Clodagh Finn: The ‘prowling pilot' who became Ireland's first female flight instructor
When I was in my early 20s, I wanted to grow up to be like Dr Daphne Pochin Mould. She was, among other things, a geologist, a photographer, a writer, a 'prowling pilot' and Ireland's first female flight instructor who, it was said, regularly took her hands off the controls to lean out the window and take aerial shots of the landscape below.
For a long time, I thought that story apocryphal but to my great delight I see it verified in a spirit-enriching piece by the late Matt Murphy in Sherkin Comment, a Sherkin Island Marine Station publication.
Here's the thrilling proof from the mouth of one of her students Simon O'Flynn: 'To take photographs… she would open her side window of the Cessna 150 single-engine plane and with two hands on her camera shoot away.' Simon, for his part, sat beside her white-knuckled, holding his breath.
Now, as a much older woman, I still aspire to be like Dr Daphne, as I like to call her, and testimony such as that just sharpens the desire. What I wouldn't give to have accompanied her on one of those unnerving flights.
In a sense, though, we can join her in the skies because she left behind an immense body of writing (25 books), which includes this bird's eye vision of the country: 'If anyone asked me to show them Ireland in all her beauty, colour, variety, I'd take them flying in a light plane.
HISTORY HUB
If you are interested in this article then no doubt you will enjoy exploring the various history collections and content in our history hub. Check it out HERE and happy reading
Islands and cliffs, strands and mountains, lakes, rivers, canals, ancient monuments and modern developments, ring fort and turf-burning power station, all are there in an ever changing pattern of colour and form.
In another piece, she described flying over Killarney, leaving its wild jungle of arbutus, rhododendron and oak behind as the high mountains of the MacGillycuddy Reeks, boiling and smoking with rain clouds and swirling mists, came into view.
It is not surprising to find that Dr Daphne Desiree Charlotte Pochin Mould, to give her her full name, always wanted to write: 'I remember composing stories and poems before I learned to write, and dictating them to members of the family who wrote them down for me.
"None of these early efforts, which so far as I remember were often about fantastic animals have, fortunately for me, survived!'
What a shame for us, though, as I would love to have read the words of the very young girl who once tried to climb on to the famous prehistoric structure at Stonehenge in Wiltshire only to be immediately hauled off by an irate official. She was clearly spirited and curious from the off.
And a bit different. Born in Salsbury in November 1920, eyesight difficulties meant she was home-schooled by an aunt who turned to Homer's ancient Greek epic, The Odyssey, when her young charge was less than impressed by the biblical story of the Garden of Eden. She was brought up an Anglican but would later abandon it, thinking that religion and her quest for truth were incompatible.
She wrote:
Science for me meant the discovery of truth, reality, the nature of being, finding out what things were, what life was about.
As a teenager, she went into the country to identify plants, trees and birds and to examine rocks, fossils and the nearby chalk pits. When she learned to drive, at 17, she borrowed a car and went further afield into Scotland which, with its rivers, glens and mountains, tempted her to move there in the late 1930s.
She enrolled in Edinburgh University and began her degree 'with the wail of sirens and the crackle of machine gun fire as the first air raids took place on the Forth Bridge', as she later recalled. She graduated with a first-class honours in geology and later got a research fellowship to study a previously unmapped stretch of land – 100 square miles of it – beside Loch Ness.
Her study earned her a PhD in 1946 and crystallised her plan for the future. She wanted to write 'something Highlandy' so moved to a dilapidated house in Fort Augustus. (It was 'also on Lough Ness but I never saw the Monster,' she wrote.)
A neighbour Sandy Grant taught her to scythe, make hay and harness a horse to a cart. She also learned how to use a two-wheeled walking tractor and ploughed the three-acre paddock she had worked to reclaim.
The same neighbour was a Catholic who attended mass at the nearby Benedictine monastery, an incidental fact that would later have a profound effect on Daphne. While writing a book on the Iona of St Columba, she undertook research which, she said, was designed to 'show up' the saints and the Church for what she thought they really were.
Instead, while using the library kindly offered by Fr Augustine at the monastery, she discovered St Thomas Aquinas and a Catholic philosophy that combined reason and religion. 'After a year of struggle and argument', she was received into the Catholic Church in 1950.
Life in Ireland
Her interest in saints brought her to Ireland. She moved to Galway in 1951 with her parents and later to Aherla in Cork. She spent the rest of her life here and became so immersed in Irish culture that she said she 'passed readily enough for a born Irishwoman!' any time she returned to the UK.
That was true even by 1957 when she wrote Irish Pilgrimage which opens with this evocative passage: 'There is a magic in the road, in the very fact of travel, in the track which leads out to the islands. Many indeed seek to travel for the sheer delight of it, for the changing scene and the sense that the delectable mountains are always beyond the next bend or the next city…'
The dust jacket offers this charming vignette: 'Miss Mould… is in love with Ireland, with its antiquities, its traditions, its culture, and she imparts her devotion to the reader. She has not only lived with the people; she has joined them in their faith and gone on pilgrimages with them, the length and breadth of the country. She has climbed mountains in the predawn and rowed out to holy islands.'
That love was reciprocated. Trawl the archives and you'll find several tributes to this true Renaissance woman who mastered several disciplines and broke new ground by learning to fly in the 1960s.
She became Ireland's first female flight instructor and she was also a pioneer of aerial archaeology, recording and sometimes discovering archaeological features from the air.
In the 1980s, the Cork Archaeological Survey commissioned her to take photographs for the five-volume series The archaeological inventory of County Cork (1992–2009). Her collection is now held by the Muckross House Trustees in Killarney. It's one that will, in time, come to be considered in the same way as the Lawrence Photography Collection, according to her friend Matt Murphy.
Daphne Pochin Mould, a true Renaissance woman who instilled a sense of wonder. Picture: Richard Mills
In his beautiful article, he wrote about her difficult final years when, due to failing health, she moved from guest house to hotel to nursing home. She felt like a 'caged lioness', he said, but she continued to write despite the arthritis in her hands and the lack of an archive.
Her memory remained razor-sharp.
Both Daphne and Matt are gone now. Matt Murphy, founder of the Sherkin Island Marine Research Station and passionate environmentalist, died earlier this year but, between them, they leave behind an invaluable legacy.
Let's make sure we preserve it to inspire a new generation and instill a much-needed sense of wonder in this battered but still-beautiful world.
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Irish Examiner
a day ago
- Irish Examiner
Clodagh Finn: The ‘prowling pilot' who became Ireland's first female flight instructor
When I was in my early 20s, I wanted to grow up to be like Dr Daphne Pochin Mould. She was, among other things, a geologist, a photographer, a writer, a 'prowling pilot' and Ireland's first female flight instructor who, it was said, regularly took her hands off the controls to lean out the window and take aerial shots of the landscape below. For a long time, I thought that story apocryphal but to my great delight I see it verified in a spirit-enriching piece by the late Matt Murphy in Sherkin Comment, a Sherkin Island Marine Station publication. Here's the thrilling proof from the mouth of one of her students Simon O'Flynn: 'To take photographs… she would open her side window of the Cessna 150 single-engine plane and with two hands on her camera shoot away.' Simon, for his part, sat beside her white-knuckled, holding his breath. Now, as a much older woman, I still aspire to be like Dr Daphne, as I like to call her, and testimony such as that just sharpens the desire. What I wouldn't give to have accompanied her on one of those unnerving flights. In a sense, though, we can join her in the skies because she left behind an immense body of writing (25 books), which includes this bird's eye vision of the country: 'If anyone asked me to show them Ireland in all her beauty, colour, variety, I'd take them flying in a light plane. HISTORY HUB If you are interested in this article then no doubt you will enjoy exploring the various history collections and content in our history hub. Check it out HERE and happy reading Islands and cliffs, strands and mountains, lakes, rivers, canals, ancient monuments and modern developments, ring fort and turf-burning power station, all are there in an ever changing pattern of colour and form. In another piece, she described flying over Killarney, leaving its wild jungle of arbutus, rhododendron and oak behind as the high mountains of the MacGillycuddy Reeks, boiling and smoking with rain clouds and swirling mists, came into view. It is not surprising to find that Dr Daphne Desiree Charlotte Pochin Mould, to give her her full name, always wanted to write: 'I remember composing stories and poems before I learned to write, and dictating them to members of the family who wrote them down for me. "None of these early efforts, which so far as I remember were often about fantastic animals have, fortunately for me, survived!' What a shame for us, though, as I would love to have read the words of the very young girl who once tried to climb on to the famous prehistoric structure at Stonehenge in Wiltshire only to be immediately hauled off by an irate official. She was clearly spirited and curious from the off. And a bit different. Born in Salsbury in November 1920, eyesight difficulties meant she was home-schooled by an aunt who turned to Homer's ancient Greek epic, The Odyssey, when her young charge was less than impressed by the biblical story of the Garden of Eden. She was brought up an Anglican but would later abandon it, thinking that religion and her quest for truth were incompatible. She wrote: Science for me meant the discovery of truth, reality, the nature of being, finding out what things were, what life was about. As a teenager, she went into the country to identify plants, trees and birds and to examine rocks, fossils and the nearby chalk pits. When she learned to drive, at 17, she borrowed a car and went further afield into Scotland which, with its rivers, glens and mountains, tempted her to move there in the late 1930s. She enrolled in Edinburgh University and began her degree 'with the wail of sirens and the crackle of machine gun fire as the first air raids took place on the Forth Bridge', as she later recalled. She graduated with a first-class honours in geology and later got a research fellowship to study a previously unmapped stretch of land – 100 square miles of it – beside Loch Ness. Her study earned her a PhD in 1946 and crystallised her plan for the future. She wanted to write 'something Highlandy' so moved to a dilapidated house in Fort Augustus. (It was 'also on Lough Ness but I never saw the Monster,' she wrote.) A neighbour Sandy Grant taught her to scythe, make hay and harness a horse to a cart. She also learned how to use a two-wheeled walking tractor and ploughed the three-acre paddock she had worked to reclaim. The same neighbour was a Catholic who attended mass at the nearby Benedictine monastery, an incidental fact that would later have a profound effect on Daphne. While writing a book on the Iona of St Columba, she undertook research which, she said, was designed to 'show up' the saints and the Church for what she thought they really were. Instead, while using the library kindly offered by Fr Augustine at the monastery, she discovered St Thomas Aquinas and a Catholic philosophy that combined reason and religion. 'After a year of struggle and argument', she was received into the Catholic Church in 1950. Life in Ireland Her interest in saints brought her to Ireland. She moved to Galway in 1951 with her parents and later to Aherla in Cork. She spent the rest of her life here and became so immersed in Irish culture that she said she 'passed readily enough for a born Irishwoman!' any time she returned to the UK. That was true even by 1957 when she wrote Irish Pilgrimage which opens with this evocative passage: 'There is a magic in the road, in the very fact of travel, in the track which leads out to the islands. Many indeed seek to travel for the sheer delight of it, for the changing scene and the sense that the delectable mountains are always beyond the next bend or the next city…' The dust jacket offers this charming vignette: 'Miss Mould… is in love with Ireland, with its antiquities, its traditions, its culture, and she imparts her devotion to the reader. She has not only lived with the people; she has joined them in their faith and gone on pilgrimages with them, the length and breadth of the country. She has climbed mountains in the predawn and rowed out to holy islands.' That love was reciprocated. Trawl the archives and you'll find several tributes to this true Renaissance woman who mastered several disciplines and broke new ground by learning to fly in the 1960s. She became Ireland's first female flight instructor and she was also a pioneer of aerial archaeology, recording and sometimes discovering archaeological features from the air. In the 1980s, the Cork Archaeological Survey commissioned her to take photographs for the five-volume series The archaeological inventory of County Cork (1992–2009). Her collection is now held by the Muckross House Trustees in Killarney. It's one that will, in time, come to be considered in the same way as the Lawrence Photography Collection, according to her friend Matt Murphy. Daphne Pochin Mould, a true Renaissance woman who instilled a sense of wonder. Picture: Richard Mills In his beautiful article, he wrote about her difficult final years when, due to failing health, she moved from guest house to hotel to nursing home. She felt like a 'caged lioness', he said, but she continued to write despite the arthritis in her hands and the lack of an archive. Her memory remained razor-sharp. Both Daphne and Matt are gone now. Matt Murphy, founder of the Sherkin Island Marine Research Station and passionate environmentalist, died earlier this year but, between them, they leave behind an invaluable legacy. Let's make sure we preserve it to inspire a new generation and instill a much-needed sense of wonder in this battered but still-beautiful world. Read More Clodagh Finn: How a true pioneer emerged from the shadows
The Irish Sun
05-06-2025
- The Irish Sun
Chilling execution of ‘washed up' Medieval woman revealed as experts say brutal punishment was a ‘warning to others'
THE remains of a roughly 1,200-year-old woman found on the shores of the River Thames have exposed the brutal punishment practices of early Medieval Britain. London between 600 to 800 AD , or Lundenwic as it was then known, was a very different place than it is today. 3 The woman, whose remains have been categorised as UPT90 sk 1278 in museum records, was between the ages of 28 and 40 when she died Credit: Museum of London 3 The River Thames near Blackfriars Bridge, London Credit: Getty The settlement, which covered the area of modern-day Covent Garden, was made up of narrow, winding streets and buildings made of timber and straw. It had a population of roughly 8,000 people - a far cry from the 9.26million residents that live there today. The remains of one Londoner, believed to have lived during the early medieval period between 680 and 810 AD , act as an example of these practices. Lawbreakers appeared to be executed in the streets, according to experts, and their bodies were left to decompose for all to see as a warning to others. READ MORE ON ARCHAEOLOGY The woman, whose remains have been categorised as UPT90 sk 1278 in museum records, was between the ages of 28 and 40 when she died. She was not buried, but rather sandwiched between two sheets of bark, lying on a mat of reeds with moss pads placed on her face, pelvis, and knees. When the woman was first excavated in 1991, archaeologists noted that she was likely placed on the foreshore of the Thames where her remains were in public view. "The burial treatment of UPT90 sk 1278 lets us know that her body was meant to be visible on the landscape, which could be interpreted as a warning to witnesses," said Dr. Madeline Mant, who studied the remains once they were moved to the London Museum . Most read in Science Dr. Mant and her colleagues their findings in the journal World Archaeology . Biggest burial site in Greek history guarded by two headless sphinx unearthed and it could be tomb of Alexander the Great "We can tell from the osteobiography of this individual and their burial treatment that they were executed, but the specific offense is impossible to know for certain," she added. "We can only infer from the law codes of the period." Just two weeks before her death, the woman was subject to torturous beatings and an eventual execution, researchers wrote. Her body was laden with over 50 individual signs of injury, with fractures on her shoulders and spine resembling that of a car accident victim, according to experts. The researchers believe the 9th-century woman may have been beaten or flogged - where a victim is repeatedly hit with a whip or a stick. The second round of injuries on her torso and skull suggest the woman was punched or kicked repeatedly, in what experts have likened to torture beatings. Her execution was a final blow to the left side of her head. Dr. Mant said her death was likely a form of capital punishment, which were becoming increasingly common in the period the woman is understood to have lived. "Early Medieval England was a time of change regarding law codes - the law code of Æthelberht (c. 589–616) did not include corporal punishment, but that of Wihtred of Kent (690–725) outlined specific punishments, for instance, beatings for those who could not pay fines," explained Dr. Mant. "Capital punishments were also included when willed by the king. "As time passed, more crimes were associated with the death penalty under King Alfred (871–899). "Crimes such as theft, treason, witchcraft, and sorcery could be met with the death penalty, which could be brought about by stoning or drowning." 3 An illustration of London in the early Medieval period Credit: Mola The woman's diet consisted of terrestrial foods, like grains, vegetables, fruits, meat, dairy, and eggs. However, her remains show a period of increased stable nitrogen values sometime after she turned 5-years-old. This could mean the woman either began eating more meat, or she suffered a period of starvation, during which her body began breaking down its own fat and protein stores. Starvation was a significant threat in early Medieval London, particularly for those who migrated to the city.
Irish Examiner
01-06-2025
- Irish Examiner
Sky Matters: a good time to spot Venus in the evening sky — and we've a 'strawberry moon' coming up on June 11
Last week I visited the Skinakas Astronomical Observatory on Mount Ida on the island of Crete. It's a small observatory perched 1,750 metres above sea level, beyond the reach of the cloud layer that would make the site otherwise unusable for astronomical observations. The atmosphere here is unusually 'stable', evidenced by the lack of twinkling of the stars and the remarkable detail that can be captured in images from the Observatory's two telescopes. About 60 kilometres west of Skinakas is the city of Heraklion. Unlike the steady stars above, the lights of Heraklion far below appear to dance about and change colour — a kind of terrestrial twinkling on steroids. As I watched this entrancing spectacle I was reminded of the impact that Greek (and Cretan) culture has had on our world from great minds such as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Archimedes and Hippocrates. Their ideas spread across the globe, sometimes taking years to cross country boundaries, sometimes much longer. 1.0m Telescope. Picture: Vangelis Pantoulas / Skinakas Observatory So what has this got to do with Skinakas, the observatory? More than you might think, because Mount Ida is one of the sites around Europe that is taking part in experiments to move ideas around the globe employing technologies that would have seemed magical to those great minds. Using a small telescope with a mirror that is one metre in diameter — and that's small by current day standards — the site will use a laser beam to connect to a satellite above, which will then itself transfer that beam (and the ideas contained in it) to receiving stations across Europe and beyond. In a fraction of a second. And in huge volumes. Indeed volumes which are much greater than we can move with current satellite technologies. Sending a beam from a small telescope to a moving satellite some 500km – 2000km above your head is no mean technological feat, and the state-of-the-art technology is still somewhat in its infancy. But give it a few more years and it's likely that this mode of communication will mature and be widely used. In the future, when you send an email or ask ChatGPT to summarise the differences between a South American Parakeet and a Common Irish Tern there will be a new information superhighway that ticks along unnoticed involving remote mountain tops and orbiting satellites. People watching a the rising strawberry moon — so called because it is the full moon at strawberry harvest time. Picture: AP Photo/Charlie Riedel Meanwhile, June is a curious month for the casual sky observer. The nights start late, they're short, and the sky never gets truly dark, but at least it's (relatively) warm. Despite the astronomy drawbacks, there's still much to see: The planet Venus shines brightly to the west of the setting sun and is an easy spot in the evening sky throughout the month There's a full moon on June 11, called the Strawberry Moon — a North American term which refers to the time of year when berries, including strawberries, started to ripen and become edible. And on June 29, Mars is very close to the top-left of the moon. On June 21 we have the longest day of the year, marking the peak of the summer season for Earth's northern hemisphere. We are familiar with a season lasting three months, but on Saturn a season lasts 7.5 years; on Uranus it's 21 years; and on Neptune it's about 40 years. By contrast, there are no seasons on Mercury, Venus or Jupiter. This is because only planets that have a tilted axis — ours is 23.5° — can experience seasons. For sure the ancient inhabitants of Heraklion were aware of seasons on earth. They had no knowledge of seasons on other planets. Despite their immense achievements in architecture and construction, they had to rely on the slow spread of ideas beyond their immediate locality. I wonder what they would think if they came back today to witness how their ancestors are once again at the leading edge of a transformation in our world. Dr Niall Smith is head of research/ head of Blackrock Castle Observatory, Munster Technological University, Cork
