The pipe

Y'know, when you pass someone on the street and you realise something about that person has triggered an old memory that brings a warm feeling to you, brings you back in time, to your childhood, to an innocent time, perhaps, even to a specific moment, one you may not be able to immediately identify, but the comforting warmth resonates, your senses bristling at the fuzzy, familiar, feeling. 

Doniel Sexton, from 'out the country' by his own admission, but living now on Nuns Island, passed me on Dominick Street this evening, a fine, persistent drizzle had hastened everyone else off the street, just the two of us, walking, head-down in the soft rain, opposed on the narrow footpath, made narrower by a bollard, that swept us closer together, between the wall and the road, two polite, beanie-heads, "excuse me, excuse me", we part-passed, his pipe smoke enveloped me in a sweet, damp, retro haze, transporting me in an instant, back to Loughrea, fifty-five years ago, to an old farmer, John Ryan, visiting my father and mother in our kitchen, his big frame fairly filling the small armchair by the Aga cooker, him, tamping his pipe with a gnarled, work-calloused thumb, and slowly, patiently, alternately lighting and puffing and tamping, and lighting and puffing again, patiently reddening the shredded plug tobacco, waving the lit match, and exhaling a long blue-hued plume of smoke, smiling wistfully, before launching again into a story of the 'old days' in the town. 

Lost in this sudden un-bidden memory, I turned and looked back at his half-turned head, at his teeth-clenched pipe, he, similarly, simultaneously half-turned, gazing down at my barefoot sandals. I said, "What brand of pipe tobacco is that?" He said "Sandals, for the summer, it's coming too, next Wednesday, or Thursday, though I wouldn't be betting the house on it, still, at least you aren't wearing socks, I can't understand that, in this wet weather." I said, "Can I take your photo?" He quipped, as he posed, "Go on ahead, sure it's a free country, for the time-being anyhow, or until we start charging for it."


#Pipe #Tobacco #MickMcQuaid #Oldholborn #StBruno #Cutterschoice#cuttobacco #plugtobacco #aroma #smoke #Pipesmoke #cantremember#amnesia #retro #memories #childhood #rain #mist #Galway #Ireland

This poem was penned after the death of King Charles I who was beheaded outside Whitehall Palace in London on the afternoon of January 30th, 1649, exactly 368 years ago, today. 

"He nothing common did or mean
Upon that memorable scene:
But with his keener eye
The axe’s edge did try.
Nor called the gods with vulgar spite
To vindicate his helpless right,
But bowed his comely head
Down as upon a bed."

- The Poem was written by Andrew Marvell, in ‘An Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell’s Return to Ireland’, one of many Royalist publicity coups designed to reinstate the monarchy.
The Galway connection is obviously 'The Kings Head' bar on High Street. Nowadays a popular pub, entertainment venue and restaurant, back in 1649 when Charles was executed it was the Bank Castle, one of many Lynch manor houses in Galway city. 

The execution of Charles I put an end to the Civil War in England but marked the start the Cromwellian invasion of Ireland, earning him the reputation of a mass-murderer for his terrible treatment of Royalists and Catholics in Ireland. While the English Civil War led to the deaths of some 300,000 people in the period 1642-1649, or 6% of the population, in Ireland it led to the deaths of about 600,000 Irish, or 40% of the then Irish population of 1.5 million. The dead were soldiers sure, but the wars and general chaos killed many hundreds of thousands of poor peasants who starved to death during Cromwell's policy of crop-burning and agrarian interruption, denying the enemy food and supplies, and causing famine to stalk the land. 

Galway city was besieged by Cromwell's army under General Coote (who directed operations from Claregalway Castle) for 10 months, from June 1651 to April 1652, after which a surrender of the city, on terms was arranged. 

Colonel Peter Stubbers was put in charge of the now surrendered and devastated city. He confiscated The Bank Castle, (Kings Head today) for use as his headquarters and billeted his troops, some 1,000 battle-hardened and land-hungry Puritan soldiers and their officers. They had but one thing in mind, confiscation of Royalist land. Galway's first non-native Mayor (previously mainly Norman Tribe names) was Peter Stubbers, who in 1654 expelled all rebellious people (mainly city merchants and their servants) from the city. Whether he profited from shipping catholics to Barbados is up for debate, but he certainly profited from something. 

He was not to stay in Galway much longer. 
The Restoration was his downfall.
Once the Great Protector, Oliver Cromwell died in 1658, and after a disastrous short period of rule by his son Richard Cromwell, in 1660 Charles II was restored to the throne of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. His first act was to command that all the 59 signatories of his father's execution warrant be rounded up and executed themselves. Some had died in the meantime, some were captured, though many more had fled, to Europe and some to Connecticut, where they were protected by the Puritans there. 

Peter Stubbers didn't sign Charles I's Execution Warrant. He didn't have that status. He was nothing but an opportunistic, journeyman soldier, taking advantage of a devastating war to enrich himself, and his fellow soldier, Richard Gunning, who took the house behind the Bank Castle as his own. They both disappeared from Galway, in 1660, no doubt feeling the heat from the hue and cry, as the former Cromwellian statesmen and their followers were coughed up, arrested, imprisoned and even hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn and Charing Cross... a spectacle of horror that can only be imagined. (Cromwell was subjected to that too, though two years after he had died). 
Going back to that chilly afternoon in London, with Charles I kneeling, his long hair tied up in a hair-net, his head resting on the block, wearing two shirts lest he shiver in the cold and appear afraid to the huge assembled crowd. 

The executioner was masked and disguised. Let's face it, this was no ordinary execution. This was a Regicide. There would be repercussions. There is much debate over his identity and that of his 'headsman'...whose unenviable job was to retrieve the newly severed head and display it to the crowd. 
Richard Brandon, (not Branson) was then the common hangman of London, but he refused this lucrative job, despite being offered £200 for the chop, the equivalent of maybe £200,000 nowadays. Many other handy axemen have been proffered as potential executioners, including George Joyce, William Hulet and Hugh Peters, however his identity remains a secret as nobody has ever come forward and said 'I did it'. 
Well almost no one. 

'Seems Peter Stubbers and Richard Gunning were fond of over-imbibing on the confiscated wines and brandies that filled the cellars of the merchants of Galway, cellars that they now laid claim to. Rumour has it that they were close, 'thick as thieves' one might say, and so they were. Galway lore has it that they had 'done the deed' in London in 1649. They were certainly boastful, brash, bold, cruel, and rich, rich beyond their Gloucester dreams, they lived high on the hog in Galway until 1660, when in the dead of night, shortly after Charles II was restored to the throne, they both quit town. 
Galway has seen many a night-time flit, since, and before, but these two, well they take the prize. Could they have been the hooded axeman and headsman on the scaffold outside Whitehall Palace in London, on that wintry January 30th day in 1649? Who knows? 
Brian Nolan Jan 30 2018
PS. Charles I was a Catholic, and his enemies a mix of Anglican Protestants and Dissenters, Presbyterians, Methodists and Puritans. The institutional distrust of Catholics continued long after Charles I death and culminated in Ireland with the passage of the Penal Laws at the end of the 17th century, essentially proscribing the Catholic religion and condemning catholics to poverty and persecution that lasted into the 19th century. 
Catholicism went underground, priests were hunted down and killed, churches destroyed and land confiscated. Admitting to being catholic was dangerous and did your career prospects no good. Secret signs were used and one became quite popular in Ireland. The Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, so favoured by the executed King and his son Charles II, became a secret symbol silently, secretly declaring 'this is a catholic house'. The practice of displaying two pottery dogs on the mantle pieces and windows of cottages stems from this. 

Check out O'Connor's Famous Pub in #Salthill where they have over 40 such 'dogs' scattered around the pub. Come on one of my 'Fireside Tours' at O'Connor's pub, or take a Galway City Tour with me, for more stories like these. 
Check out my website Galwaywalks.com 
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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

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.
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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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