Our caravan holidays in wilds of West Cork

WE have had such wonderful memories of summer holidays in long ago childhoods in recent Throwback Thursdays that it put this writer in mind of her own experiences way back then.

I should state that we Kerrigan kids regarded ourselves as short-changed, deprived, and left out of the general round when it came to holidays.

When you had a dad like Joey, the everyday, the normal were just not even to be considered. Where other (more fortunate, as we considered) children could look forward to a blissful two weeks or even an entire summer down in Crosshaven or Youghal, we had a parent who would take us as far away as possible from all such well-known places, seeking out instead draughty mountainsides, damp boglands, and remote shorelines in far west Kerry (before west Kerry became famous).

A very early memory is of camping by the lakes of Killarney in the wettest summer on record in the early 1950s. You could still camp by the lakes back then (or my father considered that you could, which was the same thing).

Dripping tents, damp clothes, clouds of midges… how my mother put up with it, I do not know, but my father was happy.

The modern hordes of tourists in buses and cars had yet to be seen, just the occasional green CIE single-decker chugging along on its way to Tralee.

A site near Loo Bridge on the Cork/Kerry border in later years had to be abandoned the next morning due to a monsoon and resultant flooding of the river that we had paddled across to pitch the tents the night before. But didn’t Joey enjoy it all!

Those tents bore no resemblance to the modern comfortable ones. Aged, painted with slogans like Afrika Corps or Desert Troops, they possessed no such luxuries as groundsheets of course, and inflatable mattresses were a thing of the future.

Sleeping on rocky ground with rain battering down inches above your head was enough to inculcate in me at least a positive hatred of camping. “Boy, when I grow up, I’m going to live in a hotel!” was my constant refrain.

When we were teenagers, and the Kerrigan Bus was capable of travelling just a little further, my parents came home one weekend and announced that they had truly found the place of our dreams. Barley Cove, it was called, and it was a LONG way away.

Do remember, as you read this before tackling a 100 mile journey without even thinking, that it isn’t so long since 30 miles (OK, OK, kilometres if you insist) was quite a distance.

Well, in the early 1960s, Barley Cove really was a dream come true. To be precise, Burchill’s caravan site at Duke Strand.

To us, that stony beach where the sand only became visible at low tide, was the place in which memories were made. Dozens of caravans were parked in that rough field during the summer months, many of them owned by families from Northern Ireland who came down every year.

We all hung round together, played together, explored Brow Head, Mizen, Streek Head, and everywhere in between. 

We went up each morning to Burchill’s farm for milk, bought the bread and other essentials in Goleen, and called into Crookhaven at night to have singsongs in the bar.

Bert Mills had just brought over his family from France in order to set up the lobster ponds on Rock Island, and a young Richard Mills soon became part of our family too, sharing the summer days and later using our home in Cork as a friendly location when he came up to UCC at the same time as my sister and myself.

He was taking pictures back then, of course, and we still have very old black and white shots of that beloved caravan site.

My very first portable record player (a tiny thing which constantly needed batteries replacing) was bought precisely so that I could play House Of The Rising Sun on the beach at Duke Strand at midnight. Which I did.

My sister Frances and I would sneak into the family car on Sunday nights to listen to The Top Twenty, until my father emerged from the caravan in rage to stop us using up the battery!

That caravan was a dumpy little thing, nothing remotely like the modern, all-mod-con models. A few bunks around the walls, a tiny gas ring and cooker on which my mother somehow managed not only to create meals but produce baked delights as well.

My older sister, Flora, painted an elegant set of footmarks in white paint all across the floor, up a wall, and across the ceiling, to give the place character. That, my father didn’t mind. It was doing what everyone else did that drove him wild.

Most of the time, my younger sister and I would sleep in a tent outside the caravan, which gave us the chance for escapades like playing that Animals hit on the rocky beach late at night.

There was a tap on the field which everyone used for water supplies, and modern conveniences were provided by the caravan owners themselves. Ours was a small tent over a pit dug by my father some way behind our caravan.

My mother rarely if ever went down to the beach. She simply enjoyed to the full the opportunity to sit outside the caravan reading and knitting, occasionally throwing a friendly word to the pied wagtails which hopped around hoping for crumbs. Sometimes, she would stroll up to the farm and spend an hour or two chatting with Mrs Burchill.

When she discovered a romance novel in our bookshop that had been authored by a Mary Burchill, she seized on it with delight and brought it down specially to give to the lady of the house.

Once we had discovered Lord Of The Rings, she spent a whole summer reading it there, and ever afterwards named cats and dogs after its characters. Snowmane, Shadowfax, even a Shelob.

Once, on hearing the fog signal from the Mizen (which gave a strange slapping sound between hoots) she said it reminded her of Gollum running up a wet stone staircase. Which it did.

Mizen hadn’t developed into a tourist spot back then, and it was empty, wild, beautiful. You could climb to the top of the hill and see the choughs with their red beaks and legs, thrusting into the grass for worms. No crowds, no cars, just an incredible view of the Fastnet. “108 feet high at low tide, 96 feet high at high tide,” we would chant every time we saw it.

Often, we kids would walk into Crookhaven, for amusement as much as anything, and see who we would meet there.

One Saturday in 1966, Frances and I set off with the aim of buying a sixpenny bar of chocolate at O’Sullivan’s pub. When we got there, the pub door was tightly shut and locked, the blinds were drawn, but there was a deep hum of voices inside. We knocked, Mrs O’Sullivan unlocked the door and glared out. We stammered our request, she disappeared, came back with the bar of Cadbury’s, snatched our sixpence, and slammed the door again.

It was only later that we realised the enormity of our offence at interrupting the World Cup Final, with England snatching victory from Germany only in extra time! Needless to say, the pub should not have been open at that hour, but for heaven’s sake, it was the only television set for miles around!

Our battered little caravan remained in Burchill’s field for several years afterwards, and from time to time we would go down to recapture the joys of being by the sea in such a special place.

But, eventually, the owners were forced to close the site, as modern health and safety regulations came into force. Hot and cold running water, public toilets, firm, safe pathways, all the facilities taken for granted by today’s holidaymakers, were just not possible in that simple field with its one tap. And so we had to move the van.

That it moved at all was a minor miracle. My parents took it to the side of Lough Guitane, just over the Kerry border, and there it ended its days, giving grandchildren over from America their first taste of living rough Kerrigan-style.

Another minor miracle was that Joey himself put up with leaving the caravan in situ at Barley Cove for so long. Normally, he would be bored within a week of finding a new place to camp. But, for the first time perhaps, the strength of feeling on the part of his family forced him to yield to demand, and submit to the siren call that Barley Cove exuded without the slightest effort.

After all, there were still cliffs to climb, ancient copper mines on Brow Head to explore, a coastline to paddle round in his canoe, The Irish Aspidistra.

Today, looking at the area on a busy summer Sunday, it’s hard to remember how quiet it all was, how empty and covered with wild flowers were the sand dunes behind Barley Cove beach.

A field opposite the old school on the way into Crookhaven did duty as a camp site for a while, but that too was forced to close.

Eventually, the bright modern caravan site on the opposite side of the road from Burchill’s field came into being, and caters for thousands every year. But it is impossible to drive past even now and not glance to the left at the undulating grass, the bumps and mounds, and trace where our caravan, and those of so many dear friends of yesteryear, once stood.

It was such a special and undiscovered place back then, and I for one am very glad to have experienced it.

Now, Mike English has sent us a couple of interesting photographs from back in 1989, together with a clipping of the article which appeared in the Southgate supplement of the Echo.

These concerned the get-togethers held at Bishopstown GAA Club by retired men on Wednesday afternoons back then, where they chatted about old times, played cards, or even had a singsong.

The organiser at the time, Con McMahon, was anxious to stress that it was certainly not a male-only gathering, but that women for some reason had been slower to join up.

Since then, of course, we have had the development of the Men’s Shed in different locations, catering for those with time on their hands and lots of memories to share, but we wonder if (a) the Bishopstown Retired Persons group is still going, and; (b) if there are other such projects operating happily in different parts of the city; and (c), most importantly, do any of you recognise the people in these photographs?

Sing out and tell us right away if you can cast light on any of these queries, now do!

We do seem to recall that some contributors have mentioned regular get-togethers in Northside pubs, where friends and acquaintances would talk about old ways and old traditions, remember noteworthy events, and (naturally) decry the way everything seemed to have gone to hell in a hand-basket since the days of their youth!

Wasn’t there one such pub up near Shandon? And another in Blackpool? Who can remember? And are these delightful gatherings still going?

They serve such a valuable purpose in today’s Cork, where knowing every single neighbour on both sides of the street as well, as the names of every shopkeeper in the vicinity, can no longer be taken for granted. Remember when you were a child? Didn’t you know everybody along your road? Of course you did!

Tell us about it! Email jokerrigan1@gmail.com. Or leave a comment on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/echolivecork.