'The Poet' Himself: Robert Huddleston (1814 - 1887)

Moneyreagh, County Down is a land of rolling green fields. On a clear day you can see straight across to Scrabo Tower, but the wind can also nip at your cheeks and ears. It was here that Robert Huddleston was born in 1814, and here that Robert Huddleston died in 1887. He worked as a farmer and a gunmaker in his townland¹, but his true passion was for writing. Huddleston wrote so much poetry, prose, and letters that they fill ten boxes at the National Museums NI Library and Archives in Cultra. Known today as the ‘Bard of Moneyrea’, Huddleston recounts part of his life story in ‘The Poet’ (HOYFM.H2.22.5).

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‘A romping lad he spent his youth’

According to Huddleston, the ‘Muses at his birth convened’ on ‘April the fifth, eighteen-fourteen’ to gift him with poetic prowess before his baptism in the Presbyterian Church². He went to ‘Cowan’s School at Moneyrea’ where he was ‘[a] romping lad’ and ‘[a] headstrong blade […], though shy’, more interested in watching birds in the trees than the cows under his care.

‘Still pouring to the winds his “raun”’

According to ‘The Poet’, Huddleston finally found purpose and acclaim through his poetry. ‘One day while musing far apart / O’er sorrows pert with soul on fire’, Huddleston received poetic inspiration. He says the Muse of Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759-1796) ‘took compassion on the swain / And lent the struggling bard her aid’. Huddleston presents himself as (mostly) devoted to his writing from then on, enduring hardships and ‘poverty’ as ‘aye he croons and sings awa’’, earning the approval of ‘[t]he neighbours all around’.

That said, even Huddleston admits he wasn’t always an upstanding citizen. When describing the ‘dark and rife’ vices he regrets, he notes that ‘[o]f girls still fond in folly’s van / He danced the jig that brought him low’. Such lusty pursuits, along with his ‘poverty’, may have tainted his chances with other women as he asks someone named Jane to not ‘fling disdain’ at him. In fact, this Jane may be Margaret Jane Ellison, the woman he married in 1862 when he was 47 and she was 19³. Robert and Margaret Jane had three children together: Mary, Nancy, and James.⁴ 

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‘The weary Bard now worn and grey’

While enjoying local praise and attention, Huddleston wasn’t always happy: ‘You’ll see grief blended with his smile’. While Huddleston’s greatest worries in ‘The Poet’ are his finances and his early sins, a different heartbreak lay ahead for him: his daughter Mary died in 1877 when she was nine years old⁵. Huddleston wrote the poem ‘Mary on the Brain’ for her⁶, which musician Joshua Burnside performed at the Ulster Folk Museum more than a century after Mary’s death.

Huddleston himself did not live long past Mary. ‘Like yon old castle tumbling down’, he died on 15 February 1887. He was buried in the graveyard of the church where he was baptized, residing in Moneyreagh for the rest of time.

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A Proud Poet

Huddleston ends his poem by praising ‘sweet Poesy’ and calling people who dislike his work ‘pedant curs’. He asks his readers to ‘pledge the Bard, […] / And toast him o’er a brimming bowl’. His poems, songs, and stories leave lots to read and lots of themes to explore. Robert Huddleston is far from Ulster’s only poet, but he’s certainly ‘The Poet’ for Moneyreagh.