Sometimes small museums are best,
writes Brian Byrne. Not least because visitors don't feel they have to rush through a vast selection of exhibits in order to make the most of their time. Such is the
Ballitore Library and Quaker Museum, where Librarian
Pauline Fagan reckons she has one of the most heritage-atmospheric workplaces in Ireland, devoted to the life and times of 18th-century diarist and writer
Mary Leadbeater.
When, a few weeks ago, the great and the good of Kildare heritage enthusiasm descended on the small Quaker village
to mark Mary Leadbeater's 200th anniversary, it may have been the largest gathering there since the 1843 Monster Meeting held nearby by Daniel O’Connell. Or, earlier, the incursions into the locality of the 1798 Rebellion. Mary Leadbeater's writings, published as the
Annals of Ballitore, offer harrowing first-person local observations of that latter doomed event, along with much-respected commentaries on contemporary Irish rural village life.
The granddaughter of Yorkshire teacher Abraham Shackleton, who settled in Ballitore and founded a school in his home, Mary married one of his former pupils, and they moved into the building that's also the former Meeting House of the Religious Society of Friends. There, she managed the then-equivalent of a local post office and wrote poetry and her diaries in her spare time.
Three of the upstairs rooms comprise the museum, one of which was Mary's writing room. Through its window, she had a constant view of Ballitore's streets and square. "She would have watched all of life going on, and the events of 1798 as well," says Pauline Fagan. "This place is lived experience, of a woman, her writing, and the Quaker values of service." It's the first room Pauline takes visitors to — there were some 600 who went through in June. The only furniture is a writing desk and chair, which she emphasises are not the originals but do approximate what Mary Leadbeater used. Three panels provide a short overview of the writer and her place, extracted from a 2009 introduction to the
Annals by Castledermot-born writer John MacKenna, long fascinated by the story.
The Folk Life room has artefacts of local domestic and agricultural heritage, old photographs of the village, and an original copy of the Charles Brookings Map of Dublin published in 1728. This one, which is referenced in the Annals, used to hang in Abraham Shackleton's home and was donated to the Museum in 2006 by the Shackleton-Chinn family.
The third room features women's clothing from Mary Leadbeater's era, including an 1853 wedding dress owned by a lady from nearby Burtown House, built by Quaker Robert Power in 1810. In its own space is the one item of men's apparel, a 19th-century fedora hat worn in 1970 by peace activist and historian Charles Lamb when he was the sole Quaker protester at US President Richard Nixon's visit to the cemetery in Timahoe where his maternal Milhouse ancestors are buried.
For Pauline, who has similar feminist and pacifist instincts to those of Mary Leadbeater, working for the last nine years in the Ballitore Library and Quaker Museum has been a "huge privilege". She especially likes to explain the heritage to school groups who come. "She was a woman, she was married, she was a Quaker, and she was a voice of her time that we don't often hear. So when the small ones come in, I'm saying: what you have to offer is yours alone, and only you can be you, and to value your unique voice."
These days, many voices compete loudly, often peremptorily, for attention to their opinions, angsts, and prescriptives. They will mostly be well-forgotten in a far, far shorter time than the two centuries from which Mary Leadbeater's diaries' observations and notes still encourage their audience to think about what's going on around them, and make up their own minds.
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