The Allingham Arts Festival has brought literature, poetry, music and drama to the streets of Ballyshannon every November for over a decade.

William Allingham was born on 19 March 1824 on the Mall in Ballyshannon in a house that still bears a plaque to his memory, the eldest child of a merchant and bank manager. He lost his mother at the age of nine, left school at fourteen, and entered the local customs service, a post he would hold, in various towns across Ireland and England, for the next twenty-five years. It was an unlikely career for a poet, but it gave him time, mobility, and a keen observer’s eye.

From his earliest years, Allingham was determined to write. He began corresponding with the poet Leigh Hunt in 1843, and through him was introduced to the great literary figures of Victorian England: Alfred Lord Tennyson, Thomas Carlyle, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the Brownings, and many others. His poem The Fairies, published in 1850, became one of the most anthologised poems of the Victorian era, and remains the work for which he is best remembered: “Up the airy mountain, / Down the rushy glen, / We daren’t go a-hunting / For fear of little men…”

His most ambitious work, Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland (1864), was a long narrative poem addressing the Irish land question with a directness that earned it admiring mention in Parliament from Gladstone, and the praise of Turgenev, who said it transformed his understanding of Ireland. His diary, published posthumously in 1907, is a remarkable document of Victorian literary life, offering intimate portraits of Tennyson, Carlyle and Rossetti drawn from decades of friendship.

In 1870 he left the customs service, moved to London, and became editor of Fraser’s Magazine. In 1874 he married Helen Paterson, a talented artist twenty-four years his junior. He died at Hampstead in November 1889. His ashes were brought home, at his own wish, to the churchyard of St Anne’s Church in Ballyshannon — where he rests to this day.

W.B. Yeats, who regarded Allingham as a formative influence on his own work, wrote: “Pleasant destiny has made him the poet of his native town, and put ‘The Winding Banks of Erne’ into the mouths of the ballad singers of Ballyshannon.” That connection between a poet and his place has never been broken.

Helen Allingham (née Paterson) was born in Derbyshire in 1848 into a family with a strong artistic tradition, as her maternal grandmother and aunt were both accomplished artists. Showing a gift for drawing from childhood, she studied at the Birmingham School of Design before winning a place at the Royal Academy Schools in London in 1867. To support herself, she worked as a professional illustrator, joining the newly founded The Graphic newspaper as its only female staff member in 1870. Her illustrations were widely admired: the young Vincent Van Gogh, teaching himself to draw by studying English illustrated journals, was struck by her work.

A pivotal commission came in 1874, when she illustrated Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd for Cornhill Magazine. That same year she married William Allingham. The marriage brought financial security and artistic freedom: she gave up commercial illustration and devoted herself to watercolour painting, for which she had an extraordinary gift.

Her subject was the rural English landscape, such as Surrey and Sussex cottages nestled in woodland, cottage gardens in bloom, children in country lanes. Her paintings were not merely pretty; she was engaged in a conscious act of preservation, recording vernacular buildings and ways of life that were disappearing under the pressure of industrialisation. Architects still study her work for its precise rendering of historic building techniques. The critic John Ruskin, initially sceptical of women artists, was won over by her painting The Young Customers, praising it as “for ever lovely.”

In 1890, she became the first woman elected to full membership of the Royal Watercolour Society, a landmark in the history of women’s participation in the arts. She exhibited at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, and continued to paint and exhibit until the end of her long life. After William’s death in 1889, she raised their three children largely through her art, edited and published her husband’s diary and poetry, and kept his memory alive with tireless dedication.

Helen Allingham died in 1926. Her work is held in collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the world’s largest archive of her paintings is housed at Burgh House, Hampstead. Together, William and Helen Allingham represent a partnership of extraordinary creative achievement — a poet and a painter, rooted in one small town on the banks of the River Erne, who each left a permanent mark on the culture of their age.