I started this blog as background piece for a journalism student/friend of mine in Galway University, researching for a radio feature she was doing on Periwinkles. I know, what of them, those little sea-snails? So one day, around the spring equinox, when the tide was at its lowest ebb, I walked to Salthill and watched some winkle pickers far out on the reef at Blackrock, Salthill, where winkles grow aplenty and they grow big, blue and tasty on the wave-swept rocks there. The picked winkles would be bagged and left at the high-tide mark in a rock-pool for a few days, before being picked up by a 'winkle wholesaler' and shipped off to France, presumably at a tidy profit to the seller, though probably not for the pickers.
I walked out there myself, to the end of the reef, carefully picking my way across the slippery seaweed and hidden rock pools, feeling very self-conscious in my fashionable walking gear and tried to get one older grumpy man to talk about his experiences picking and harvesting the blue pearls that are the Atlantic periwinkle. He was bundled up from the cold, his weather-beaten face and wrinkled, blue hands a testament to the hard life of a sea-shore harvester. He hardly stopped to look at me, let alone speak so I didn't get much information out of him. He was busy, stooped over, one hand in the water, one clutching an onion sack, brimming with hundreds of blue-black shells, anxious to get the most of the sea's bounty before the tide turned. He ignored me, grunted and waved me away. One look at his big blue hands convinced me that this conversation would wait! On my way back to shore, I cast my mind back to Kilkee, County Clare, just for a moment in time and remembered how I fell in love with these little beauties.
Y'see my Dad was born in Kilkee way back in 1914, although by his own admission, he fled that windswept coastal village as soon as he could pay for a ticket on Percy French's famous West-Clare Railway. He found the 44 weeks of deserted Kilkee too depressing to bear. and the hectic bustle of the 8-week tourist season too busy to enjoy, so he left. He became a primary school teacher, initially in Dublin, then in Raheen near Killimor in East Galway, and finally he settled down, got married to my mum, raised a family of seven children and ultimately taught for 45 years in a three-room country school in Duniry, near Woodford, at the foot of the land-locked Slieve Aughty mountains, far from the spume of the waves, the cry of the seagulls and the smell of storm-stranded seaweed and bloated bladder-wrack.
The draw of the sea is irresistible though and Dad was drawn back more often than he cared to admit. Thus in the sixties and seventies we spent every summer there, in a rented 'lodge', all nine of us, cramped like sardines yes, but the accommodation was not important, for we had different priorities then...like building sand-castles on Kilkee's golden horseshoe beach, tight-rope walking the endless strand-line wall, swimming 'au natural' at Newfoundout, the naturist swimming hole under Georges Head, idly fishing for cobblers and crabs, using barnacs for bait on a threaded twisted pin, barefooting the rocks 'back west' at the Pollack holes, de-spineing jet-black spiky sea-urchins to make ashtrays out them and sell to the tourists, playing pin-ball in Perks Amusements.
And yes, the 'piece de resistance', eating winkles with a straight pin, off with the little round lid, out with the whorley snail, down the hatch, toss the shell, reach for another, and on and on, no tv back then, just the beach and the winkles...simple pleasures, impossible to recreate nowadays as an adult. Kilkee and winkles were an inseparable fact of life for us...and as I grew older the taste for them never waned. As a boy-racer you could follow my car tracks from Kilkee to Loughrea by tracking the trail of empty winkle shells from Clare to Galway. The archaeologists of tomorrow will surely be confused at the proliferation of sea snails so far inland.
Winkles are not for the faint-hearted mind you...eating a periwinkle is an acquired taste, and you never, ever look at it before swallowing...or you will never eat one at all. Oysters and mussels are easy pickings by comparison. The winkle's nutritional value is probably tiny, the sodium content high, but the pleasure connection from eating these booger-like delicacies...priceless!
What is odd is that to my knowledge, no one in my family ever picked a winkle and boiled it...it wasn't like the done thing...I don't even know how long to boil them...kind of a trade secret..is it 10 minutes, or as we believed as kids, 10 hours? I still don't know, but the one thing I do know is that no one sells periwinkles on the street here in Galway, you still gotta go to Kilkee or Lahinch to satisfy that craving...so that's an even bigger mystery.
One day I was at a little hotel in Kinvara, on the south shore of Galway Bay, meeting some friends for a drink. I was wearing what were then fashionable, pointy-toe shoes, or winkle-pickers. My friends pointed out that the hotel itself was called Winkles, after the family that owned it. We had a good laugh. Seems one is never far from a periwinkle in Galway. Sadly, the hotel is gone now, a supermarket stands in its stead.Funny thing, I have never seen winkles on a restaurant menu, not even in Winkles Hotel.
A friend of mine, Bob Fane, wrote me from the States about the periwinkle, yes, the same Atlantic blues we ate here on the other side of the sea.
'Ah childhood, 'Boy Land', 'Never Never Land', once you cross its borders you may never return again. When I was a lad of 8 or 9 my father had a place in Connecticut on the then pristine Long Island Sound. We would dive off the rocks, root through the seaweed, find the periwinkles and, like yourself, would take out a safety pin from our bathing suit and eat then down, maybe 1/2 dozen, I never really chewed them, just let them slide down with the salty brine as the taste. We felt like Jon Hall from some exotic South Pacific movie. Then my brother told me they were nasty little buggers, full of excrement and other things too hellish to stomach, the source of hepatitis, yellow fever, polio, and bubonic plague. My peri-days were over.'
Today, the periwinkle industry in Ireland is quietly thriving. It is an invisible industry, with the harvesting of this naturally occurring seafood mainly carried out by migrant workers way out on the foreshore, or on the small off-shore islands, far away from prying eyes. Many of the workers are illegals or at best, working off-the-books. Conservatively some 5,000 tonnes of periwinkles are exported from Ireland annually, and the business is worth some €15 million annually. The players in the market fly way under the radar and the industry is completely unregulated. Curiously it is almost impossible to buy cooked or raw winkles in Ireland. Almost all are exported.
My memories of winkles are very much the stuff of boyhood adventures and endless summers. I see from the Clare Champion that winkle sellers on Kilkee beach will now have to register with the county council, the health board and take out a traders licence, as well as providing €2 million in public liability insurance. The Periwinkle kept people alive during the Famine and has provided a simple living for the west Clare winkle sellers. These are not in 'big business'. Selling a couple dozen winkles for a Euro won't make one wealthy, but it is such a tradition, part of our culture.. Winkle sellers were a fixture in Kilkee, our 'supplier' of our fix. Aah for those innocent childhood days of carefree, endless play and afterwards, dangling your barefoot legs over the strand wall, needling a damp bag of periwinkles,watching the sun setting on Kilkee bay. A little bit of heaven. Perhaps it is gone now, another victim of draconian regulations gone mad in this little island off an island off Europe.
