Roamer: Village’s popular tourist attraction was a phantom footprint

Her narrative divides neatly into three parts, the Place and the Presbyterians, previewed last month, and today - Part III, the People - beginning with an appropriately spooky seasonal tale.

It’s about a phantom footprint in Clare Castle, a long-gone stone fortress with an action-packed past that includes near-demolition during the 1641 uprising and several rebuilds after devastating fires.

It was also the meeting place for local Orangemen in “a building at one end of the castle avenue,” Jennifer recounts, “whilst young trainee priests were being educated at the other end.”

She admits “nowadays most people drive past, oblivious to the incredible history of this place.”

But it wasn’t always so! “There are fine drives in all directions,” the ubiquitous American traveller Michael Myers Shoemaker enthused in 1908 after visiting Clare’s “old ruin where the devil is supposed to leave the impress of his foot upon a plank in the floor each night.”

During one of the castle’s fires “a child was supposed to have been burnt” Jennifer reckons “and a burnt footprint could be seen in the floorboards.”

The owner built a new floor but “the very next day, the mysterious footprint had reappeared and people from all around travelled to Clare to see the mysterious mark on the floorboards.”

Part of an old tower, possibly a ‘folly’, and some much-renovated outbuildings are all that remains of the Castle today. “Burnt down, rebuilt and burnt again,” Jennifer muses, “this building has been many things over the years…a bawn, house, academy, local curiosity and farmyard.”

Adding to the Castle’s intrigue is a ‘secret tunnel’.

When part of a field subsided in the 1930s stone steps were apparently exposed and, oddly, re-buried by estate-workers. “Was this the entrance to the tunnel?” asks Jennifer, “If so, its location still remains a secret.”

“One of the saddest stories connected with Clare” she told me, is in the chapter entitled ‘Death Comes to Clare’ - about the 1918 flu pandemic.

In lieu of the new Covid variant that has arrived here it’s an extremely pertinent story, and more so as it involved some of the author’s ancestors.

In the church’s graveyard is a headstone to three McClelland brothers - Robert (27), David (24) and William (38) who all died in one awful week in November 1918. They were “fit young men” and full cousins of Jennifer’s grandfather.

“Robert was the first to die,” she recounts. “He was no sooner in his grave than his younger brother David was the next to succumb. The oldest boy William died the following day.”

Everyone thought that the tragedy would kill the dead boys’ mother too.

Concerned local folk saw Phoebe McClelland “lying prostrate on the grave, crying her heart out” but she lived to bear her sorrow for another 16 years.

There are other sad accounts - for instance, around 1910 a young man was seen giving his frail old dad a ‘piggyback’ along the road with “quiet tears running down both their faces.”

They were hungry and the rest of the family at home “was on the brink of starving.”

His father was too ill and too weak to walk so the son was carrying him 10 miles “over the hill to Banbridge, via Scarva” to the workhouse. “Both men knew they would never see each other again”, a passerby observed.

Beyond sadness laughter often lurks, and local humour is abundant throughout Jennifer’s narrative.

One of her favourite tales features “the best ‘trout tickler’ in the county.”

A policeman spied him ‘at work’ on the Cusher River and strode determinedly across a field to confront him.

The cop really thought he had him but no matter how much he searched in the undergrowth he couldn’t find a hastily hidden trout.

A couple of men standing on Clare Bridge were watching intently and saw what the policeman failed to notice.

The poacher never once turned his back on the policeman, even for a moment, and out of the back of his trousers was the tail of an enormous trout.

To purchase The History of Clare, written and published in aid of Clare Presbyterian church’s building fund, email [email protected] or [email protected]