W2F-015 North Kerry-0.txt
Among places of enchantment were the woods, with their laurel, chestnut and hazelnut groves. Each season brought its own magic to the woods. Building tree houses in the lushness of summer, gathering conkers in the multicoloured autumn, wandering through the scented bluebells and wild garlic in May and collecting holly and ivy in the cold, bare woods at Christmas time, were some of the seasonal variations of activity. Born by the sea, one never loses the sound of the sea and the majestic Shannon estuary at Tarbert was a continual fascination in a whole variety of ways. There was swimming in the favoured spots such as Rusheen, Wall's Bay, the Slatey Pier, the Island and the Back-o-the-hill. There was fishing from the pier and on "The Bank". Periwinkles, bornachs and mussels were in profusion and unpolluted along the shores. The tides came and went in ceaseless motion, ships plied up and down the river, and the curlews, seagulls, swans and widgeon brought the reed-fringed mudflats and creeks to life. Tarbert Island with its lighthouse, battery coastguard station and gantry brought Treasure Island and Coral Island close to home, and bands of cowboys and Indians, or hordes of cops and robbers worked out their fantastical games in-and-out through the ruins.

In April and May the boglands called for the turf-cutting, and through the summer they spread their splendour of bog-cotton, heathers, furze and many-coloured mosses to enchant the eye. The cutting and saving of hay, with a heavy reliance on manual skill and horse power, had fun as well as work attached to it. The satisfaction of leaving a wyned meadow in the evening sun, with the aroma of freshly saved hay in the nostrils, stays as a haunting memory.

There was no time for boredom, the word was never used. There were many hunts - rabbits, hares, foxes and the occasional badger hunt. The "horse-park" was the mecca for groups of young and established football players in the evenings as aspiring youngsters tried to imitate their heroes. The year was pun- ctuated with a variety of activities and events which were very congenial to youngsters. The great carnivals, which drew huge crowds of all ages to the village, were held in August. The fancy dress parades were highly elaborate and imaginative. It took a couple of hours for all the sections of the parade, from individuals to large groups, to pass through the crowds lining the streets. Horses, tractors and lorries were used by the larger groups for their colourful presentations. Regattas with their boat races, swimming races, greasy poles and pillow fights, brought great excitement to the island. Matches in football tournaments drew large partisan audiences. At night the pubs resounded to laughter, songs, music and arguments. There was no consciousness of a generation gap in the dancers who thronged the marquee. The carnivals may not have had the flamboyance and exhilaration of a mardi gras, but they had as much vitality as an Irish community could give them. Other summer occasions were marked in different ways, for instance, May Eve was treated with a sense of unease and respect. The summer tree (sycamore) was brought into the houses, and whispers were made of the "piseogs" which could be perpetrated on that evening, which retained vestiges of old pagan folk memory. The old festival of mid-summer was also marked by the mighty bonfires on the Market Road on St. John's night, for which materials were gathered evenings in advance. We danced and played as the flames and sparks went higher in the night sky, giving us feelings, at once, of both fascination and dread.

The autumn evenings were marked by the Listowel races, the All-Ireland final and the Glin Coursing. As altar boys we visited the houses throughout the parish for the stations in the mornings, and attended at the October rosary and benedictions in the evenings. These led on to Halloween, with the excitement of "high-fiddles", snap apple, Halloween games and blind-man's-buff. The abundance of apples, nuts and barmbracks were consumed with relish.

Christmas, of course, was special in the village, as everywhere else. Many of us, however, preferred the activity of Stephen's Day to the quiet atmosphere of Christmas Day. Groups of us gathered and tramped the countryside with the Wren-boys, generally being warmly welcomed and well-treated in the houses which dotted the landscape. Trudging home from the hills of Ballygaughlin, with lights and Christmas candles lighting the dark, and with many days of Christmas holidays stretching ahead, was a good feeling. New Year's Eve was a special night in the village when crowds gathered in torchlight procession, with accordions and bodhr&/ans bidding farewell to the old year and welcoming the new. The music, dancing and songs carried on in the village square into the early hours.

At other times, the village was entertained by the sounds and smells of the animals, which were part of the agricultural economy of the region. The cattle fairs, bull-tests and pig sales brought varied activity to delight youngsters. The great social occasion of the creamery, particularly on summer mornings, created a buzz of activity and conversation in the village, and also brought town and country close together. The forge with its sizzling fire and sound of the anvil also brought town and country and hedgehogs together, as youngsters vied to blow the large bellows to redden the blacksmith's horseshoes.

The carpenter's shop with its resin-smelling ringlets of shavings was also a place of delights. The whine of the great saws mingled with the carpenter's hammer blows, as cradles, coffins, carts and crates were fashioned. Nearby was the parish hall which housed the billiards club, the hops and the whist drives for the older groups.

The school, for good or ill, is the institution which has a vast range of influences upon us when we are young. Many experiences occured there with life enhancing as well as debilitating effects, but which stay with us to the grave. In our time the tolling of the church bell for mass, angelus, or funeral was close to us in the school. In the church the great events of Catholic life - baptism, confirmation, marriage and funeral - were conducted and, to the eyes of us altar boys, had an interesting ritual about them, if also tinged with trepidation at times. The primary school had been built in 1869 and was strictly segregated between boys and girls. Facilities were rather spartan, and the large rooms depended on the quality of the turf, brought by children's parents, for the open fires. Discipline tended to be on the "spare the rod, spoil the child" principle, with catechism class particularly fraught with anxiety. For some of us, practice with the mouthorgan band brightened the rather narrow curricular range, which was based primarily on English, Irish and Arithmetic, with a welcome dimension of History and Geography added.

A minority of pupils went on to secondary school in the nearby St. Ita's. This was one of the small lay, co-educational secondary schools to be found, fairly regularly, in Kerry and Limerick at the time. The founder of the school, Miss McKenna, was a noted educationalist who set high standards as the norm, particularly in her specialist subjects, English and French. She and her team opened up for us teenagers the richness of new languages, great literatures, mathematics and so on. It was also an era in which the competition for the public examinations was much less intense than to-day. Pupils cycled and bussed from nearby townlands and villages to the school.

We were always conscious that most parents took schooling seriously, and one took for granted a regard for learning, which was part of the tradition of the region. Both the national and secondary schools bore witness to the long-term impact, which gifted teachers can have, on the attitudes and outlook of youngsters in their formative years. Since that time the "school on the hill" has been replaced by a splendid comprehensive school, and it is gratifying to know that the traditions of good schooling and scholarship are alive and well in that corner of north Kerry.

The forties and fifties were decades of economic depression, and many families suffered from the deprivations of real poverty. Employment, other than in agriculture, was very rare and emigration was the lot of many. It was sad to see so many of one's school pals gathering at the corner to catch the bus to Limerick and be on their way to England. To get there, they were often aided by the allowances gained on F.C.A. training camps. It was the scarcity of money which acted as a constraining and blighting force on many people. The fabric of community life was maintained and, often, the very poor did not allow their material impoverishment to quench the spirit of their personalities. To a degree the old proverb <&Irish> "Ar sc&/ath a ch&/eile a mhaireann na daoine"

was borne out, and various quiet forms of assistance were available. Nevertheless, life, in general, was affected by the lack of a employment for the people of the area. Even as a youngster, one was conscious of this overlay of economic hard-times, and despite the richness of aspects of community life, the potential of many individuals was not realised.

A striking feature of this community life was the respect for individuals, the tolerance for eccentricities and a regard for the "characters". People were known for particular songs, or yarns, experiences or skills. This I have found to be a strong feature of life in Kerry, but, no doubt, is not inique to it. There is, however, a delight in difference, a pleasure in language usage and a regard for the individual experience, which ia a valuable feature of life there.

Old Glories Reflected in Stone

Among many features one would like to dwell on, I will touch on one which struck me very forcibly, as a young person, but which was not much mentioned - Tarbert's walls. To a youngster's eye in the forties and fifties there was very little industrial or commercial employment in the village, but all around one were mighty walls and large buildings which spoke to one of a different era, a bygone era in a Tarbert which must have been very different. They stood silent as sentinels and witnesses of a Tarbert which must have been more vibrant. They symbolised an era when there must have been great collective endeavour. The question arose as to what had happened in old Tabert that left us so many monuments in stone, which seemed out of keeping with the community's character at the time one was growing up. Only communities with a sense of confidence, of collective purpose and of optimism built on a grand scale, and such optimism was foreign to the decades of the forties and fifties. Another question which arises in one's mind was the number of skilled craftsmen who must have been there to build such splendid edifices. The scale of the building projects would have required a whole sophisticated culture in crafts, but particularly in stone masonry. When I looked at skilled masons in our time, they seemed to be the inheritors of this older tradition. As well as the scale of the buildings and the remaining walls of greater edifices, one was also struck by the beauty of the stone itself and by the skill and sense of pride which exuded from the workmanship.

The surviving evidence went back to the medieval times as evidenced in Kilnaughtin Church and Lislaughtin Abbey. In the latter, the beauty of the dovetailing of the flat river stones with the shaped limestone of sedilia and lintel windows has been beautifully caught by the Polish artist Ursula Ratzlaff O'Carroll.
