A Beauty Impossible To Believe

“There goes the landed gentry,” I murmured to myself as I wandered through the woods with the words of a murder balladeer in mind.

I’d taken time out for a trudge in Prehen on the principle that we should look our last on all things lovely every hour. Like Janis foretold us, it may not be there tomorrow.
Prehen Wood is a pristine patch of primitive beauty about ten minutes walk from the centre of town, a tangled web of secretive paths through clumps of birch and ash and beech and hazel, alive with badgers, foxes and long-eared owls, buzzards and native red squirrels, seasonally carpeted with orchids and anemones and bluebells nodding in the glades, a shadow-land of rare and sturdy wildlife which, naturally, the powers-that-be would concrete over.
I’d called to see George McLaughlin, main man in the Prehen Historical and Environment Society, who has been standing in the gap of the endangered woods for decades, firing off defensive salvoes of complaints, appeals, lobbying letters, freedom of information requests and reminders to the citizenry that the vandals and visigoths of commercial development are massing at the gates again. They have been hacking at Prehen for hundreds of years. The first governor of Derry following the Plantation, Sir Henry Docwra, complained in his diary in 1600 that every work-party sent to chop down trees faced attack and ambuscade. George ensures that the tradition endures.
There’s also the annual Big Oak Festival at Prehen House, where, with poetry in the parlour and stand-up in the barn, the likes of Here Comes The Landed Gentry and Peter O’Hanlon have provided music that’s far from incidental. Peter’s new album Simple Equation has a sound when he needs it as sumptuous as the Silver Strings, as rough-edged as Woody where appropriate, and the best rebel song of the last generation, ‘Move On Raytheon’, complete with a gospel choir of the Raytheon Women who’d chained themselves inside the death merchants’ Derry facility. His back catalogue features his erudite reading of ‘Half-Hanged McNaughton’, the song as social history. The Gentry has meanwhile germinated the Murder Balladeers, deep down and dirty as the Hole In The Wall gang at a particularly unwashed juncture. Their album Ain’t No Money In A Border Town includes a translation to now of ‘Half Hanged MacNaghten’, Rion McCartney growling of love and death and no redemption over dangerous snarling guitars.
Prehen House snuggles in at the edge of the woods. It was built in 1740 for Sir Andrew Knox MP on the occasion of his marriage to the exquisitely named Honaria Tomkins. Their daughter, Ann, was said to be the most beautiful woman in Ireland. She fell in love with John McNaughton. He wasn’t of the peasant class. But he wasn’t gentry either. Sir Andrew would have none of the match. Twice, the lovers tried to elope. Alarmed at the indomitability of love, Sir Andrew resolved to pack her off to Dublin, and on a spring day in 1760, set out to accompany her along the first stretch of road, an armed escort in close attendance.
McNaughton emerged at Burndennet Bridge pistol in hand and called on his love to come with him now. Sir Andrew instructed the coachman to drive on and the escort to draw arms. McNaughton fired at Sir Andrew but struck Ann in the heart. He was tried at Lifford and sentenced to death. A huge crowd gathered in Strabane for the hanging. But when the trap-door opened and McNaughton plummeted, the rope broke rather than his neck. They tried again. It broke again. As the instant original ballad told:

“The rope it broke, not once but twice
By the laws of man you can’t hang thrice
The people cried, ‘Let him go free
Don’t hang him high on the gallows tree.’”

It’s said that he then proclaimed to the throng, “I will not live to be known as Half-Hanged McNaughton”. Really he meant that life without Ann in the knowledge that he’d killed her would be no life at all.

“He placed the rope around his neck
A rope so strong it would not break
‘Half-hanged now I ne’er will be
Hang me high on the gallows tree.’”

It’s said McNaughton and Ann can be seen yet at twilight, wafting together at last through the woods.
A 1977 survey by the Environment and Heritage Service reported: “Prehen Wood represents a significant block of semi-natural woodland, a scarce resource in Northern Ireland. In terms of its habitat, species diversity and mammal interest, it is... of Nature Reserve status.”
That was back in the sentimental times. More recently, four years ago, the planning service gave developers the go-ahead for four houses on the fringe of the wood, overlooking the sweep of the Foyle, as gorgeous a setting as there is in the land. It’s only four dwellings, they tell George. But it’s four plus an access road and sewerage and drainage. More important, it’s a perilous incursion into an area with protected status, a precedent. George and PHES have seen them off so far. But the developers’ pressure and the planners’ pliability persist.
George wants to know why the reasoned objections of the PHES have repeatedly been rejected. But, despite an order from the Information Commissioner, the planners flatly refuse to say. We might yet be called on to chain ourselves to trees. We saw off Raytheon, didn’t we?