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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.
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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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