A quick note on the photo up top: those five headstones standing upright in a line are almost all Deverys. Devery is my 3rd great-grandmother’s surname.
The day started the way all great pilgrimages start: with instant coffee made from the hot tap.
To be fair, there was a lounge in the Airbnb. There may even have been a kettle in it. I just never found it. The place was a gorgeous rabbit warren of stairs and corridors and doors that went somewhere I hadn’t expected. I loved it, but I’d have needed a map and a packed lunch to find the kitchen.
Luckily, I always pack safety coffee. Always. I’d picked some up before I left home for exactly this sort of situation, and that morning it earned its place in my bag. Hot tap, one sachet, done. Caffeine achieved.
The packed lunch was sorted too. I’d done a quick recce the day before (Day 2) and heard that the visitor centre would be closed. Worse, the famously good coffee stand at the welcome centre had shut for the season. So I’d hit Tesco on the way back and stocked up: flatbread, hummus, cherry tomatoes, some sliced salami-type things that were probably more chemical than salami, and a Coke. Just in case extra caffeine was needed. (Safety coffee, part two.)
On the walk to the station I realised I’d never actually laid eyes on the Athlone workhouse. I was very tempted to go have a look. But no. The bus waits for no woman. (Spoiler: it did, in fact, wait. For quite a while.)
The bus to Clonmacnoise left Athlone station at 9am. Ish. Heavy on the ish.
Our driver was a big, chatty man who was getting through as much cigarette as humanly possible before departure, while raving about the coffee at the train station. (I thought about my tap-water instant and felt a small pang.) We got talking outside. I got the usual “You’re not from here, where are you from?”, and once he’d placed me, he insisted that next time I must make time for Birr. Noted, sir.
At about ten past nine we finally boarded, and he waved me into the front seat so he could, in his words, “tell me all the lies about the area along the way.”
He was exceptionally well spoken. From a few things he let drop, I got the impression of someone highly educated, now retired and driving the bus purely because he enjoyed it. Which is a pretty great way to spend a retirement.
Then we were off, bouncing down a narrow country road, me firmly strapped in and him swivelled half round in his seat (no seatbelt, naturally) so he could talk to me properly. I’m not saying I was gripping the armrest, but I’m not saying I wasn’t.
And the lies, it turned out, were mostly about food.
Fish on Friday was “nothing to do with religion”
Or so he told me, with total confidence, before we’d even cleared town.
“It was nothing to do with religion. The church was the early government, really. People in Ireland were suffering badly from lack of iodine, eating a diet of potatoes. Some clever guy said fish once a week would solve the iodine problem. Problem solved. That’s what the fish was.”
The Midlands, he explained, are a long way from the sea and short on iodine. So short that people had swollen thyroids.
“Yorkshire and Tipperary have a lot in common. It’s called Tipperary neck, or Yorkshire neck. There’s a better medical term for it, but that’s what it’s called.”
Here’s the problem with a weekly fish rule in the middle of the country. There was no way to keep it fresh.
“Some people in the inland counties hated fish because there was no storage. There was no storage of fish that hadn’t sold. Salt was expensive.”
His grandfather drove the horse and cart into town every Thursday to fetch the Friday fish. He hated it so much he wouldn’t ride home with it.
“He would let the horse walk home. He’d follow behind the cart. He wouldn’t sit up in it. He would just smell the fish.”
Picture it: a grown man trudging along a Midlands back road, keeping a careful distance from his own cart. It might be my favourite thing I learned on the whole trip.
Spices, mustard and bacon up the chimney
Once he got going on food that had seen better days, there was no stopping him.
“All the spices in the Middle Ages were about trying to eat rotten meat. Spices were not about French cuisine. It was about trying to mask the smell.”
He remembered it in miniature from his own childhood. If a contract worker didn’t turn up on the Monday, “he’d get the same sandwiches on Tuesday, but there’d be more mustard.”
The older people kept their bacon in the chimney, smoked and pungent. “Today we don’t like it. It’s like ham that’s gone off.” To this day he ignores the date on a packet of ham. He opens it and smells it.
And the preserving didn’t stop at meat:
“Jam was only a way of preserving. That’s all it was. Cheese was only a way of preserving milk for out of season. Butter was the same thing.”
Meanwhile, he talked about fruits, kiwis, and wonders why people want to eat them so badly. The supermarkets fly plums in from Chile. “We feed the world and import our dinner.”
The way of the cow, and the old Coughlan houses
When I told him my emigrant line spelled it Caughlin while the family who stayed spelled it Coughlan, he launched into Irish. There’s no K, so C does everything, and an H softens what follows. I got a few pronunciation lessons!
Then came the cows. He pointed out numerous cows and how to tell the ‘French’ ones from the ‘Irish Dairy’ ones. In Irish, a cow is a bó, and a road is a bóthar: the way of the cow. Under the old Brehon law, he said, a road had to be wide enough for the cows. One to graze and enough space for another one to walk by. Now — try to fit a car down that road and you understand why cars here are small and Trump’s insistence everyone import American cars makes zero sense!
“A cow is very important in Irish culture. There’s a great Irish saying: a woman of three cows, don’t be so proud.”
He seemed to know half the county. Every so often he’d give a beep and a wave to someone along the road. Near Clonfanlough, I pointed out the farmhouse I had visited the day before (post coming!) There was my second great-grandfather’s brother’s house, the one with the falling-down roof, and next to it the little one a cousin’s grandfather grew up in. He was delighted.
That set him off on a guided tour of houses of a similar age that he’d tried to buy at one time or another. One lovely old place hasn’t changed since the 1780s. He’s offered the owner 50,000 for it, and the man won’t sell. “He doesn’t want money.” He told me the Irish government will give you money to do up old places like these, so apparently the dream is alive.
The supermodel heifer
And then there was the heifer. A lady along the road owned her, and he had wanted that heifer. She’d been sold the week before, for a whole lot of money, and he hadn’t quite got over it. He turned pink talking about it!
“I wanted her, I did. I’d have offered 3,000 for that. She’s just 39 months old, but she’s got everything going for her. She’s like a supermodel heifer.”
“Oh yeah, yeah,” I said, as if I had any idea what makes a heifer a supermodel. Then, by way of a language lesson, he told me
“If a girl was a bit heavy, it’d be said she was ‘beef to the heels, like a Mullingar heifer’.”
So now I know. Mullingar heifers are famous, and I’ve been given an explanation for a compliment I’m not sure I’d ever want to get!
Clonmacnoise, and no coffee
Clonmacnoise is Cluain Mhic Nóis, the meadow of the son of Nós. St Ciarán founded the monastery here, and for centuries it was the economic centre of the region, not just a holy one. Many of the high crosses you see outside are replicas, he told me. The originals have been moved indoors to protect them.
As promised, the café was shut for the season, so out came the flatbread and hummus. Before he pulled away, he mentioned the next bus wouldn’t be along for a while, and that it’s about 6 kilometres to Shannonbridge if I fancied walking there for lunch.
At the welcome hut, I heard the genealogist’s version of a horror story. A university team had once transcribed every gravestone on the site, then wouldn’t hand the transcriptions over without an eye-watering fee. There was equal dismay as to why the Irish Government wasn’t also doing this. Certainly, something has to have been done… I have homework ahead of me when I get home.
The ride back: potatoes, a rabbit and a stick
My phone was nearly dead when I got back on the bus – and I’d forgotten my charging cable. He offered me his. When I said I live near London, he informed me I was no longer in the European Union, but they’d let me back in if I gave up sterling. I promised to pass the message on.
We passed the little family house where twelve children had been raised. Then he went back to the table. Before the Famine, he said, the diet was potatoes three times a day. The variety most people grew was the Lumper: cheap, heavy-cropping and low in nutrients. With milk alongside, though, it kept people going.
“Believe it or not, they were considered better fed than the English industrial worker. Nutritionally, they were better fed.”
The catch was everything else on the land.
“The problem was the landlord owned the hunting and fishing. If you stole a fish or a rabbit, the sentence was Australia.”
So the fish came full circle. Forbidden from the river on a Tuesday, compulsory from the cart on a Friday.
He had one more story for the genealogist on board. His grandfather bought a field from a neighbour who needed a few pounds to get to America. Nobody had any money and nobody had a solicitor. So his grandfather pulled a straw from the field and broke a stick from the ditch, in front of a witness, and that was the sale. Decades later, to register the land, he had to place a notice in a national paper asking if anyone else claimed it. If nobody did, it was his. He very strategically placed his notice in a national paper….of Northern Ireland. Probably not read in the Republic!
Into Athlone: the pig is committed
I mentioned I’d picked up my picnic at Tesco. That set off a ranking of sandwiches (Tesco’s are “pretty decent” now, and half the price of a café’s) and one last test for me.
“Egg sandwich and bacon sandwich, what’s the difference?”
“In the bacon one, the hen is only involved. The pig is fully committed.”
What a scream! As I got off, he asked where I was headed next on my adventure. Dublin on the 7 a.m. train, I told him, to the National Archives. His parting advice: “No vodka, okay?”
So, was Friday fish really about iodine?
Sorry to my new favourite bus driver, but there is an alternative story about Fish Friday. Meatless Fridays were a Catholic penance, marking the day of the Crucifixion, and they go back to the early Church. Fish got in because it didn’t count as meat. The rule was relaxed in 1966, which is why your granny may still serve fish on a Friday and your kids won’t.
He wasn’t wrong about the necks, though. Goitre from iodine-poor inland soil was real, in Ireland and in England too. The English version is usually called Derbyshire neck, though.
The church and the iodine were never actually in cahoots. But it’s a better story his way, and I’ll be telling it at every Friday fish supper from now on.