The Unquiet Grave

Until this century, life expectancy in Ireland was short, very short, less than forty years for most people.
If you lived to be fifty you were considered a rarity and if you made it to sixty or seventy or eighty, you were an elder, a revered personage, a respected sage, for you had seen two, or three, or four generations come and go. Not many people could say that.

Can you imagine how hard life was n the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th century here in Ireland? Most people lived from hand to mouth, subsisting on too-small farms, that were over-worked and hopelessly inadequate to amply feed the too-big families of the poor tenant farmers who made up the largest proportion of the people in Ireland. Life was uncertain. 
Aside from being poor, they were governed in the main by antagonistic or at best unsympathetic Protestant and Presbyterian English settlers, who themselves, though they were better off, also had a relatively short life expectancy. War, famine, disease and accidents were the more likely cause of death for most people. For women, child-birth was one of the biggest killers. Life was cheap, hard and unfair. Death did not discriminate, rich and poor died at an astonishing rate.

Men especially, died young. They worked outside, in all elements, in poor clothing and with little food or shelter. Widows did not fare well without their men to provide for them. Life was hard. Death, and especially an early or unexpected death was a fact of life. The dead, both rich and poor, were mourned by their loved ones, buried quickly, and but for a few, quickly forgotten.

Very few left any kind of records, and almost no one had a permanent grave marker. If you were memorialised at all it was probably in song or story. That job fell to the local, or sometimes itinerant seanachai, or story-teller. Those ancient bards were revered and respected and gained the valuable patronage of the Irish and indeed the Norman upper class, allowing them to survive and thrive in that society. By the 18th century, with the demise of the Irish ruling class, the bards and shanachies were thrown on the generosity of the less well-off farming classes.

On my walking tours of Galway ( www.galwaywalks.com ) I tell my visitors about the intrinsic value of the story-teller or ‘shanachie’ in Irish culture. The shanachie was a revered and respected individual, poor no doubt, but hearkening back to the minstrels who lived with the ancient Irish nobility and recorded their histories. The older people, men and women, were a store of learned experience and handed down traditions that younger people could access, verbally when you were alive, because you had witnessed events and were able to recount them first-hand or from memory. Unfortunately, most stories died when you died, but if we were lucky, your stories, your knowledge, your wisdom was carried to the next generation by the shanachai.

Shanachies were skilled at recounting a good tale, especially when gathered around the hearth in the long winter nights. Family histories and legends were passed down from generation to generation in this way, from father to son, mother to daughter, but in ear-shot of the elders, who would act as editors of the tales, correcting, embellishing, reinforcing the stories before they themselves passed away.

So too it was with ballad singers and poets. The wandering musicians who went from village to village sang their songs, recounted stories, collected new stories, a latter-day Reuters, spreading the news of the day, but 'singing for their supper' too. They relied on local hospitality for their lodging and food, because no one had money to pay for their services and the ‘Big Houses of the Irish nobility were long gone and the patrons long dead or banished overseas as 'The Wild Geese'. The old Irish ascendancy had been replaced by ‘Planters’ who wouldn't have understood the language, had no interest in the ‘old Irish tales’ and even less interest in being a patron of a mendicant minstrel.

This reliance on travelling minstrels to collect and disseminate news and stories became even more important during the Penal Laws, and right up until the Famine, during which period the Irish language, religion, education and culture were suppressed. Literacy rates among all classes of Catholics plummeted. By the mid 18th century very few Irish speakers could write or read and their stories, their histories, their customs and folk-tales were lost as the generations passed away.

Most of the Irish population were tenant farmers, mainly illiterate, unable to read the papers of the day, and now heavily relied on itinerant poets musicians for entertainment and for news. The suppression of the Irish language was a major cause of this cultural loss. The upside is that despite their hardship and changed circumstances, the Irish kept the tradition of the shanachai and bard alive, as well as the music, the stories, the faith. Those fragile stories survived in the poems and songs, but only barely.

After the Great Hunger however, from 1842 on, emigration, evictions and famine finally broke the back of millennia of Irish tradition and culture. There was a flight to the towns and rural traditions were quickly forgotten. So too were the thousands of songs and stories that were the stock-in-trade of the shanachai. Very little of our history and cultural lore had been written down, much was lost forever as these seanachai and bards died.

Fortunately, some of the stories and songs and poems were collected and written down, much of it by Anglo-Irish academics during the late 19th and early 20th century while there was still some folk memories of the great stories and indeed while some of the itinerant story-tellers still lived. Lady Gregory was one such collector. Her work amongst the tenant farmers rescued countless stories from permanent loss. There were many others around Ireland doing similar work, many of them women. We have through them, some glimpse of the imagination, tales, ballads and poems of these often under-estimated poets, musicians and shanachies, the druids of a bye-gone era.

Later on in the 20th century, there was a Gaelic Revival and much credit has to be given to the many writers including Padraic Pearse and Douglas Hyde who wrote down many of these stories. Finally, with the invention of the wax disc recorders, and with some foresight, very many ‘Oral Histories’ and ‘Folk-Tales’ were recorded and collected in the 1930’s and 1940’s by the volunteers working for the 'Irish Folklore Commission’ and they have been saved. Of course much more was lost, died with the people and the tumbled cottages, buried forever in a restless grave.

England, like Ireland had also lost touch with its own shanachie and rural traditions. Their stories and songs were lost at an accellerated rate during the 19th century industrialisation and urbanisation of Britain. Unlike Ireland, literacy rates were much higher in Britain and there was a large academic and wealthy class who dedicated themselves to writing down these dying traditions, stories and songs. Collectors like Child, working dilligently up and down the country, dilligently and avidly recorded thousands of songs and stories and these collections now inform our academics and singers on that lost oral history. 

A hundred years or so after the Famine, ‘The Clancy Brothers’ and ‘The Dubliners’ emerged from the cities and entertained us with a new genre of Irish Music. They sang songs we had never heard before and we embraced them, these new brand of minstrels, our own latter-day shanachies mined that treasure trove of collected songs in Irish and British museums and universities and revived these otherwise lost songs. The songs they sang were really the stories and poems of the past, handed down, generation to generation, now put into ballads. they breathed life back into our folklore and the ‘Folk’ movement blossomed. We now called our shanachies 'folk-singers' and the name and genre stuck.

Luke Kelly was one of our best folk-singers. A founding member of The Dubliners, Luke was a sponge, soaking up words and stories anywhere he lived, especially in England in the early sixties. He collected songs and poems like other people collect stamps or rare coins. He collected many of his songs in England where he worked as a younger man.

Luke was the quintessential story-teller, but one with a singing voice that once heard will never be forgotten. The world and Ireland is so lucky to have had such a balladeer. He and his fellow musicians, including Christy Moore and Ewan McColl have saved an entire tranche of Irish and British folk history from oblivion.

Recently I made a little time to research a poem/ballad I’d never heard of, ‘The Unquiet Grave’. This song was alluded to by the widow of Luke Kelly (Luke of the Dubliners, died 32 years ago) in an interview I heard on the radio. Luke apparently sang this song and it was her favourite memory of him, for reasons that will become apparent when you read the poem or listen to the song. This is an ancient poem, one that probably existed in parts, and in other versions for over five hundred years, but the sentiment of loss and of undying love contained in this song or poem is powerful and utterly timeless. It is a true folk-tale.

Enjoy…but be prepared, it is a very moving piece.

“The wind doth blow today, my love,
And a few small drops of rain;
I never had but one true-love,
In cold grave she was lain.

“I’ll do as much for my true-love
As any young man may;
I’ll sit and mourn all at her grave 
For a twelvemonth and a day.”

The twelvemonth and a day being up, 
The dead began to speak: 
“Oh who sits weeping on my grave,
And will not let me sleep?”

” ‘Tis I, my love, sits on your grave, 
And will not let you sleep;
For I crave one kiss of your clay-cold lips,
And that is all I seek.”

“You crave one kiss of my clay-cold lips, 
But my breath smells earthy strong;
If you have one kiss of my clay-cold lips, 
Your time will not be long.

” ‘Tis down in yonder garden green, 
Love, where we used to walk, 
The finest flower that e’re was seen 
Is withered to a stalk.

“The stalk is withered dry, my love,
So will our hearts decay; 
So make yourself content, my love, 
Till God calls you away.”

‘The Unquiet Grave – or Child Ballad # 78, is a street ballad that was collected by the Harvard scholar, Francis James Child, in his unfinished ten volume collection, ‘The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1892-98)’. Without him, this little story which could have its roots in Ireland, England, Scotland or Wales, may have been lost forever. We do not know where or when Luke Kelly found this ballad, but he did, and it is beautiful. This is his version of a timeless story of tragic true love. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyqBA_Qr3qs

Luke Kelly passed away on the 30th of January 1984.  

Enjoy, Brian.

You can also read my blog on http://www.thenewwildgeese.com 
Photos, John Carlos, Anna King and various others in Public Domain. 

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.

The Old Man And The Sea

I'd been walking my usual route home after work, along the promenade by Grattan Beach, in Salthill, watching a few dogs playing in the tide, chasing each other and the tennis ball their owner threw for them, a typical scene on a typical afternoon in Galway. It was as I approached the junction with Lower Salthill that I noticed him, sitting alone on a bench, in his grey tweed coat and the flat cap, leaning slightly forward, looking out towards the Aran Islands. It was a universal pose, one of wistful thinking and remembering, one that all of our fathers and grand-fathers might have struck had they had an idle moment on a sunny afternoon by the sea, but perhaps also a pose that one may not have witnessed very often, or at all, depending if we were away ourselves, or perhaps our fathers had never made it to the respectable old age where such horizon-gazing is considered ok. Whatever his reason for taking his private moment on the bench that day, it struck a chord with me and I stopped the car for a moment, and snapped the photo. I was glad that I did.

Roll on the seasons, and a full year later, on another such afternoon, lo and behold if he wasn't there again, sitting on his now favourite seat, looking off into the afternoon haze. This time I parked the car and walked back to him, took a few photos and then sat beside him, for a chat. He was delighted to talk and before I knew It, he'd told me a story. Here's roughly how it went.

I said to him as I approached the seat, 'Do you mind if I sit here?' 'Why would I mind? It's a great day isn't it? We've had a woeful winter, I've hardly been out in months.' he answered. I'm Brian by the way' I said, settling down on the edge of the seat, trying not to make him nervous. 'Nice to meet you. My name is PJ, PJ Ruane', he answered. A noisy truck was passing and I asked him to repeat his name. 'PJ, Patrick Joseph is my real name, but everyone calls me PJ.

I nodded. 'Are you from here?' 'New Road, just back the ways' he answered, pointing back towards The Jes. I asked 'By the canal, up off Henry Street?' He nodded. 'All my life, in the one house there, still there, I'll be carried outa there in a pine box I suppose.'

'I saw you here a year or so ago, at this very seat,' I said, '...would it bother you if I took a photo of you? 'He hardly paid any notice to me. I asked him to look to his left and took a photograph with my phone. 'How old do you think I am?' he asked. ''Seventy maybe' I said. 'I'll be 84 on the 24th of May, can you believe that? 'Wow, really! You certainly don't look it. You look fit and healthy, God bless you' I said, honestly.

'I worked outdoors all me life. I finished school when I was 11, never liked it. Worked with horses every day of me life, until 2001 when the council said I'd to stop drawing away loads on the cart. Told me I'd have to pay for a licence and pay a fee for every cart-load. And wear a yella jacket and a hard-hat too, imagine, on a horse-cart?'

Just as he said that, I remembered him then. Years back, maybe 1981 or '82. I remembered taking a photograph of him drawing seaweed off Grattan beach. I said that to him, was that him? He nodded. 'After the winter storms I would bring the horse and cart down here, just there where the monument to the famine girl is now, and draw loads of the seaweed up to the gardens in Taylors Hill and Rockbarton. I drew seaweed as far as Shantalla for the allotments there, but they didn't pay as much as the big doctor's houses. I'd get two pound, or two pound and ten shillings a load in the seventies for seaweed. Great on the roses and on the potatoes. But no one buys seaweed now. It's all in packets now, nothing natural at all.'

'So you were born in 1930 or thereabouts? There wasn't much work in Galway back then, was there?' I asked. 'No, times were hard. My uncle Sonny lived with us in the little house, my mother and father, and me. Bartley bán, they called him, my father, he worked all his life in Palmer's Mills, and Sonny worked in McDonagh's yard. 'Bartley bán?' I quizzed,' bán?' 'Bán, y'know, white, he always had a head of white hair, all my life anyways, that's what they called him.'

'Would your father have known Eugene Daly, the man who was on the Titanic?' He snorted, 'Eugene, from St. John's Street, sure we all knew him, didn't he dress as a woman to get into the lifeboat! I'm not sure he did that, it was all a rumour about people dressing in women's clothes, but he survived it anyway, howsoever he did. I never heard him talking about it, I suppose he was ashamed, or in shock. I remember him well, a tall thin man, worked in Palmers Mills, and then he went off to America to his daughter, she was married out there, in Boston or New York, I suppose.'

He went on. 'Palmer's mills is where the Bridge Mills are now. It was a busy place, full of carts all sorts of carts, donkey carts and pony traps, and small lorrys, all drawing in grain, or drawing out flour and meal. Fierce strong men they were back then, able to load a cart with huge bags of meal or fertiliser, two hundred-weights in a bag, lift it straight up off the ground up onto a cart, no bother, and stay doing that all day, with hardly a mug a tae all day and a sandwich at the Angelus, if they were lucky. And never a word outa them.'

I was mentally trying to remember what a hundred-weight was. 'A hundred-weight, what's that, like twenty kilos?' He explained. 'One hundred and twelve pounds was a hundred-weight. A standard sack of grain or fertiliser, or coal would weigh two hundred-weights, that's two hundred and twenty four pounds, as big as yerself 'twould be, and there might be a dozen of them on a cart, to load or unload. I'd like to see a man do that nowadays.'

Aside from wondering how he knew my weight, I was thinking jeez, a bag weighing over 100 kilos. I'd just done a Manual Handling course, where we were told a safe weight to lift for a grown man was 25-30 kilos. The week before, I had just bought two 50 kilo bags of coal and I had to get help lifting them into my car-boot. I felt like a puny weakling. This man on the seat beside me was small, well not small, but certainly not Mr. Universe.

'What did you work at when you finished up in school?' I asked, changing the subject. 'I was always at the horses, from when I was a young fellah. I never had any land so I kept them in the commonage behind Shantalla, or on the old quarry railway line, or I let them graze the long acre, but you wouldn't know what that was, I suppose. That was when you grazed your horses on the ditches either side of the road, that was the long acre.' McDonaghs yard had 19 horses, and big stables so I worked there and I was always drawing stuff for people on the cart, y'know, builders rubble, top-soil, stones for foundations, sand, blocks, slates, whatever needed drawing, I carried it.'

'I'd go to Balinasloe Fair and buy a few horses. I had a fair good eye for a sound horse. Some of them I'd keep and some I'd sell on. You could make a few pounds on a good horse in a few weeks, and people would always ask me to keep an eye out for a good one for them.' You see that high point way over across the bay?' He pointed out Tawin to me, a promontory west of Oranmore. 'Yes' I said, 'I often see the light changing on Tawin Point from here, it's always got a different light to it, I'm sure the old folk could tell the weather for fishing from the light over Tawin.'

'That's as may be but I bought a horse there once, from a big farmer called Harty. The horse was one of the breed with the hairy fetlocks, like a quarter-bred draught-horse, a lovely mare she was. I cycled out and led her back through Oranmore and put her up in Shantalla for the night. Well wouldn't you know it, she was gone in the morning. There was nothing for it but to go all the way back through Oranmore, asking along the way for the mare, and sure enough, wasn't she there in the field I'd bought her in. I often thought she had something to do, something to finish and nothing would do her but to go back in the night. I walked her back again and she never strayed again, can you believe that?'

I laughed. 'There's no homing instincts in horses, I mean pigeons have it and maybe dogs, but I never heard of horses homing in!' ...and then I remembered the beautiful poem, 'Caoineadh Airt O'Learaigh' and how his horse came home to his wife, covered in his blood after the English murdered him. I said as much to him. 'I'll tell ya a better one. There was a big dealer, be the name of Dunne, came to Salthill from Dublin every year for the month of August. He stayed in a hotel over there, ah, it's long gone now, but I used buy the odd horse from him. He'd buy in Smithfield and sell down here. One year he had a horse to sell, a big draught mare she was and he had a buyer coming up from Gort for her. I had her kept with my horse up in Shantalla and wouldn't you know it, she went off in the night, with my horse and two others. I hadn't a clue where to look, but a man told me he'd heard tell of a few horses the night before, out in Barna. I found them after searching two day on the bicycle, a ways from Spiddal, up near the little lake there, Doughisce and I brought mine home and told Dunne where he'd find his mare. He thanked me and brought her back and sold her to the Gort man. Damn me if she didn't go missing again, and where do you think she turned up? Hah? Not Galway or Spiddal, but back up in Dublin in his yard. Now do you believe me? Sure horses are a wonder, a good one will make you, but a bad one will break you, my father used to say.'

'Did you ever work abroad? In England or America?' I asked. 'No, I never travelled. All my school friends went to England or America, but I had too much to be doing here. I never left. My uncle Sonny got me into working on the docks. It was hard work. They'd usually get a work gang together for unloading the ships that'd come in to McDonaghs. Sometimes you'd be picked, other times you'd be sent home. It all depended. I was often employed unloading the potash or some other fertiliser for Mairtin Mór McDonagh. He was a big man, died young, but he was tough. He owned half the town back then. The fertiliser was in sacks usually, but the potash had to be filled into big heavy buckets. The potash was fierce to be carrying. It got into your eyes and mouth, you'd be breathing it in all day, coughing and sneezing, but shure no one cared back then.'

I remember nineteen and fifty-five, it was a fierce hard winter, but that summer was sunny and warm. There were twelve us, all young and fit. Men from the Claddagh who hadn't any other work, times were hard, wirey men, tough as nails. They put two 30 foot planks up against the ship in the docks. Thick planks, maybe 4 inches thick and a foot wide, one plank to walk in by, and one to walk out off the ship. In one day we unloaded the whole ship, carrying bag after bag of the fertiliser on our backs, walking down the bendy plank, without even a rail to hold onto, up and down, all day without hardly a break, 690 tons, all stacked 6 bags high on the quayside!, Man alive but that was hard work, I was tired out that evening, and all for three pounds for the day. Money was scarce back then, not like now. And you couldn't say anything to the ganger, or Mairtin Mór might get to hear it and that was the end of it, out with ya.'

'Did you play football or soccer when you were younger', I asked. 'No, I never was into that. I kept ferrets most of my life. I'd be out after rabbits and selling them. You made good money on rabbits during the Emergency. They must have eaten a quare lot of rabbit meat in England during the war. I never really liked rabbit meat myself, but they put bread on the table.'

'Are you married', I asked. 'I never married. I just never met a one I could settle down with, and sure, where would we live anyway. There's wasn't room in the house on New Road, and I just stayed with the horses. I moved furniture for people if they were moving flats or getting a corporation house. I collected scrap and I brought loads to the dump. I was as good as my word, for that was all I had, my word. If I started a job, or promised to be somewhere, to do something, I would... I never let anyone down.'

'Has much changed along here?' He looked straight at me, with eyes that had seen it all.
'Changed, sure it's all changed. See the rocks here', pointing at the sea-wall along the prom, 'well that was only put in here in the sixties. Yes, before that the tide came right into where Kelleher's Garage is now, there would be water all the way across here, three, no four feet deep, for 500 yards.

'Y'know the swamp, at the Claddagh, where they play the football now, that was all a dump in my day. I didn't dump there, but near every business in town did. No one cared what was put in there. It's great now with the playing fields and the cycling path, but way back, it was awful, you wouldn't let your horse eat the grass there, it all smelled bad.'



He pointed down the road towards town, to where the big houses on Beach Court now are. 'That was all what we called 'The Boggers' in there, low, swampy land, always flooding. It belonged to Flaherty's, y'know the Supervalue, well that was Flaherty Motors back then and old Mr. Flaherty was always good to me. He didn't mind me dumping there, y'know, rubbish and back-fill from old yards in the town, and soil from digging out foundations. He wasn't keen on old bicycle frames and bed springs, but near anything else you could dump there. There was talk in the sixties that they were gong to build a greyhound track there, but that was just talk In the end they built those houses on it.'

'That road, Grattan Road, Bothar na deich pingin, was always there, but the sea would be one side of it and the flood the other. Just down there was the bathing shelter, near those steps there and the men and women would change into their swimming clothes in it. It was a wooden shed, swept away in the storm in 1960 I think. And there was Moon's pavilion too, it was an L shaped hut there, just below the famine plaque, but it got completely flooded. Moons, you know, the big shop, well they had it as a summer cabin, Grattan Lodge they called it, and it was beautiful, but then the roof blew off in a storm in the fifties, it was ruined. I helped move the housekeeper out of it up to Newcastle. She was a lovely lady.' 

I wondered if he remembered the old Claddagh? 'What was it like', I asked him what he remembered. 'It was all thatched houses in the Claddagh back then. On a summer's day you'd look back from here and be blinded by the whitewashed walls of the Claddagh village. They were very proud of their village, a tight crowd, hard to be in with them. They owned the shore here. That all changed when they knocked the old houses and put up the corporation houses in the forties and fifties. The Claddagh was never the same after that. Well I suppose the fishing was all gone too, and the boats, man there would be dozens of fishing boats out on the bay here, with all different sails, especially when the herring were in. You'd rarely see a hooker out there now, it's a pity. They didn't have much back then, but they were great people, the Claddagh people, they stuck together.'

We commented on the sand and seaweed that the March storms had blown into piles across the road.

He said, 'in the Spring after the big tides, the Claddaghmen would be down here collecting the 'Laryck' for the iodine factory. That's the long seaweed rods that get washed in after the storms. They'd stack them and dry them there on the beach, and then load them onto a boat, and row them up the canal and then into the Corrib. Up to the iodine factory below Menlo. The ruins of it are still there. There'd be just two men rowing a big heavy boat, loaded to the gunwhales with seaweed. The boat would be near sunk with the weight of it, but it made no differ. They could manage big loads on those boats. They were great boatmen.'

I asked him about the lighthouse. 'They would be out around Mutton island where the lighthouse is, there was no road back then, you went there over the rocks when the tide went out. I remember a family living out there, at the lighthouse. And a young boy, maybe 16, from the Claddagh, drowned when his canoe turned over when the tide caught him by surprise. He was out there fishing for rockfish when the tide caught him. Terrible sad that was.'

I quizzed him about the winkle-picking that went on along the shore, now and back then.
'Yes, there were a few families in the Claddagh made their money selling periwinkles, They'd pick them, the winkles, especially at the very low tides, they'd be way out there, bent over the rock-pools, gathering winkles. They'd wash them and then boil them and sell them for tuppence a bag. They gave you a straight pin to eat them with. Some of them sold cockles and mussels too, all picked from the strand and the rocks here, when the tide was out. There was always something going on here, always men and women out there, working away.'

'That's why I like to sit here, y'know, remembering those days. Nobody works the shore now, sure you wouldn't see a sinner out there, barring a few walkers with their dogs and the odd German tourist walking in the tide. I don;t know when I last saw a man driving a horse and cart? Times have moved on and I suppose we must move with them.' He was getting up to go, we shook hands and said our goodbyes. Time had flown as we had spoken, the evening had turned chilly. I watched him walk away, still looking out towards the Clare coast, and the white horses on the bay.

Da.
He casts a lonely figure, silent, gazing... out to sea
Eyes fixed on a distant point unknown
to all but him, a secret place perhaps a memory
A fleeting glimpse of days before he’d grown

A man alone among his thoughts perhaps it is his wife
That passed across the void those years ago
His son who sailed from this point to start a brand new life
Alone among his thoughts that we can’t know
He casts a lonely figure as he shuffles down the way
His mind fixed on a distant point unknown
Returning every morning, he will sit and gaze all day
Absorbed within those distant thoughts, his own
Marty Boyce April 2015 ©

An Australian cousin of mine, Marty Boyce, penned the above lines when he saw the photograph of PJ that I'd posted on my Facebook page, just over a year ago. I liked the poem then and still do today.
He, like me, recognised something of his own father (Tom) in the demeanour of the man on the seaside seat, gazing out to the Burren hills across Galway Bay.
----------------
I hope you enjoyed the story. If you see PJ on the bench be sure to sit and chat with him. You can catch me some evenings at O'Connors doing my 'Fireside Tales' or around town giving my Walking Tours of Galway. If you would like to join me some evening, or if you have a story to tell me, please call me at 086-3273560 or email galwaywalks@gmail.com
Thanks for reading...I hope you liked it.
Please feel free to share or comment.
Brian Nolan
NOTE: All photos are mine, taken by Brian Nolan and copyright to me, except for the photo of cart taken in 1973 on Shop Street, taken by Paddy Brittany, and used with his permission.

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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

Fair Days In Ireland

Fairs played a vital role in the rural economy. Farm income depended on the seasonal sale of stock or crops and the fairs were where these transactions took place. Some fairs were just for cattle, or sheep or pigs, others were more general, and items sold included hay, turf and potatoes, as well as turkeys, geese, calves and bonhams.

Fairs were held in most towns and even in the cities. The top part of Eyre Square has been a market-place for probably five hundred years or more.

Each fair was held on a set day, and that day was marked on the farmers calendar, and the life of the farm revolved around having the stock ready for each fair. Fair days were held for centuries on the same day of the month, so tradition was of huge importance, and the fair days were oriented to the seasonal production of stock and crops, unlike today, where the mart is open most days of the week. While they all read the 'Farmers Almanac', they knew their fair day dates off by heart.

I remember the fair days in Loughrea in the early 1960's, before the mart was built. We got the day off school on fair days, so we loved the tradition, though not the inconvenience of the fairs. Personal safety aside, we got the day off because of the amount of liquid slurry that lined the streets and the footpaths and made walking around town on a fair day, a rather mucky, smelly business for a young 'townie'.

Pig, geese, turkey and calf fairs were smaller than the big sheep and cattle fairs and most of the animals were brought to town, confined by the creels of the cart, which was drawn by a horse or a donkey, though I remember several mules and ginettes pulling carts as well.

The sheep and cattle fairs were much bigger affairs. The animals began arriving for the big cattle fairs from around 9pm the night before, with canny farmers and their bleary-eyed sons staking out traditional pitches, where generations of each family had always sold their beasts. Such a territorial spot was important and also considered 'lucky' so it was always on their minds to get to town early and secure their 'sweet spot' for selling their cattle or sheep.

Sheep fairs were a sight to behold. Unlike cattle, sheep had to be penned, or they would simply disappear into the night. To achieve this, men brought wooden hurdles with them to town and tied them to the fronts of houses, shops, gateways, whatever they could find, and wherever they could, and made a three-sided pen into which they herded their sheep and lambs. I remember seeing the full length of main street on both sides, penned off in this manner, with perhaps a half mile in total of sheep pens up and down Main Street, strapped to the fronts of each and every business premises on the street. There were probably thousands of sheep in town for those fair days.

 My mother owned a ladies drapery shop, which had two big plate glass display windows, perhaps 3 metres wide on the front of the shop and an elegant, wide, glass doorway in the middle. The sheep pens were tied right up against the shop windows, filled to bursting with huge woolly bleating sheep with panic in their eyes and escape on their minds. Dad had special wrought iron grids made to protect the shop windows from being stove in by the press of the sheep in the pens.


After the fair, I would be given the task of hosing down the footpath and the walls of the shop, brushing away the yards of sheep-poo. Then I had to get the lanolin oil off the windows and have them gleaming for the morning. I don't think I'll ever forget the smells.

Cattle fairs were very different. Cattle can stand in groups for hours without wandering off, with a little minding, so no pens were needed. Hundreds of cattle would fill every street in town, and while to the stranger it must have looked chaotic, it was in actual fact, quite organised, with each farmer's cattle being watchfully guarded and herded so they weren't just in one huge herd. This 'minding' of the cattle was done by the boys and they had a difficult task of it, but they were used to minding cattle, unlike me, who was terrified they might bite!

Once the cattle were in place, the men went off the gauge the market, or meet the cattle jobbers, leaving their sons in charge of the cattle they'd just driven into town. For all of them it had already been a long, tiring night, walking the cattle as much as ten miles in the dark, possibly in the rain and certainly in the cold, running ahead to stop the cattle turning off the road, down bohareens, or into front gardens of road-side houses.

They may have been tired, but they were excited too, at the responsibility they now had for their farm's valuable stock, and at the notion of being in 'town' for the fair, with it's change of scenery from their rural pastures. The cattle too sensed the excitement, looing and mooing, scittishly threatening to break from the herd at any moment, prodded back into line by the boys, yelling and 'hullahing'.



The streets were a mad cacophony of animal and man sounds, echoing around the dim, foggy streets of the town. There always seemed to be mist, whether thats my dimming memory, or the combination of cold, damp steam rising from backs of the cattle, their soft, musty breath condensing in the cold night air, and the blue wisps of smoke from the coal and turf fires wafting down through the throng. The smells were incredibly vital, fresh, dungy, wet, musty, but to a very high volume, if smells can have a decibel level.

The boys wore their working clothes, many wore duffle coats, the 1950's hoodie, but their hands and faces, and their bare legs over the tops of their too-big wellingtons, were raw from the moist cold. The men were the same, though many of them were dressed for town, a serviceable suit or jacket, and a heavy overcoat, and of course they too wore wellingtons, or big boots. The jobbers, distinctively dressed, were dapper in their broad-brimmed hats, velvet-collared crombie coats and bright ox-blood slip-on boots.

By 2 or 3 am the fair was in full swing with buyers, jobbers and sellers all engaged in their deal-making. The big cattle-jobbers moved very efficiently through the fair, buying huge numbers of cattle, strippers, heifers, bullocks, bulls, all destined for further fattening in the midlands, or for abattoirs in Dublin. Many cattle, just like generations of our people, were destined for England. Those just-sold cattle were herded off by drovers and were held in track-side pens, for later loading onto dozens of cattle-cars that had been shunted into place the day before, for onward shipping, to catch the boat to Hollyhead and on to the English markets. Other cattle were loaded onto cattle lorries with high creels, and off they trundled to their destinations across Ireland.

By mid-day, palms had been spat upon and slapped,.deals had done and settled, money exchanged. The boys were given a tanner or a few bob for their services and they made a bee-line to the sweet shops. The men were not done yet. They met up with their wives who had come to town in the pony and trap at a more civilised hour. They settled a few bills around the town, the hardware shop, the grocery, the drapery and the insurance office. In later years they went to the bank, to pay off an overdraft or lodge some money to the farm account.
Almost universally, before they headed home, they went to the pub, usually a pub-grocery, where they bought some shop goods, biscuits and sausages, a side of bacon. The men stood at the bar, the boys waited in the 'lounge', while the wives went about town, buying some necessities for the house or for themselves, a dress, a coat, some wool for knitting, a luxury or two, perhaps. It was also a time to match-make and many's a farmer came to town with a few cattle and returned home with a wife!

Finally, after enjoying a few pints of stout, with their friends, or neighbors, they made their way home, in the pony and trap, home to the farm they'd left almost 24 hours previously. Back on the farm, the cycle of farm life started again, while over in the town, the big clean up was under way, and the smells only got worse before they got better!

Copywright - Brian Nolan, Galway Walks - Walking Tours of Galway  http://www.galwaywalks.com
12 October 2015.
With Thanks to Mount Talbot- A Journey Through the ages for the Ballygar Fair photos, dating from 1953, and the Lawrence Collection for some of the older b&w's.