Cuireadh do Mhuire - An Invitation to Mary

The poem, 'Cuireadh do Mhuire' or 'An Invitation to Mary' was composed by Máirtín Ó Direáin (1910 – 1988), the great Irish language poet from the village of Sruthán, on Inis Mór (Inishmore), the largest of the Aran Islands, in Galway Bay.

Ó Direáin penned this beautiful and delicate verse at Christmas 1942, when the whole world was at war and his little piece of Ireland, perched on the edge of the vast Atlantic, was helpless to influence the world's powers in any way, save to offer hospitality to the displaced, of whom there were millions.

Today we see the terrible effects of war and devastation in the Middle East, with emigrants and asylum seekers in their hundreds of thousands risking their lives to reach safety and peace. This poem resonated with me today when I read it. I hope you like it. 

The original Irish language version is first, followed by English translation. 

Cuireadh do Mhuire

An eol duit, a Mhuire,
Cá rachair i mbliana
Ag iarraidh foscaidh
Dod leanbh Naofa,
Tráth bhfuil gach doras
Dúnta ina éadan
Ag fuath is uabhar
An chine daonna?

Deonaigh glacadh
Le cuireadh uaimse
Go hoileán mara
San iarthar chianda:
Beidh coinnle geala
I ngach fuinneoig lasta
Is tine mhóna
Ar theallach adhanta.

--------------------------

An Invitation to Mary

Do you know, O Mary,
Where you will go this year
To look for shelter

For your Holy Infant,
At a time when every door
Is shut in his face
By the hate and the pride
Of human kind?

Be pleased to accept
An invitation from me
To an island in the sea
Far away in the west:
There will be bright candles
Lighting in every window
And a turf fire

Photo of Máirtín Ó Direáin's cottage in Sruthán, Inis Mór (Inishmore), Aran Islands. © Photo by and with thanks to Bengt Ason Holm. 

Idea for this blog post prompted by the Naomh Eanna Trust.

Happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year to you all.

You can find me any day at Galway Walks - Walking Tours of Galway www.galwaywalks.com, email: galwaywalks@gmail.com phone 086-3273560. Look me up if you ever visit Galway.

If you liked it, then you should've put a ring on it....

"If you liked it, then you should've put a ring on it...." 

A Galway short story from Liam Garvey who owns Galway Bay Gifts on Williamsgate Street. 

If you want wit and wisdom with your gift shopping, then this is the shop for you, right beside Powell's Four Corners, opposite Garavans. 

Liam is one very funny guy, an acute observer of the coming and going on the streets of Galway, and a great story-writer to boot. 

His most recent tale reminded me so much of Brendan Grace, but unfortunately he never got to tell it, what a pity.

"The Races

Galway Races have been happening for a long time – 150 years in this year of 2019.

The horses, for some, are an annoying inconvenience – they would prefer not to have to bother with the equine side of things and just concentrate on the drinking and their attempts to have it off with a person of their desired gender.

I met a man this evening who had been out for a while – he stood for a time beside the wall of the shop opposite – unfortunately his equilibrium suffered anytime he moved away from the wall – it was if there was a gravity in the concrete blocks that kept him upright.

Eventually he lurched across the street and asked me in a confidential bellow if we had a toilet – I told him we have to use the pub facilities but this was no use to him as he had been ejected from the same pub, he had tried to convince the bouncer of his sobriety for some time and had received little sympathy.

“I’ll just go roun’ the corner and hava quick slash”

He came back after a few minutes and looked a little less pained.

“D’ya have any of them Claddagh rings?”

I answered in the positive – “Muchardey?” was his reply.

My price was acceptable to him and he indicated that he would purchase one for his loving wife.

“What size is she?” was a question for which he was unprepared.

“Sheezbigenuff” wasn’t a ring size that I recognised and I told him that he could be better off waiting until tomorrow – he might have a better idea of dimensions after consulting his beloved.

“No, wanna surprise her tonight” was an admirable aspiration but one I felt was a touch doomed. I could sense that his welcome home might be a silent one.

“Size sixteen, that’s what she is!” he uttered. I told him that maybe that was a dress size “Yep, thazzer size, givvus a ring”

He took out a lump of money from his pocket that could have bought most of the rings in the shop. As he was likely to make a scene if he didn’t get a ring I chose one I thought might fit, took a couple of notes from his pile and gave him the ring in a box.

“Youra gentleman an a Scholar” were his parting words.

I wonder if the ring ever made it as far as his happy abode and if so how impressed was his lucky spouse.

Race Week!"

The Heron

Sometimes you just know that there are forces and energies all around us that we rarely experience, until the unexpected occurs. It all started with a mother's enduring love for her daughter and a promise kept. Cheryl Miller from Indiana walked into Liam Garvey's gift shop on Shop St. Galway on last Thursday and the die was cast. 

It had been a wickedly wet day, her first day in Ireland, and having flown all night, driven in torrential rain across Ireland, she and her daughter and both their husbands checked into the Victoria Hotel, all of them exhausted. They hit the bed for an hour, to shake off the jet-lag, but they overslept, really overslept.. When they finally got their act together hours later, the rain had eased a bit, so they decided to chance a quick walk around the city and get some dinner. It was to be a fortuitous evening.

After they'd eaten, because of the late hour, only a very few shops were open. Cheryl was looking for a very simple Claddagh pendant, and luckily Liam's 'Galway Bay Gift Shop' stocked just what she wanted. As Liam wrapped Cheryl's purchase, he felt her subdued mood, not quite the usual tourist's high, and then he noticed her top, a printed T-shirt with a woman's photo on it. Liam inquired, to be told that it was the final photo Cheryl had taken of her 40 year old daughter Cynthia, just days before she'd succumbed to cancer, earlier this year. 

Her wish, all during her chemotherapy was that once she'd recovered enough, she was going to fulfill her lifelong wish to visit Ireland, a desire she'd had since she was a teenager. 
Alas, it was not to be. Life and chemotherapy can be cruel. Later on, Cheryl decided she would go on Cynthia's journey, a hard decision for a Mum grieving her dead daughter, and so it was she found herself in Liam's shop, telling her daughter's story. 

Liam asked her what Cynthia really wanted to do in Ireland, and Cheryl told him that she'd talked incessantly about sitting in a pub, listening to an old man telling stories. 

After she'd left, Liam called me, wondering could I give the family my 'Fireside Stories' tour in O'Connors bar in Salthill. I like Liam... he gets me, and my stories, so I said yes. It was already 10.30pm, but i called their hotel room anyway, only to be told that they were leaving Galway at ten am the following morning... heading for Killarney, so that was kinda that, no tour possible. 

We talked a few minutes, hung up. That should have been it, but the next morning, I had an early walking tour.. at ten am. 

When I awoke, at 7.30, I was still thinking about the conversation I'd had with the mum, so I called her back. Told her to be ready at the hotel door at 9am..reassured her I'd have her back to the hotel within an hour. I picked the four of them up... they were intrigued and bemused... and a little reluctant... but decided to go with the flow, and the nutty, enthusiastic stranger, safety in numbers. 

I brought them to one of my favourite spots in the city, 'the circle of life' garden in Salthill Galway built two years ago by the Goggin family, after they'd lost their son in a car accident. It's a place of peace and salve, and a place that speaks many languages, heals many wounds.

It's a garden filled with gorgeous flowers and plants and stones, stones from all over Ireland. At the rear of the garden is a park, with a lovely pond. In the middle of the pond stands a bronze statue of a heron, a magical bird, a deadly hunter, but also a bird that represents the healing and other powers of the ancient Celtic druids. 

I was telling Cheryl about just that when we crested the path that leads from the garden to the pond. 
On another day, under the time constraints that we had, I might have skipped the pond, but something told me to tarry a little longer with Cheryl... no it wasn't a conscious decision, just an inevitable sequence. 

Cheryl, I am sure, was just dragging along...half jet-lagged, half humouring the weirdo...and then there she was... waiting for us to visit... a real heron, standing by the heron statue. 
Just like that! Bam!

Cheryl and I both stopped... drawn into the most amazing awareness of a 'presence' in the stillness at the pond's edge. The silence was broken only by Cheryl's heaving sob as she spoke her daughter's name. 

There is no question.. no doubt in my mind, Cynthia, or her spirit, or her personified memory, was right here, waiting patiently for us, knowing that her mum had asked Liam, who'd asked me, to bring her mum and sister to see her, to get one last group photo, to breathe the same air together, to laugh and cry together, to embrace and hug and say hello, and goodbye together. 

We were ten feet from the heron... she never moved... a message-bearer from four thousand miles away, from four thousand years ago, unmistakable, 'hello mom, I'm here, I'm safe, I'm not in pain, don't cry, I love you mom, enjoy your, our, trip to Ireland, I'm here with you, and we are going to have a fabulous time, thank you, thank you for bringing me, thank you, this means so much, I know you are hurting, don't, don't, it's going to be OK, you are going to be ok'.

Not kidding you... the hairs were standing straight up on the back of my neck, the goose-pimples dry, hard on my arms my mouth dry. This was real...yet surreal.

I see herons all the time... on the river, on the canals, on the salmon weir, in the drain at the back of my house. This one was different. This one was here for us.... with a message. 
After what seemed like an age, I dropped them back to the hotel and went off to find my tour, but the buzz, the heart-warming sensation, stayed with me all day. 

I've had this before, many times in fact, an awareness of a presence or a spirit, but rarely so powerful. 
Maybe it was something entirely different... the heaviness of the air , a hurricane had just come through here, devastating Donegal, maybe it was that, a charge in the air, mother nature telling us she's here, or maybe I'd had an after-burn from a late-night whiskey....who knows...but I know... something happened on Friday ... and you know what... it was pure magic.

There are lots of Herons in Galway, testament to the rich, clean waters we have all around us in this beautiful city. Don't ignore them...they may be trying to tell us something. I see them all the time on my Walking Tours of Galway. www.galwaywalks.com galwaywalks@gmail.com Twitter and Instagram @galwaywalks 086-3273560

Prayer of St. Brendan, the Navigator

-Prayer of St. Brendan, the Navigator- 

When St. Brendan got back from his travels discovering America in a small wooden and leather boat around 564 AD, he wrote a book in Latin, 'Navigatio Brendani' or 'The Voyage of Brendan', which, some 900 years later (1477) convinced Christopher Columbus that there might just be something out there beyond the western horizon.
The rest is history!

After he got back to Ireland, Brendan, filled with a missionary zeal, sailed from his native Kerry, round by the Aran islands, in by Salthill to Galway and soon founded an Abbey at Annaghdown, five miles up the Corrib River from Galway City (which did not exist for another 700 years). 

Later on, he founded the Cathedral at Clonfert, between Portumna and Athlone, on the banks of the River Shannon. Clonfert Cathedral is still in use as a church today and has a most magnificent Romanesque doorway that attracts visitors from all over the world each year. St. Brendan is the Patron Saint of the Diocese of Clonfert and I suppose, he really is our Irish patron saint of Journeys and Voyages. 

He died at the Abbey in Annaghdown in the care of his sister, Briga and is buried at Clonfert. 

This is his prayer. It can be applied to many journeys, including the spirit and the mind.
It is as meaningful today as it was 1500 years ago.

-Prayer of St. Brendan, the Navigator-

'Help me to journey beyond the familiar
and into the unknown.
Give me the faith to leave old ways
and break fresh ground with You.
Christ of the mysteries, I trust You
to be stronger than each storm within me.
I will trust in the darkness and know
that my times, even now, are in Your hand.
Tune my spirit to the music of heaven,
and somehow, make my obedience count for You'.

One of the many stories I tell on my Walking Tours of Galway. If you ever go to Galway, come join me on a wonderful walk of discovery in Galway, the City of the Tribes, European Capital of Culture 2020. Follow me on Twitter @galwaywalks or on Facebook www.facebook.com/galwaywalks/
Photo - Image from 'Navigatio Brendani', St. Brendan encounters a whale.

Thatching a traditional cottage in the Claddagh, Galway, Ireland

I know that many of you have been to Galway (or intend visiting ) and I am sure you have heard of the Claddagh village, which was on the west side of the mouth of the Corrib river, where it flows into Galway Bay. It was immortalised by Bing Crosby when he recorded the song 'Galway Bay' Remember the opening lines. 'If you ever go across the sea to Ireland, and maybe at the closing of your day, you can sit and watch the moon-rise over Claddagh, and watch the sun go down on Galway Bay'. There, I've got you singing already...yes, the lines are coming back to you now... 'the bare-foot gossuns at their play' ... young boys and girls, wearing no shoes, carefree, oblivious to the woes and tribulations that awaited them in their adult lives... aaah the innocence of it all.

Problem was, that by the time the song was being popularised all across America by the old crooner, back here in Galway, the city officials had decided to build Galway's first housing project, right where the iconic thatched cottages stood. To be fair, those cottages were already hundred of years old, stone-built, cold, damp and in many cases, because of poverty, they were in pretty poor condition and not fit for continued habitation in a modern Ireland, that was just shrugging off the yoke of the British empire.

So in due course over a period of twenty years or so, all the old whitewashed thatched cottages were demolished and replaced by modern, warm, if indifferent looking terraced houses. If there is a prize for the most-asked tourist question in Galway it surely has been 'Where is the Claddagh?' So many people ask that question everyday here that the locals were embarrassed to admit that there wasn't a single thatched cottage left. The wrecking ball had made a clean sweep of them all, the old Claddagh had become confined to black and white picture-postcards and vivid imaginations.

So you can imagine my delight when driving one day in the car, I noticed a guy unloading loads of thatching straw into a back-yard off Fairhill Road, in the Claddagh. My curiousity piqued, I paid the site a visit last week, accompanied by a good friend Tom O'Connor, owner of O'Connor's Famous Pub in Salthill. I brought Tom, not so much because I like him a lot, but really because he just bought some really cool camera equipment, and we made a little video blog which I called 'The first thatched cottage to be built in the Claddagh, Galway, in over a century'.

Like a  phoenix rising from the ashes, we were fascinated to bear witness to the first thatched cottage in nearly a century being built in the Claddagh by a local family called Walsh. They intend to open it to the public in April 2016 and hope to call it Katie's Claddagh Cottage, after their grand-mother who had lived there a long time ago. Using entirely authentic traditional building and thatching methods, when it is finished, it will be an iconic gem in the heart of the old Claddagh village.

So, to cut a long story short, while we were there, picking our way through the building site, I got talking to the guy who was painstakingly weaving straw into the thatched roof, a master-thatcher called Eoin O'Neill, who came all the way from Waterford in the south east of Ireland to help get the new thatched-roof, just perfect. Eoin was really great fun to speak with and was a natural on camera too.

Eoin was using locally-grown wheat from Corandulla, county Galway to thatch the main roof and was using rye that was grown in Wexford for the comb or ridge of the thatched roof. He took a break from his work while I admired the roof-timbers before they were covered over by the rye and wheaten thatch.

The main beams on the roof were old scots-pine or bog-oak rescued from the bogs that cover much of Connemara. The rest of the roof is made of hundreds of ash plants, 2 metre long sticks or scallops, onto which the thatch will eventually be secured by means of twisted hazel wands, which are 'purloned' into the thatch and inter-laced with the ash cross-beams. The thatch is then tamped and pummelled by a special hammer and tied off with thin ropes, until it is as firm and as watertight as any slate roof, really warm, and with some maintenance good for thirty or more years. When looking at really old thatched cottages one can see a hundred years of thatch-layers one on top of the other, making for a delightfully artistic roof.

Looking up through the slatted scallops that comprised the rafters of the cottage I was struck by the frailty of the entire undertaking and was reminded of the old Irish saying, 'Ní hé lá na gaoithe lá na scolb' - 'The windy day is not the day for thatching'.

The lattice-work of the inter-laced scallops dissecting the heavier cross-beams of the rafters reminded me of the warp and weft of the weavers loom. Soon the thatch will cover this natural web, and these patterns of light and heavy timbers will become the clothes of the house, not unlike a bolt of hand-woven tweed.

The shafts of winter sunlight filtering through the inter-woven sticks on the roof will soon be a distant memory, once the thick layer of rye and wheaten thatch is stitched onto the rafters by Eoin's skilled hands. When the cottage is fully thatched, this under-skeleton will be covered forever and in a month's time, really one could not imagine how such a thatched roof was constructed unless one witnessed a new-build such as this.

This is exactly as our fore-fathers would have made a cottage roof made from thatch, by gathering up locally available material, ash plants, hazel wands, bog-oak beams, driftwood etc. Most of the materials the older generations used were not bought from lumber yards or builders-suppliers, no, they were begged, borrowed, bartered and even liberated from bogs, woods, sea-shores etc. Collecting flotsam and jetsum from the shore would have been a common activity and hey, y'know, the best beams are ones that have been used before in another venture or vessel. Something with the patina of age, and the experience that goes with it, not brittle, but yielding and reliable.

Eoin made these 'bobbins', or 'skirts' by twisting and knotting sheaves of rye stalks, and then braiding them onto a hazel stick. These skirts will be pinned to the ridge to form the thicker top row of thatch at the apex of the roof and also to be additional protection around the chimney. Eoin's handiwork in fixing these bobbins to the roof is really evident when seen from above.

Here's a story! I remember hearing of one family who moved from a small tenant farm beyond Inverin, in west Connemara, to a slightly larger tenant farm, just east of Furbo, a little nearer to Galway city, in 1890. The two brothers, one wife and two children walked the 15 miles from Inverin to Furbo, carrying the roof-beams for their yet-to-be-built stone cottage, on their backs. Such was the value of a few long poles or spars back then! Their humble little thatched cottage saw 9 more children born and thereafter, 17 grand- and great-grand children, all born under the thatched roof that had been made by hand, using only locally grown or found materials, until the cottage was finally replaced in 2009 by a new slate-roofed bungalow.

I would have railed against a 'fake' Claddagh cottage, one built just for tourists to take selfies at. This is no fake. This is the real deal. I believe that this lovingly built, traditional, Claddagh cottage is set to become one of the must-see locations in Galway city for locals and tourists alike. Congratulations to the Walsh family and their hard-working friends on this unique venture to commemorate the iconic village of the Claddagh. Once the garden is in bloom and maybe with a few chickens in the 'street' this cottage will be a perfect example of how the Claddagh village houses would have looked.

 

They have a bog-oak studio at the rear of the cottage and intend selling bog-oak sculptures and tea and freshly-baked scones during the summer. You can sit in by the hob, and watch the busy cottage come to life. The turf-fire will be lighting in the big old fireplace and the half-door will be ajar, or half ajar, whichever! They hope to have various artists and crafts-people working in the cottage, perhaps even a claddagh-ring maker on site too, as well and having a warm, inviting cottage experience, showing how the people of the Claddagh lived and thrived on the shores of Lough Corrib and Galway Bay for the past five centuries.

I hope you enjoy the video. Click on this link to view Katies Claddagh Cottage;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mP8klOF1vYo&feature=youtu.be&a
Tom and I hadn't planned making the video, and we certainly hadn't rehearsed my lines. If fact we did most of it in one staccato un-rehearsed take... so expect a few bloopers...and of course there was lots that we forgot to mention or talk about.

You can come on a walking tour of Galway with me anytime, just call or email me and we can meet up at a time to suit you and your family or friends. If it's wet and windy, I also give 'the shortest walking tour of Ireland, the fifty foot tour of O'Connors pub!' It's a Fireside tour that I give at 6pm any day at O'Connor's Pub, Salthill. A half-dozen or more people can come on that tour, winter or summer.

Thanks for reading. Come and walk with me sometime.
Brian Nolan. Galway Walks - Walking Tours of Galway
Website www.galwaywalks.com Twitter @Galwaywalks
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/Galwaywalks/
Phone 086-3273560 - email galwaywalks@gmail.com

*Photo Credits - The photos are all my own, save for the shot of the bread being baked at the open fire, which I use with the kind permission of the Connemara Heritage and History centre.

Walking Tour of Galway - Eyre Square, Galway

All in a Galway Walk;

 

A freshening breeze breathes life into the iconic Galway Hooker's sails billowing against a cottoned-blue sky in Eyre Square, the main square in the centre of Galway City, on the west coast of Ireland.

 

Galway was founded by the Norman invaders around 1230 AD and the growing fortified medieval town of Galway was granted a City Charter by none other than King Richard III (of Leister fame) in 1484. Galway Corporation commissioned Northern-Ireland sculptor Eamonn O'Doherty to make the sails sculpture in 1984, for the city's 500th anniversary, or our city's Quincentenary or Quincentennial Celebration.

 

 

 

The sculpture represents the sails of a Galway Hooker, a traditional sail-boat that was used for trade and fishing up and down the Atlantic coast of Ireland for centuries. The sails were traditionally red or dun-coloured and the rusty sculpted steel sails are a life-like representation of the sails that are still used on Hookers on Galway Bay. You will see the Hookers sailing off Salthill, or berthed in the Claddagh.

 

The sculpture  was from the very get-go, a simultaneous source of joy and annoyance for Galwegians. Some see it as an eyesore, others think it looks rather Picasso-esque and love it. It is nominally a fountain, but whether for budget reasons or conservation, or to stop college kids chucking soap-powder into it, the water jets are now rarely turned on, and even when they do the water jets are barely knee-high.

 

On the flag-poles behind the sculpture fly the banners and coats of arms of the fourteen 'Tribes of Galway', the 14 Norman families who more or less dominated trade in this bustling medieval city until they too were dispossessed by the army of Oliver Cromwell in 1652, when they captured the city and confiscated all the land, houses and wealth that these enterprising families, and other Irish families had amassed in the previous 400 years.

 

Galway city went into decline under English rule and much of the Spanish influence that the Normans brought to bear on the city's architecture is now visible in the many preserved medieval windows and doorways that survived the siege and occupation. Today Galway is a modern city with many successful industries, a strong tourism sector, beautiful beaches and mountain scenery, and some 20,000 third-level students in our University. It has been voted the friendliest city in Europe and is bidding to be the European City of Culture in 2020 ( +Galway 2020 or @Galway2020 )

 

Eamonn O'Doherty is far more famous these days for his 'Armoured Pram for Derry' sculpture, but sometimes in Galway's Eyre Square, on a suddenly-Spring day, one can almost hear the crack of the gallants, the jibs, the mizzens and the moonrakers as the wind picks up and the herring are running, and the captain calls for canvas!

 

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Join me, Brian Nolan, on one of my walking tours of Galway, whether on the streets of the city or at O'Connors Fanmous Pub in Salthill, where I entertain locals and visitors alike with my 'Fireside Tour' of O'Connors Pub. www.galwaywalks.com galwaywalks@gmail.com  Phone 086-3273560

The Way They Went - How the Irish 'got about' in 1850!

The Irish, while extremely fond of their horses, tended to walk everywhere, most of them not having the means nor the land to support a horse. Public Transport was inefficient, to say the least. The Railways had only just arrived in Ireland but were confined to short lines in Dublin. River boats and canals carried goods and passengers, though very, very slowly. The Mail Coach from Galway to Dublin took 2 to 3 days, stopping frequently to change horses and rest. 

Charles Bianconi changed all that. He was the Michael O'Leary of his day. Having arrived here in 1800 as a door-to-door salesman of Italian engravings, he soon saw the need for faster coach transport. His Bianconi Coach business had humble beginnings. in 1815 he started with just two coaches (called Bians), each carrying 8 passengers, sitting back to back, face out to the roadside, in 2 rows of 4 longitudinally on a hard bench, plying between Clonmel and Cahir. 

By 1850 he had revolutionised public transport around Ireland, managing some 100 vehicles, which traveled an astonishing 3,800 miles daily, calling at 120 towns, and 140 stations for changing horses. Each of these 'stations', many of which were hotels, inns or public houses, employed several grooms and a farrier, not to mention the catering and other people involved. With over 500 drivers on the payroll and 200 'Bians' in the fleet, they kept over 1,300 horses to pull the cars, that ate around 3,500 tons of hay a year, plus 35,000 barrels of oats. Bianconi also owned a coach-builders company in Clonmel where they made and repaired their own fleet of coaches, and also contracted to dozens of tradesmen and harness-makers, as well as establishing a network of over a thousand ticket-vendors all over the country. 

Blacks Hotel in Eyre Square Galway, Ireland was the Bianconi station in the city (now the Imperial Hotel). The Central Hotel In Loughrea, owned by J. Salmon was the Marconi depot there. A laden Bianconi Royal Mail Day Car or Coach covered about 8 miles per hour and passengers were charged one penny and a farthing per mile (about a 1/2 cent nowadays). 

The fare from Galway to Clifden was 7 shillings and six pence (about 30 cents today) and took 11 to 12 hours to cover the fifty-odd miles! And you sat outside, in all weather! Coaches to Dublin took 2 days, with passengers staying overnight in places like Athlone or Kilbeggan. 

 

They carried mail, passengers and trade-goods. Bianconi's coaches helped the revive the fishing industry by allowing fish caught today in Galway or Cork, to be sold in Dublin within 24 hours, by driving 24 hours straight with perishable cargo.

The mass migration of the Irish people ignited by The Great Famine brought huge increases in passengers, who used Bianconi's services to reach the ports from which they emigrated to England, Canada, America and Australia. The departing emigrants would have passed harrowing scenes of poverty, beggars, evicted families, demolished or uninhabitable homes and lean-to's on the sides of the roads, no doubt reinforcing their decision to leave their native land. 

The Railways finally put the Coaches out of business in the final years of the 19th century, though these new rail-lines, while they provided huge employment in their building, only helped spur and enable more emigration from Ireland..
Today you can still see some Bianconi Coaches in use as jaunting cars on Killarney. 

Charles 'Carlo' Bianconi, who brought cheap public transport to Ireland, died in 1875 and left his company to his employees. A truly modern, innovative and patriotic Irishman, though he was born 130 years ago in a little village called Tregolo, in northern Italy, in 1785.

Hope you enjoyed this post. If you'd like to hear more Galway stories, check out my website www.galwaywalks.com or my Facebook page www.facebook.com/galwaywalks or follow me on Twitter @galwaywalks 
Regards
Brian Nolan
Galway Walks 
Galwaywalks@gmail.com

The Knife Sharpener

Every couple of years this man would come to Loughrea, County Galway and set up shop on the foot-path outside Molloy's Harp Bar on Main Street. He was an itinerant blade-grinder, or knife sharpener. Folks would get wind he was in town and quickly a queue would form, of people waiting to have their 'sharps' sharpened.

All manner of blades were whetted. Scissors, shears, scythes, chisels, sickles, lawn-mower blades, axes, carving knives, plane-blades, scrapers, even razors, he sharpened them all. Sparks would fly when he applied the blade to the spinning whetstone, turning the blade to whet both sides, changing the angle he held it at, almost flat for knives, fully right-angled for scissors. He moved in reverie with the blade, caressing the blade's fine edge to the stone, teasing it to a polished finish as he gently varied the speed of the stone by pedaling the foot-spindles faster or slower. He was an artist really, a craftsman for whom steel was his brush.

He would finish with a smile, rubbing the now gleaming blade with an oily rag to keep the rust off. I can't remember what he charged, something fairly nominal and affordable I imagine, for everyone needed their knives sharpened, rich and poor alike, and he didn't discriminate. He would finish up when the last blade was tested. Deftly he'd flip the cart onto it's one wheel, and using two handles which he had folded into the frame, he wheeled the grinding barrow off to his night's lodgings.

He towed the cart behind his bicycle and like the poet Antoine Raftery, he went from village to village, town to town, farm to farm, working his magic on the cutting edges of Irish life, continuing a tradition that probably went all the way back to medieval times. I wonder if he had a set route, or just took a notion, north today, tomorrow west with the sun? I took these two photographs in August 1973 and had 'lost' the images until this weekend when tidying out my mum's house.  

I was working in Sligo in 1979 when one day I took a drive to Drumcliff to see Yeat's grave. There I saw the little blue and white cart for the last time, tucked in behind a caravan, parked off the road. I stopped, but there was no one about. I often wondered what ever became of the little man with the sharpest wit in Ireland. I never saw him again. I didn't even know his name!

Sometimes I see a Heron in the Corrib river when on my Walking Tours

The word for Heron is 'Corr' in Gaelic. It is also the Irish word for Crane and is used interchangeably. In Celtic mythology, if a sacred place or taboo is disrespected, the effected Druid would adopt a 'corrghuíneacht' - or Heron stance, to put a curse on the transgressor. They reputedly stood on one leg, with one arm skyward, wrist at right-angles over their head, pointing at their enemy, transfixing them with one eye,  chanting or satirising him. Such a spell resulted in everything from blisters on the person's skin, blindness of the enemy, even their death! Irish Herons, not to be messed with. Timeless guardians of our heritage! 

Here in Galway, you can often see Cranes at Salthill, in the rock-pools opposite Leisureland, at Long Walk, near the aptly named B&B Heron's Rest, and often when on my 'walking tours', I see a Heron at the little weir below the Fisheries Tower or at the weir below Nuns Island. 

Keep a wary eye out for them...hah! 

Heron sculpture at Nuns Island, Galway.

The Winkle-Pickers Tale.

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.