Listening To The Stories The Neighbours Tell...

The photograph is of Himself bringing our donkeys home for the night...

We have some rough land at the end of the street...near where the car is parked...they spend the days there in the summer time but we bring them home if heavy rain is forecast.

That piece of land used to be the Bishop's garden when he spent his weekends having fun and frolicking about on the river...his little cottage is totally surrounded by that awful Japanese Knot-Weed now. It's a Bamboo and it grows like fury.

It's been a long time since the Bishop has used the cottage...it was sold and then occupied by an old lady who refused to have either piped water or electricity...the other people who lived here clubbed together to pay her share but she still went to the well and lit her home with oil-lamps. An Englishman bought it when it was virtually derelict but he took to the drink and gave up on the project...now it's falling down again.

The next cottage along the road used to belong to a chap named Will...so it's still called Will's cottage. When we first moved here a man was living there who had diabetes...he was a friendly soul who loved to have a chat. One day our immediate next door neighbour called to see him and asked had he had a bath recently? She thought he smelled a bit.

I'll bring towels and run you a hot bath, she said and help you in and out...that'd be grand he said.

So she took off his shoes.

And the first foot was fine, not a bother...but his other foot left all the toes behind in his socks.

This was before the days when everyone had mobile 'phones and so she had to pick up her skirt and run back to her house and 'phone the Doctor...

And the Doctor came out and had a look and said no wonder he was a bit smelly...he'll have to go to the hospital.

So the ambulance came and took him to the hospital and he stayed there for a while and then came back again with a special shoe 'cos of not having any toes on that foot.

He went back to live in his home place in the end and the cottage was sold...

The next big field once had a two storey house in it...one of the gate piers is still there at the side of the road. All the family who once lived there at the turn of the twentieth century died from TB...they were taken straight to the burying ground and didn't have a Wake because people were so frightened by the disease...when the last of the family died, the house was pulled down and nothing now remains. Apart from Tom's cattle.

Then it's the old station house...but if you were to walk across Tom's land down the old railway line you'll come to some woods and a tiny cottage with an out-shot...that is where the Brehenny brothers were raised and continued to live after their parents died.

Both brothers had rickets and both were fond of the drink...they slept together in the bed in the out-shot... which is a little built on section just big enough for a bed...with a curtain to pull for privacy and warmth.

I used to like to walk down the old line to go and peek inside that small cottage...little more than a cabin really...the curtain is still there...awful threadbare now...and the old straw mattress that countless generations of mice have called home.

The brothers are long gone and Neilis's horses shelter in the front room when the weather is bad...

They had a donkey and cart...the donkey would wait outside the 'pub in town until it grew tired and it'd make it's own way back home, leaving the two old boys to stagger back on foot.

Times change.