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.

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 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.

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.