‘The view from our door’
215 years ago, On This Day, 22nd September 1810, Ellen Hutchins received a letter from Dawson Turner and wrote another letter to him, just five days since her last one.
It is an informative letter covering botany and much else, including a description by Ellen of her home setting and how she viewed herself. Read the full letter HERE.
‘I had the pen in my hand to write to you’
The letter begins with this and ‘I had spent the morning sketching the enclosed.’ It ends with ‘The clock has struck one & all the house are asleep except your obliged and faithful friend E Hutchins, September 22, 1810.’ It gives glimpses of her day and she mentions recent and planned botanising. She sounds very positive about being able to be active but also we hear that ‘Since the day I wrote, I have been ill with a bilious attack less severe than usual but enough to prevent me doing any thing until this day.’ This pattern of periods of illness preventing any activity seems to have been a constant feature of her eight years of botanising (1805 to 1813).
‘The view from our door is very soft and pleasing’
As we have seen before, Ellen loved landscape as well as plants. She gives a lovely picture of her home setting at Ballylickey on the north shore of inner Bantry Bay. Now trees obstruct the sea view from the house, but Ballylickey Bridge on the N71 over the Ouvane River or the garden of the Ouvane Falls Inn beside the bridge both allow us to experience a version of what Ellen would have been looking out upon. This is where the photographs featured above and below were taken.
‘A very retired inhabitant of the mountains’
At the end of his letter to Ellen written on 26th July 1810, Dawson Turner wrote a post script – ‘Tell me, I beg of you, all about yourself.’ Ellen’s first letter after this, on 17th September, and this one, a few days later, do not seem to address this request and do not contain very much personal information. There is some here, so maybe she was responding to the request in a discreet manner.
Young person
Ellen described herself as a young person. Dawson Turner did not know her age and had been given to think she was older than she really was because of reports from Lewis Dillwyn, who visited her at Ballylickey the year before, and from James Townsend Mackay via Dr Robert Scott, Professor of Botany at Trinity College, Dublin.
The letter from Dr Robert Scott to Dawson Turner on 19th March 1808 is a very interesting one. He is fairly clearly answering questions he has been asked by Dawson Turner as to whether Ellen is young and beautiful. Scott says that his information comes from James Townsend Mackay: ‘She is, he [Mackay] admits, not very beautiful nor is she very young, I understand verging to 30 but she is very accomplished & ingenious, reading & speaking he says French & Italian & being able from her knowledge of these to understand your characters of the mosses.’ (Scott is referring to Dawson Turner’s book on Irish mosses, Muscologia Hibernica, of 1804, which was written in Latin.) The estimate of Ellen’s age is some years out. James Mackay visited Ellen in 1805 when she was 20 years old and 19th March 1808 was two days after her 23rd birthday – she was born on 17th March (St Patrick’s Day) in 1785. See a longer extract from Robert Scott’s letter and notes on it HERE.
Lewis Dillwyn had written to Dawson Turner after his visit in 1809 with some description of Ellen and he made a similar overestimate of her age, putting her at ‘about 30 years old’ when she was in fact 24.
Read the full letter of 22nd September 1810 HERE.
The next letter in the correspondence from 1810 is one written by Dawson Turner to Ellen on 17th October and there will be a blog post about it here on 17th October 2025.
Madeline Hutchins
Researcher on Ellen and her great-great-grandniece
22nd September 2025
