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In The Happy Prince, one of Oscar Wilde’s most popular stories, the statue of a Prince begs a swallow to give his gold leaf and jewels to the poor people of his town. Now Enniskillen in Northern Ireland, where Wilde spent his school days, is honouring one of its most famous literary inhabitants, with the installation of more than 100 gold-leaf sculpted swallows around the town.
Wilde lived in Enniskillen from 1864-71, boarding at Portora Royal School, which is now Enniskillen Royal Grammar School. The Happy Prince is said to have been inspired by Wilde’s view from his dormitory window at the school, from which he could see the statue of General Sir Galbraith Lowry Cole on Cole’s Monument at Forthill Park at the top of the town.
The new literary tourism project from Arts Over Borders has mounted 150 gold-leaf sculpted swallows high on 86 buildings around Enniskillen, from the butcher’s shop to the jeweller, the optician to the florist. The swallows are concentrated around the town’s central space, beside a new mural of The Happy Prince by Jordan Shaw, but follow a trail from the War Memorial at the foot of the statue through the town to Portora Castle.
Some of the swallows are positioned in locations that give a nod to Wilde’s own life story, with one at a cell window at the town’s 19th-century jail to mark the two years Wilde spent in Reading jail for “acts of gross indecency” in 1895, and another by the Victoria Cross memorial in tribute to Wilde’s eldest son, Cyril, who was killed in action in the first world war.
Enniskillen is also marking another famous literary inhabitant: Samuel Beckett boarded at Portora between the ages of 14 and 17, excelling at sport. Arts Over Borders said that at 6am every morning, Beckett would row to Devenish Island on the waters of Lower Lough Erne.
Beckett’s fascination with the game of chess – it appears in his plays Endgame and Play and the novel Murphy – is being marked with 64 black and white chess board squares in 64 separate indoor locations across Enniskillen. Timed to coincide with Wilde’s birthday, on Saturday 32 chess pieces sculpted in bronze by artist Alan Milligan will be moved in a choreographed sequence across the town by volunteers, inspired by Beckett’s TV play Quad.
The project to turn Enniskillen into a long-term living art gallery in celebration of Wilde and Beckett was dreamed up by Seán Doran and Liam Browne, marking the 150th and 100th anniversaries of the authors’ years in the town. Doran said that Enniskillen’s literary connections had been “rather downplayed” before the annual Beckett and Wilde festivals that have taken place since 2012.
“Wilde’s Enniskillen years ended up being the longest time he lived anywhere outside his birthplace in Dublin and married years in London, yet for years you could only find his name on the Gold Medal Honours Board in the Great Hall of Portora Royal School. In the case of Beckett, the watery landscape of Fermanagh, its still waters, and the political upheaval at a time of establishing the Irish border 100 years ago all entered Samuel Beckett’s imagination and, some say, found its way into his later works,” said Doran.
“While the original intention was for these two installations to be temporary, immediate interest among the people of Enniskillen is such that it is likely that they will be around for some time to come. Outside Ireland, the name of Enniskillen may normally provoke thoughts of tragedy and the Troubles. The work of Arts Over Borders is aiming to change that.”
The projects are funded by the European Northern Peripheriy and Arctic Programme, Fermanagh and Omagh district council and Enniskillen Bi.
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