involving an ancestor to life was to write a song which she got Brian Sharkey to record. The CD is available with her book. Also featured on the CD is Bennie’s brother, Anto, reciting the poem ‘Evicted’, her brother, Martin, singing ‘Only Her Rivers Run Free’, and Bennie herself reciting the story of the Ballyshaun eviction.

Cathy Fahy composed the air for the poem ‘Evicted’ while musicians Tommy and Stephen Doherty and Brian Scahill played accompanying music for all the CD items.

You don’t have to be from Breaffy to enjoy Bennie’s book. It’s a delicious ramble through rural life in the mid-1900s when, as the author recalls, neighbours supported each other in times of great happiness and great sadness.

The roads around Breaffy itself were lined with majestic trees and the area itself was so attractive it was referred to by many locals as ‘The Ballsbridge of the West’.

“When I was young the trees reached across the road in a delightful arch,” she recalls.

The book and CD is available from the Castle Bookshop, Castlebar, Mayo Books.ie or from Breaffy Post Office. It is priced at €20.

• Bennie, by the way, is the nickname given to the author by her brother, Michael (Mickey), when she was a child. The name has stuck. Bennie’s baptism name is Bridget.