“Lie down dog! Lie down Bo-Patch!” I was shouting while cutting frantically at the wool. When –– what should pull up at the gate but a very big sedan car; a luxury vehicle and to my horror two coiffured older ladies get out. “Cooee Ian! Cooee!” they shouted. “O look he has lovely lambs! Can we help!” They were two ladies who live on Cherry Hill; as the name suggests a very nice area in the village behind my house. ‘Ladies who lunch.’

I’ve never been much of a traveller and in recent years I’ve been doing even less. Covid in one way has been a blessing – an excuse for me to go nowhere at all. So whatever came over me last weekend I decided to go (where in my terms is the far ends of the earth) to Ballinasloe.

My granny’s brother Eoghan had travelled right across America and up to Alaska. Then for fear that wasn’t enough he went to New Zealand. I worked with him in the fields. He told me ‘I went as far as civilization would take me and then I walked.’ We had a very good school and many of the men in the valley had travelled – my grandfather crewed a boat trading Seattle/Alaska; so it wasn’t lack of education or travel that caused our valley to remain rooted in the past.

It all started by chance. A chance turn up a newly tarred mountain road on our way to Dundalk, we were amazed to find families cutting turf. A friend give us a slane (turf spade) made from the oar of a boat. The paddle covered with tin, the handle a cow’s horn. We rented a plot. It was never our intention to cut ‘a world of turf’; even then we were conscious of its environmental importance. Our neighbours on the bog were two genteel older men and a detached young fella who done – not a hands turn – but amble over and ask, “How many bags?” Never another word but a forlorn ‘how many bags.’ Later we were to learn he was Ireland’s most brilliant nuclear physicist; chilling out.

Time slips on, it could be twenty five years ago; we met a friend in the supermarket in Newry. We knew she had retired from school teaching but what we didn’t know was that she had married and was living in rural County Cavan, some eighty miles away. In conversation she mentioned what I took to be an ancient festival in her parish; a hill field with a prehistoric stone and the oldest horse fair in the land. I must say I’d never heard of it, nor had anyone I knew.

Narrow Water has defined a border in Ireland from ancient times. I gather a little like your Rio Grande. It’s been a documented border for nigh on a thousand years. This stretch of water where Carlingford Lough narrows to join the Newry River (two hundred yards at high tide; twenty yards at low tide) is a townland boundary; a county boundary; a provincial boundary; a boundary between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland; and now the boundary between Great Britain and the European Union.

I have little knowledge of mapping in America other than to assume that the place names of many cities and towns are named after the European locations the settlers came from. And to trust that native American names were collected as sensitively as our names were in the original survey of 1824. It is remarkable that the English officers Colby; Drummond; and Larcom knew of the importance of place names in the Irish psyche and to this end employed John O’Donovan; an Irish scholar in a class of his own. O’Donovan travelled throughout the island of Ireland interviewing ‘wise old heads;’ collecting Irish place names and translating them into English – in such a way that their original meaning would not be lost.

I reached away back into the back of the scullery cupboard and ‘hand fishing’ I pulled out a bottle. A small bottle with my name on it – in my Uncle Stephen’s hand. A bottle of poitin he’d given me; it must have been there for forty years. I’ve never been a big poitin drinker preferring a pint of porter myself but Stephen managed poitin very well. He’d put a splash of it into his tea in the morning and rub it on his joints at night.

I’ve always had sheep on Loughin More. And in summer a pony. Always been on the mountain and never ever passed any remarks on ‘The Bauch.’ It’s a word I’ve said all my life; a word from the north of Scotland (I’m told) to describe a circular wall of stones. I don’t know what The Bauch is but I think I know what it’s not.

And then it dawned on me – this ewe for all her mothering instincts and supply of milk couldn’t cope. She simply couldn’t contend with two lambs. Well not at first! Because in a very short space of time, three or four in-and-out sessions and one overnight restraint, she was delighted with both lambs and went from the wee garden at the house to further pasture with the rest of the flock. Yes, I know! In a life time of working with sheep, of holding and wrestling and doing ‘the Divil and all’ when I couldn’t, in the end, get the ewe to take up with the lamb – but this time it worked; so Harrah!

We bought *six quarters, one each year, *clibs we broke-in and sold on. We often bought from Travellers. That was when Travellers travelled round the country in barrel caravans pulled by horses. Solid cobs they had often crossed with the best blood stock in Ireland. Who knew their ‘secret wiles,’ as they passed the stud farms on The Curragh of Kildare? We broke our horses (if broke is the word) very quietly and over time. The magic of the televisions ‘horse whisperers’ instant results is lost to me. ‘Do nothing sudden and do nothing rash.’ That was our mantra.

Remote is relative; but Jemmie McAlinden’s abode was remote. Four miles up the valley and a further mile along a loanin at the foot of Slieve Roosley, a mountain of black heather and cropping rock. Jemmie was known as ‘Haybag,’ I gather to distinguish him from his namesake widely known as ‘Jemmie Stout.’ Haybag was a cobbler and it fascinated me then and it fascinates me still how he ever came by the trade. Not to mention the name. ‘Haybag’. A lifetime ago I took boots to be mended by him. He was an eccentric on the fringe of our community, marked out by his failing to go to Mass.

I have custody of The Wee Holms, a strip of land along the river that a century ago was held in respectful awe as a fairy domain. A place where they would baffle and confuse the unwary, and where when crossing it was imperative to turn your coat inside out. My great-grandmother knew the fairies, she lived in Pothill, the clachan above here, and she oft told my mother that their pasture was The Wee Holms, their bailiwick The Clornies and their totem The Grey Woman (a standing stone) on Loughin More. I also have a ‘diamond dog’ called Bo-Patch. He’s big and athletic, full of fun and tricks and like David Bowie he has a blue and a brown eye.

When I was ‘the young fella’ who took horses to the forge Issac Stoops asked me to get a set of shoes on ‘the foal.’ ‘The foal’ was twelve years old; a lovely black mare of 15 hands he had bred himself. Issac never took the mare out on the road so I gather it was to give her a bit of traction ploughing a very steep brae behind his house. It was at a time in our country when ploughmen took great pride in the uniformity of their potato drills. ‘Straight as a gun shot’ being a term. Issac however was not so disciplined. ‘Your drills are a bit crooked’ a neighbour commented. ‘Aw what odds; sure they’re only for the pigs’ Issac would reply.

The forge in Rostrevor was in a very old street known as “The Back Lane.” There to the side of its entrance was a circular flat granite stone with a hole in its centre for shoeing cart wheels. And to the side of that a mountain of broken ploughs and other horse implements infringing on the road. As a child I was told very solemnly that somewhere in the heart of it was a broken chariot belonging to Brian Boru. An archway between houses led to a small yard and then the forge itself – a truly medieval barn. A high space with slates that could do with being pointed and a floor paved with thick wooden sleepers and flagged stone.

Rubber boots were introduced to my townland in 1936. That’s when a returned Yank produced a pair of them (gum boots) from his portmanteau and sparked a frenzy of work. Every man in the country was beside himself to get a lend of them. A rota had to be established. Men for whom ‘if there was work in bed, would lie on the floor’ toiled from dawn to dusk in anywhere that was wet. Habitats lost – newts and frogs dispersed – due to the draining of sheughs and bogs.

Rostrevor is where ‘The Mountains of Mourne Sweep Down to the Sea’ and we here on the shores of Carlingford Lough had an abundance of wrack. Storms wash huge banks of seaweed up on the shore. In the past this was a valuable source of fertilizer for the land and when the wrack ‘was in’ entire townlands transported it up the valley with horses and carts. We used wrack in the alleys of drills when planting potatoes and we spread it on lea fields to give a flush of spring grass. It was noted that grazing cattle preferred the seaweed–treated sections to those heartened with farmyard manure. Perhaps it was the trace of salt that attracted the stock.

Before attending the full blown event in the afternoon I did slip out in the morning to get a few photographs of the scotch cart and the spring van I knew would be there. Truly I marvelled at the work involved in turning out such pristine outfits and more than that the achievement of presenting a horse and cart in the razzmatazz of such a day.

Americans, Paul the grandson or perhaps the great grandson of the McNulty who had emigrated, and Julie, his young wife. They had two bicycles and rode all the way from Shannon Airport. They set up home in the house, where other than an open fire there were no facilities. They carried water from the well, and got jobs in the fish factory in Kilkeel. And cycled there! Nothing was any bother to them. They brought the energy back to Knockbarragh that Knockbarragh had brought to America two centuries before.