A memory keeper of travels past
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“May you live all the days of your life” is Jonathan Swift’s message to old and young. Dean Morton with students from Cross NS.Image 2 of 5
Dr Brendan Toomey encouraged people to read Gulliver’s Travels.Image 3 of 5
Travelling through his books, Sinead Fox gave insight into Jonathan Swift’s world of thoughts at the unveiling of the memory stone.Image 4 of 5
Madeleine Uí Mhéaloid delivers a brief synopsis on Swift and Quilca through the ages at the unveiling ceremony. Photo: Ian McCabe.Image 5 of 5
Organiser Sinead Fox beside landowner Mary Fox at the unveiling of the memory stone at Quilca Lake.A stone monument commemorating Jonathan Swift’s connection with Cavan was unveiled at Quilca Lake, Virginia, marking the 300th anniversary of the publication of Gulliver’s Travels. The local Fox family had invited friends, residents and children from Cross NS to the area and landscape that may have helped inspire the famous novel.
Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, the Very Revd Dr William W. Morton, said the stone would ensure Swift’s connection with Quilca was remembered for generations to come. “Swift’s imagination was at work here,” he said. “This stone we are about to unveil is more than a stone; it is a memory keeper.”
Swift himself became Dean of St Patrick’s in 1713 and, according to the current Dean, Quilca offered him an escape from the noise and pressures of Dublin. “He didn’t simply pass through here. He lived here, walked here, talked here, listened here, and of course he wrote here.”
Swift was staying in the area in 1725 while working on the book which would become Gulliver’s Travels, published on October 28, 1726.
Sinead Fox brought the history of Quilca to life, encouraging the children present to imagine what the area would have looked like in Swift’s day. The roads of today did not exist, she pointed out, while the mature trees surrounding the area would already have been growing when Swift visited. "They are about 300 years old. I counted the rings of some of them when I was a child," she reflected on her personal connection with the area.
Sinead Fox also explored possible local influences on Swift’s extraordinary stories, including the tale of a very tall local man, “Big” Doughty, who was said to have worked for Thomas Sheridan. There Swift had witnessed how "he held a man up over his head, and he cast him across the table". She suggested that Swift may have been inspired by such characters and his surroundings when creating the giants, tiny people and the strange worlds of Gulliver’s Travels.
Historian Dr Brendan Toomey gave those gathered a whistle-stop tour of the book, looking at each of its four parts and some of its enduring themes. Often, he said, “Swift made fun of our incapacity to describe things.” Like a much-consulted pocket watch - “Is it a god?” or the idea of extracting sunbeams from a cucumber.
He also reminded the audience that Swift’s famous novel was originally published anonymously under the lengthy title 'Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World by Lemuel Gulliver', while nowadays even AI couldn’t count the amount of copies that had been published over the past three centuries.Dr Toomey encouraged all people to rediscover Gulliver’s Travels, promising: “There is a joke in every paragraph.”
And, because in his opinion it was not a children’s book at all, very entertaining for adults as well.