Pippa’s place
Helen Rogers follows in the footsteps of Agatha Christie, George Bernard Shaw... and Kate Middleton’s little sis, in glorious Glengarriff
Just 16 years old and in school in Eton over a century ago, young Nigel Bryce wrote a haunting little love poem to Garinish Island, expressing his longing for the west Cork countryside he and his family had come to cherish:
There is a bay, girt round by mountains wild, And wooded to the very margin of the shore,
Where boulders lie upon each other piled, Which from the heights some ancient glacier bore
Out in the middle of this bay, so dear To me and mine, a rugged Island lies, With grassy slopes beset with boulders; there
A Castle stands – the apple of our eyes.
As we putter across the summer-calm waters of Glengarriff Bay to the island, pausing briefly to round rocks where lazy seals bask in the warm sunshine, the words written in 1909 ring as true today. Sugarloaf mountain lours over the western shore, while to the east, the white chimneys of the house once lived in by Hollywood star Maureen O’Hara peek over the green of the trees skirting the shoreline.
Nigel Bryce was to die tragically young a year later, the same year his mother Violet, a cousin of Countess Markievicz, and her husband John Annan Bryce, a fantastically wealthy Belfast- born diamond dealer and Liberal