The crow motif

The crow motif turns the winter landscape of New Ross into a persistent sign of unease, connecting everyday street life with the forbidding presence of the New Ross Good Shepherd Convent. The Crows are at once vividly ordinary scavengers and ominous witnesses: they move through public spaces, gather around the convent, and recur as Bill Furlong approaches it in the dark.

Appearance and Recurrence

December brings Crows into town in numbers people have never seen before. They first gather in black batches on the outskirts, then walk the streets, cock their heads, and perch wherever they please. They scavenge what is dead and swoop at anything that looks edible before roosting at night in the huge old trees around the convent. Their repeated movement from the town’s edges into its streets and back to the convent gives the image a broad reach: they belong to the shared public landscape, but their nightly destination is the institution on the hill.

The motif returns the next morning in smaller, sharply observed acts. Crows sidle along the frozen pavement, uttering short, hoarse calls and longer ones that make the world seem objectionable. One pins down a pizza box with its foot, pecks suspiciously at its contents, then flies off with a crust. Another group’s tidy, inspecting gait reminds Furlong of a young curate walking with his hands behind his back. The comparison makes their behavior both comic and watchful: the birds seem to scrutinize the same streets that people inhabit.

Crows and the Convent

The convent’s ordered grounds sharpen the contrast. Its shaved lawns, neatly arranged shrubs, square-cut hedges, and frost-dusted yews make it look almost like a Christmas card. Yet Crows roost in the old trees around it, while the holly berries remain untouched. That untouched detail sits oddly within the otherwise carefully composed winter picture, giving the garden’s beauty a stillness that the birds’ restless presence unsettles.

The convent is also a place of competing public accounts. The Good Shepherd Sisters run a training school and a laundry whose work is trusted by local institutions and prosperous households, while rumors describe the girls’ labor and the hidden conditions of the institution in very different terms. The Crows do not explain or resolve those accounts; their presence supplies an atmosphere in which the polished exterior and the unease around the place remain side by side.

The Night Approach

When Furlong circles the convent at night, the motif becomes part of the scene’s close, predatory imagery. He moves beside high walls topped with broken glass and blackened, barred third-storey windows, feeling like an animal prowling. At a corner he finds a black cat feeding on a Crow’s carcass. The bird that had earlier seemed alert and mobile is now dead, and the cat freezes when Furlong appears before fleeing through the hedge.

The scene gathers the motif’s earlier elements into a darker register: scavenging, watching, and the convent’s surrounding trees and barriers. The Crows have not themselves made the institution’s secrets visible, but their recurrence has taught the reader to associate the convent’s winter landscape with disturbance. As Furlong continues toward the entrance, that accumulated unease accompanies his movement from looking at the place from outside to acting within its shadow.