Our dear friend and founding member, Merrily Harpur, passed away on 4 December, 2024. She had been ill for some time and departed in Cattistock, Dorset. Poet, writer, artist and cartoonist, Merrily was born in Buckinghamshire, grew up in Surrey but had a deep attachment to Ireland, her father having grown up in Timahoe, Co Laois.
Merrily first came here in 1967 to study at Trinity College where she struck up lifelong friendships. Having moved back to Ireland in the mid-1980s she had been living in west Cork but found the rural atmosphere of County Roscommon irresistible and so she bought a cottage on the edge of Sliabh Bán. Friendly and charming she soon transitioned from being ‘the woman on the mountain’ to Merrily, our neighbour and friend. She became ‘part of the furniture’ visiting neighbours, attending Gaelic Games matches and traditional music sessions.
She transformed the area around her cottage and built what she called her ‘cricket pavilion’ and created a maze. Get togethers in the pavilion were regular with neighbours and friends enjoying her hospitality. It was at one such event in 1998, as the drink flowed that the idea of a festival in the area was mooted and so the Strokestown International Poetry Festival was born. Some of us suggested that perhaps we were getting ahead of ourselves and that the ‘international’ reference could be dropped but Merrily was having none of it – Strokestown would take its place among the festivals of the world – end of!
We set up a committee and Merrily became festival director and set about the task of organising the first festival which took place on the May Bank Holiday weekend, 1999. She directed the festival until 2004 and again in 2009 and 2010.
She promoted the festival assiduously and wrote to all the major poets inviting them to Strokestown. One of these was of course the late Seamus Heaney whom she wrote to a number of times. When the Nobel Laureate finally found the time to attend in 2006, she reminded him that it was ‘his duty’. He took great delight in this exchange.
A woman of many talents she worked as a cartoonist for many publications including The Guardian, The Sunday Telegraph and the London Evening Standard.
She once described her hobbies as ‘staring dreamily out of the window and fly-fishing’. Later, having moved to Dorset, Merrily immersed herself in another of her talents – painting, and became a central figure in the Cattistock arts community and the annual Dorset Arts Week. She undertook many creative and successful challenges throughout her life, including the Strokestown International Poetry Festival and for this we are forever indebted to her. All of us who knew her friendship will miss her greatly.
To her brothers James, Patrick and John, and their families, lifelong friend Margaret Hickey and Merrily’s many friends we extend our deepest sympathy.