Sir Walter Raleigh, White and the Mogeely Estate

 

An estate map dated 1598 depicts Walter Raleigh’s property in Mogeely (Curraglass), near the village of Conna in East Cork. This beautifully illustrated map, made by John White, is held by the National Library of Ireland.
White’s mentor, Sir Walter Raleigh, was born in 1554, around the time Conna Castle was built by the Fitzgeralds, during the reign of Queen Mary 1. At this time Elizabeth, daughter of Anne Boleyn, was imprisoned in the Tower of London. Four years later she became Queen Elizabeth1. Her policy was to grant native Irish land to English adventurers and settlers and also to her soldiers as payment for their services.
Raleigh was one of those who served with Queen Elizabeth’s forces during the bloody second Desmond Rebellion (1579-1583). This was launched by the Fitzgerald family against English rule in Ireland. The rebellion ended in 1583 with the death of Gerald FitzGerald, 15th Earl of Desmond, and the defeat of the rebels. This led to the destruction of the Desmond dynasty and the plantation or colonisation of Munster with English Protestant settlers. Raleigh was rewarded for his part in putting down the rebellion by being given large estates of confiscated land, owned by the native Irish. This included Mogeely and Curraglass.
Raleigh was knighted in 1585 by Elizabeth and in that year he sent John White as mapmaker and artist on Sir Richard Grenville‘s expedition to the eastern seaboard of North America. During White’s time at Roanoke Island, he completed numerous watercolour drawings of the surrounding landscape and native peoples, including the Algonkin Indians. These works are the earliest informative illustrations of a Native American society. Today they are housed in the British Museum.
The expedition encountered considerable difficulties and returned to England in 1586, but not before Raleigh named the region “Virginia”, in honour of Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen. However, not to be deterred, Raleigh asked White to organise a new settlement, one which would include women and children. White was able to persuade 113 colonists to join Raleigh’s expedition, including his daughter Eleanor and his son-in-law Ananias Dare, who were recently married. In 1587, Raleigh named “John White of London, Gentleman, to be the chief Governor” of the new colony. This second colony at Roanoke started repairing the structures left behind in 1585. They also searched for the fifteen men left behind by the previous expedition, but found only bones.
On August 18^th 1587, there was happier news, White became a grandfather. His daughter Eleanor gave birth to a daughter Virginia Dare. She was the first Christian born in the Western Hemisphere. However, the colonists’ food supplies soon began to grow short, and in late 1587 the settlers begged White to return to England to obtain supplies and other necessaries. White was reluctant to abandon his colony but felt he had no other choice and much against his will he set sail to seek help.
Further bad news awaited White on his return to England. Just two weeks previously Queen Elizabeth I had issued a general ban on shipping because of the threatened Spanish invasion of England by the Spanish Armada. Raleigh attempted to provide ships to rescue the colony but he was overruled by the Queen.
Finally, in March 1590, with the immediate threat of a Spanish invasion by now abated, Raleigh was able to equip White’s rescue expedition. Two ships, the Hopewell and the Moonlight set sail for Roanoke. The return journey was prolonged by a number of sea battles and hazardous weather. Governor White finally reached Roanoke Island on August 18, 1590, his granddaughter’s third birthday, but he found his colony had been long deserted. The buildings had collapsed and the houses taken down. Worse, White was unable to find any trace of his daughter or granddaughter, or indeed any of the 80 men, 17 women, and 11 children who made up the “Lost Colony”. Due to bad weather White had to abandon the search of adjacent islands for the colonists. The ship’s captain had already lost three anchors and could not afford the loss of another. White returned to Plymouth, England, on October 24, 1590.
After the failure of the Roanoke Colony White came to Ireland and lived on Raleigh’s Estate in Mogeely. He began making maps of land for Raleigh’s tenants, and reflecting upon the “evils and unfortunate events” which had ruined his hopes in the New World, though never giving up hope that his daughter and granddaughter were still alive.
During the past four hundred years, Virginia Dare has become a prominent figure in American myth and folklore, symbolizing different things to different groups of people. She has been featured as a main character in books, poems, songs, comic books, television programs and films. Her name has been used to sell different types of goods, from vanilla products to wine and spirits. Many places in North Carolina and elsewhere in the Southern United States have been named in her honour. There is a memorial to Virginia Dare in St Bride’s Church, Fleet St, London, where her parents were married prior to their journey to Roanoke.
There is no record of when John White died but his legacy lives on locally in his Mogeely estate map dated 1598. The map covers land that Raleigh leased to Henry Pyne. The map shows the native Irish settlement clusters, as well as the new colonial houses, which were separated from each other. The church and bridge in Mogeely are also clearly shown, as are the houses in Curraglass on both sides of the road and up the Mall.
What became of White’s mentor, Sir Walter Raleigh? Well, he had always been a favourite of Queen Elizabeth but when she died in 1603 and James 1 took over, things changed. He managed to displease the King on a number of occasions and lost his head on 29^th October 1618.

Recent research
In July and August 1991, the Department of History at the Mercer University in Georgia, U.S.A. sponsored a program of archaeological fieldwork at Mogeely and its Tudor settlement. The work was carried out under the direction of Eric Klinghofer, archaeologist. He believed that the English colonial settlement stretched from the church to the castle, with a wide green that probably represented the castle’s former bailey.
The primary target of the 1991 excavations was the house plot at the south-west end of the former village. It lay at the end of the village opposite to the castle and therefore ought to have been relatively immune to activity around the castle in the medieval period, as well as in the Elizabethan and Cromwellian wars when military actions took place at Mogeely. Similarly, because the house plot was separated by the village street from the church and graveyard, its archaeological potential ought to be greater than that of the house east of the road. Nineteenth-century maps and present day observation show that much of the Mogeely vicinity was extensively quarried, but the field containing the house site seemed to have been untouched.
The south-western house site depicted on the Mogeely map was successfully located. The foundation walls had been thoroughly robbed of stone some time after the destruction of the colonial settlement, but their lines could be seen by the white lime mortar lumps left behind in the robbed wall trenches. A preliminary examination of the items recovered from Mogeely Castle revealed a number of ceramic objects. There were a few medieval potsherds, and larger numbers of typical English manufactured wares delft, salt-glazed, creamware, pearlware, etc.
The Mogeely Castle excavation has brought to light the first archaeological details of the Elizabethan colonial settlement of Ireland. It also led to a new study of White’s map of Mogeely and it appears that the line of the road through Mogeely Castle estate was altered when the field boundaries were changed, presumably around the turn of the 19^th century.
A framed copy of White’s 1598 Mogeely map hangs on the wall in Conna Sports Complex. It is the oldest estate map in Ireland.

Tom Finn                 email: tomtosh2012@gmail.com
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