Ellen Hutchins Festival
Activity Report for the year 2017
2017 was another busy year for Team Ellen, with the third Ellen Hutchins Festival in Bantry during Heritage Week in August, and a number of exciting new initiatives; some completed, some ongoing.
Ellen goes to Dublin
The first of these initiatives was bringing Ellen’s story to the attention of the current crop of Irish botanists with an exhibition for the School of Natural Sciences at Trinity College Dublin, which ran from 9th February (the anniversary of Ellen’s death) to 28thApril. The Provost of Trinity, Patrick Pendergast, opened the exhibition which had been mounted with the support of Professor John Parnell and the Botany Department. It showcased Ellen’s specimens of seaweeds, collected from Bantry Bay over two hundred years ago, and kept in the Trinity Herbarium since then. There were also letters written by Ellen to James Townsend Mackay, botanist at Trinity, which were found in the Herbarium Archives in 2015. These were exhibited alongside the panels of information about Ellen’s life from Bantry Library and the watercolour drawings of seaweeds first shown in Bantry House. I made a transcription of the Ellen / Mackay correspondence. I gave a talk on Ellen for the Dublin Naturalists Field Club in the period piece of Trinity’s Botany Lecture Theatre and another talk to the Sandymount Study Group. The exhibition was featured on RTE’s Mooney Goes Wild.
Another Trinity and Transcribing Letters
In June I met in London with Dr Julia Watson, Emerita Professor of Life Writing at Ohio State University, who had discovered Ellen’s story when visiting Bantry for her own genealogical research. Julia’s interest in Ellen is as a letter writer, and she has been given approval to write an entry for Ellen in the Online Encyclopaedia Britannica. Julia, Sean and I went to see Ellen’s letters to Dawson Turner in the splendid setting of the Wren Library of Trinity College Cambridge. On her return to the States, Julia researched and found a source of funding to help with the transcription of the letters. Seventy letters from Ellen to Dawson Turner are in the bound volumes of Turner’s Correspondence in Cambridge. Twenty of these were in the wonderful book by Michael Mitchell published by Glasnevin in 1999 and I had transcribed ten more in the last couple of years. A grant from the Milwaukee Irish Fest Foundation enabled us to use a professional transcription service (on the Isle of Man) to tackle the faded ink, scribbled writing and cross hatching (overwriting at right angles to the first page of text) of the remaining forty letters. The grant money ran out with just four letters and a few stray pages left to go, all cross hatched, and we need to find £200 to complete the job. It feels good to have so much more of the primary research material available.
There is some interesting new information in the letters and lovely passages about leaving at daybreak to go to the mountains, a mountain side so steep she crawled up it on her knees, growing rare mosses on a rock in her garden, and how she is as tied to the house as a mother of ten children.
Ellen Fest 3: August 2017: Magnification and Music
The highlight was the homecoming of some of Ellen’s seaweed specimens from the Trinity Herbarium in an exhibition in Bantry Library. Through a serendipitous conversation with the Director of West Cork Music, the Festival included a joint event with Masters of Tradition, involving two highly respected Irish musicians, in the magical wooden building at Future Forests plant nursery. Organico Café was the gallery space for enlargements of Ellen’s seaweed drawings with contemporary botanical art by Shevaun Doherty. Other new developments this year were state of the art microscopes and stereoscopes, allowing people to see the intricate details of lichens, mosses and other small plants. Also, on the walks with botanists, we had a box of hand lens available.
Research Award 2017 and Exhibition in UCC, Cork in 2018
We applied for and were given a Research Award by the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society to cover research into Ellen’s Cork City Connections and the practical aspects of her letter writing, as well as the exhibition costs of sharing this information. To add to this, through our connections with the Deep Map Project at UCC (about the coastal culture of the south west of Ireland) we were introduced to the exhibition curator at the Boole Library, UCC, and offered an exhibition there from mid October to mid December 2018 with associated activities, and most excitingly a proper budget.
The research has taken me to archives in Cork, Dublin, Kew and Cambridge. I have found some great material including a Cork Remembrancer of 1792 published by the bookseller that Ellen used – giving dates and descriptions of significant events, from the Flood up to Ellen’s time with the first flights of hot air balloons, the Declaration of Independence by the United States and small dramas in Cork. At the back there is a catalogue of books and stationery items. I found the syllabus for two courses of lectures in Botany in Cork and Dublin in 1806/ 1802, describing the ‘current’ interest in the subject and the Cryptogamicks (non-flowering plants), and a book list for one of the courses. Another great moment was when the UCC Museum discovered that they had some seaweed specimens of Ellen’s.
I was put in touch with Carrie O’Flynn, a historical re-enactor in Cork, and she will provide demonstrations of letter writing with a quill, iron gall ink, sealing wax etc. With help from some specialists on paper, the postal system, and calligraphy, and our wonderful designer, Jenny Dempsey, I have put together text and images for five small exhibition panels entitled Putting Pen to Paper. I have agreed to give a talk on Ellen to the Cork Historical Society in the Crawford Arts Centre, Cork on Wednesday 7thNovember and write a paper for their Journal (end of November deadline).
Ellen Hutchins Heritage Trail Audio Guide and Leaflet
This is our latest venture; initiated by Clare Heardman and completed last week, it was made possible through funding from the Heritage Council and the Fisheries Local Action Group South. The Trail leaflet (in print form from the Tourist Office) and its Audio Guide (available from the website) take visitors to nine spots associated with Ellen, round Bantry Bay and into its mountains. Do have a look and a listen; the actress reading extracts from Ellen’s letters really brings them to life. The Audio Guide can be accessed here and the leaflet here.
Funding applications are in, for the 2018 Festival and legacy materials linked to the Trail and UCC exhibition: surveys / audits at Ardnagashel and Snave Beach; a Beginners Guide to Lichens at Snave; and YouTube videos on Learning to Love Lichens, Explore the Shore, and Ellen’s Story as Inspiration.
Also coming in 2018: Bantry Historical Society Journal article (April launch); Ellen Hutchins Festival 2018 (August 18-26); and Worth Library, Dublin, talk 16th November during Science Week.
The Bantry Historical Society, which initiated the first Ellen Hutchins Festival, is forty this year and celebrating with the publication of a Journal. I was asked to contribute a paper on Ellen. The Worth Library has a gardening conference and has asked me to speak on Ellen as botanist and gardener.
Madeline Hutchins, Ellen Hutchins Festival, 18 February 2018, www.ellenhutchins.com