Tales From Times Past

The Woman Who Walked the Cliffs

The sea at Dunmore East is a restless neighbour. It does not whisper but speaks in many voices—wind rising in the rigging, gulls cutting the air with their sharp cries, waves breaking themselves endlessly on the black rocks below the cliffs. The people who live there grow used to it, but they never quite stop listening. For Mrs. Kathleen C. Mackay, it was both companion and subject: her ear tuned to the song of the waves, her eye drawn to the grasses that bent against the salt, the seabirds tracing patterns in the sky.

She had walked those cliffs for years. Some in Dunmore said she knew every flower that clung to their slopes, every note of the birdsong carried inland from the headlands. From her house on Wellington Terrace, she could look out at the sweep of the bay and, beyond it, the sea road to Hook. To most, the cliffs were wild places, dangerous and bare. To her, they were a library, written in bracken and stone.

It was not unusual to see her alone on the paths, a figure leaning over a patch of wild thyme or pushing through bramble in search of a specimen. She was not simply a walker; she was a field naturalist, a botanist, and a writer. Under the initials K.C.M., she wrote the daily “Land and Water” column in The Irish Press, opening for her readers the quiet marvels of nature that many passed by without notice. She wrote not in the lofty language of textbooks, but in the plain words of affection and curiosity—an invitation, rather than a lecture.

She had lived through loss. Her husband, John Mackay, a solicitor known across Ireland for his work in reforestation and his book The Rape of Ireland, had died some years before. Yet she carried on, finding in the wild world a form of companionship. She was fifty-nine now, her eyesight failing badly, enough that she had set aside her writing in recent weeks. But her habits remained. Every evening, if the weather allowed, she took to the cliffs.

On Wednesday, the 29th of March, 1944, she left her garden gate just as she always did. Canon Going, her neighbour, saw her around five o’clock, standing among her plants, cheerful, alive with the small talk of birds and blossoms. She set off toward the cliffs in good spirits. None who watched her pass by could have guessed it was the last time they would see her.

Two mornings later, the silence at her house was noticed. The milk still sat on the step. Newspapers, folded neatly, lay untouched. A village like Dunmore East breathes in rhythm with its people, and absence is quickly felt. Whispers grew into worry. By Friday afternoon the Gardaí and the Local Security Force had organised a search.

That evening, a small punt pushed out from the harbour, its bow lifting and dropping in the chop. At the oars was Geoffrey Power, coxswain of the lifeboat, with Sergeant J. J. Campbell and Peter Roche beside him. They pulled hard, their eyes fixed on the jagged base of the cliffs at Creaden. The sea was rough, the rocks slick and cruel. At a place the locals called “Clough na Brandy,” they found her.

She lay face-down on the rocks, the tide reaching for her. Above her loomed a sheer wall of cliff, nearly one hundred feet high. Around her were signs of collapse—ivy torn loose, stones shifted. The land she loved had given way.

The inquest was held the next afternoon at Lawlor’s Hotel, the room heavy with the mixture of sorrow and routine formality. Her sister, Bridget, identified her. She spoke of Kathleen’s love of natural history, of birds and plants, and of her regular cliff walks. The Canon recalled their neighbourly exchanges about the life of the headlands. The coxswain and Sergeant gave their accounts of finding her body on the rocks. Dr. O’Sullivan, clinical and exact, explained that a fractured skull had ended her life, likely within thirty-six hours of her fall. There was little mystery in it: a slip, a loosened patch of ground, a fall too great for any hope.

The verdict was recorded, but no record could capture the grief of the village. Dunmore East was not large, and she had been part of its rhythm—her quiet presence on the paths, her conversations about wildflowers, her careful writings that carried the spirit of the place beyond its shores.

On Saturday, they buried her at Killea. The church was crowded, the air damp with salt and sorrow. Reverend Slattery spoke the rites, and neighbours stood shoulder to shoulder, fishermen beside farmers, readers beside friends, all gathered to honour the woman who had made the ordinary wonders of their world visible.

In death, she joined the story of the cliffs themselves. The same rocks that had taken her life now bore her memory. For years afterward, when walkers passed Clough na Brandy, they would pause and recall her. She had walked those edges not as a stranger but as someone who loved them deeply, who read their seasons and their silences.

And perhaps that is the truest way to remember her: not as a victim of the cliffs, but as part of them—woven into the ivy, the gulls, the salt wind. Her last walk was only a continuation of all the others.