Recently, with the downturn in the economy in Ireland and indeed worldwide, there is much discussion about how bad the 80's was and how it could hardly return to those bad old days again. It set me to thinking that I could remember the 40's with the 80's being just like yesterday and no bad memories – I guess I was too busy working and raising a family.
Now the 40's were a different kittle of fish entirely? My granddaughter informed me just the other day, of a `breakfast club' at their school where if or when necessary they ordered cornflakes or porridge to be followed with rasher, egg etc. When I went to school in April 1945 we were suffering the bite of by now well established war conditions, with all of the basics in short supply. We won't discuss the breakfast here for even now it's a matter of embarrassment. Having walked the three miles to school over very rough road, I can still remember having the toenail lifted from the big toe, it having come in contact with the raised `spall` - if you haven't experienced this for yourself, believe me you can do without it. Our lunch of the time consisted of two slices of homemade cake bread baked over an open fire, and was the so-called flower of poor quality? This was washed down with an HP sauce bottle of cold tea.
Raised under a thatched roof, my formative years had me denied the advantages of electricity and all that goes with it – probably the most important of which was running water, for without, there was no bathroom, no toilets, fetching drinking water from a well that was quite some distance away was an ever ending chore, as was water for washing from a nearby quarry equally a chore and hazardous to boot. There was no radio, no television, no phone, and no motorcars even, due in the main to the restrictions the war imposed, but in any case there were very few in rural Ireland pre-war as the roads were only fit for lifting toenails. As a consequence of my early upbringing I have an advantage over many today, in that I and those of my vintage could have lived in any generation in Ireland almost since it was first populated seven thousand years or whatever the historians say it was, with very little change in circumstances. I say this because we hunted, we fished, we sowed and we reaped. We slaughtered our own animals and we built our own fires to cook them. I still remember the excitement of sitting in the shade of a `hawthorn' as my father cut the last few swards of hay with a pair of horses drawing a trusty `woods mower`, and he shouting "Yes! They are in there." I waited with bated breath for the young corncrakes to break cover from the middle of the hayfield where I would give chase and hope to catch one before they made good their escape in the surrounding hedgerow. Should I be lucky enough to catch one, it was only for a very brief moment before being released, for there was still a mystery attached to these birds as it was still not known definitively where they disappeared to for the winter and early spring.
I am an old-timer but would like to think, not set in my ways? I love old things and a conservationist at heart and that is the reason for the title of my blog Danny's Quaint Ireland but not all and everything will be quaint or about Ireland, but what takes my fancy given my background of which you have had a smattering. So, my first photograph is what is reputed to be Ireland's oldest living tree. There is something wonderful at being asked to come and take a look at this ancient specimen that is growing or perhaps resident might be a more appropriate term given its age at Tomgraney Co. Clare. I was escorted over ditches and along hedges to a spot at the end of a field where there was no mistaking in all its glory was the Brian Boru Oak. It is said that Brian himself planted it, but whatever is the case there is no doubt but this oak was in times past one of the many that made up the great oak forests of these parts, a number of which went to clad the great houses of Westminster. King Brian Boru was one of the great kings of Munster and was slain in his tent when in old age fighting the Danes at the battle of Clontarf, Dublin, in 1014. We can take it then that this great oak is a thousand years old and the oldest living tree in Ireland.
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