#Peig sayers decendants how to
#Peig sayers decendants full

When she went back on land again, she heard of a cottage going for auction: the one we are currently in.īlasket Island storyteller Peig Sayers: her late son was a friend of Maria Symonds-Gooding and gave her the wooden fireside crane. So she snared, skinned, disembowelled, cooked and ate the rabbits? “I ate limpets and periwinkles and rabbits,” she agrees, surprised that apparently these hunter-gatherer skills aren’t commonplace to all.

#Peig sayers decendants how to

I knew how to do it humanely,” she says, matter-of-factly. When the divers left, she stayed on alone for three weeks, in a 'tiny tent that let the dew in.' This was prior to the island's purchase by the late Charlie Haughey. In the hot summer of 1968, she hopped on a boat with divers she met in Kruger's and got them to land her on Inishvickillane. She returned again and again to the area. The landscape on the drive in thrilled her, and then the community of musicians she discovered in Kruger’s. “It was Sunday, June 16th, 1963.” (Later, I check: the day was indeed a Sunday.) She was offered “a spin over to Dingle” with a friend, and so Simonds-Gooding, her accordion and dachshund dog Sebastian all landed in Kruger’s Bar for the first time.

#Peig sayers decendants full

Simonds-Gooding is absent-mindedly eating honey as we talk in the front room of the cottage a beautiful, atmospheric space full of artwork, artefacts from her many travels, and other items from the Great Blasket a place that has had meaning for the artist most of her adult life. Instead, as a child, she was “always drawing”, and running wild and unsupervised around the 12 acres at the Kerry farmhouse the family bought and renovated. “Could I have been 10? 12?” she asks rhetorically. She is hazy about when she learned to read and write, but agrees it was much later than someone who had been traditionally schooled. I remember thinking if I was in Mountjoy Prison, that would be better, because at least I wouldn’t have exams there.” She was a pupil at the Holy Child convent in Killiney, south Dublin, for four years, where Maeve Binchy was also a pupil, two years above her. The family returned to Ireland when she was seven, but she did not attend school until she was 12. Maria Symonds-Gooding at her home and studio in Dunquin: “I found all my inspiration from the way people sheared their sheep and built their stone walls.” That’s why I am such an independent person, and why I love remote places and feel at home there.” “It was a time when parents never really wanted to see or hear their children.

Aged three, she was once found a mile from home. “I was always running away,” she announces. She was also permitted considerable liberty. Those years, of heat and colour and noise, had a profound effect on her sensibility. “I spent seven very important years in India,” she says. (Quetta is now a western city in Pakistan. Simonds-Gooding, a member of Aosdána, was born in Quetta, before partition, when it was in India. On the drive out west to her cottage, you can see the Great Blasket rising dramatically from the ocean, and anyone interested in Irish culture will be glad to know Peig’s fireplace crane remains within sight of where it was located for so long. Peig’s late son, a friend of many years, gave it to her. “This came from Peig Sayers’s house,” Simonds-Gooding explains. Traditionally, a crane held pots and kettles to be heated over an open fire. This is artist Maria Simonds-Gooding’s home, and the piece of social history is a green-painted wooden crane over the fire burning a deep red in the autumn day. There is an important piece of social history in a stone cottage near Dunquin in west Kerry a cottage that appears modest in size on first entering, but which opens out like an enormous charmed concertina at the back.