Wednesday May 14th

Today we visited the Presentation Convent in Fermoy which is the convent from which the sisters who established St Mary’s College came nearly 150 years ago. On the way there we stopped in at Monanimy, a house/castle that used to be part of the Nagle estate and where Nano attended lessons at a “hedge school” because the laws prevented the Irish from educating their children. 

The original Sisters from Fermoy travelled to Cobh (which we visited earlier this week), I guess in some form of horse drawn transport (we are talking 1866 here), then spent 3 months on a boat to Sydney then another 5 days on a different boat to get them to Hobart. A pretty big undertaking when you consider that half the group were only in their late teens. 

There are only 8 sisters now at the Fermoy convent and all are well into their 80s. 

We were again plied with tea and scones and a huge variety of cakes. 

The house they live in is not the convent that “our sisters” lived in but we were able to visit the original convent, now used as a pre school and an adult ed centre.  

They have a mare and foal agisted in their front paddock and the sisters maintain that they “put on the music and ride dressage” any time someone asks them what they do with the horse.  

After Fermoy we headed for Glenville, stopping along the way at Annakissa to look at a very ordinary church with an extraordinary altar made in Turin a couple of hundred years ago. 

Glenville is the location of one (of the many) “mass rocks”.  

These were secret locations where the Irish Catholics celebrated mass when the English penal laws prevented it (along with educating children, owning land and horses worth more than 5 pounds.  Not sure how they policed that one).