“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.’

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 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.

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.