An underwhelming debut on the local carnival scene

Country Living with Francis Farragher

While glancing through Tom Gilmore’s recently published book about Irish country music legend, Big Tom, it brought back a lot of thoughts of long Summer evenings, when, as solid fourth, fifth and sixth ‘classers’, we would often listen intently to the sounds coming back from under the canvas of the marquee, located on a green patch near an old pub called Treacy’s in the village of Abbeyknockmoy.

Those were quieter times on our roads with less traffic to drown out the subtler tones of the night, and even though we were nearly two miles away from the western side of the village, the sounds of the showbands could be heard when the carnival came to Abbey every Summer.

Across the road from our house was a little makeshift concrete platform on an old double wall that once marked out the Blake landlord territorial boundary. Two giant rocks topped this section of wall but with the advent of the creamery, a little bit of modernisation was brought to those stones, but not for aesthetic purposes.

In those days, mid to late-1960s, there were no bulk tankers to collect the milk, only an able-bodied lorry driver whose task was to lift the cans from an elevated position onto the truck. Improvisation was the name-of-the-game for most farmers and our plan involved the laying of a four or five-inch slab of concrete on top of the stones where the milk cans would be hoisted onto each morning.

The flat, elevated surface also had a dual function for us, as it gave us a sturdy perch to ‘cock our ears’ on long Summer evenings and listen to the sounds of bands like the Cotton Mill Boys, the Smokey Mountain Ramblers, Margo, the Maurice Mulcahy Orchestra, Larry Cunningham and of course the man that would always draw the biggest crowd of all, one Big Tom and the Mainliners.

On the bigger nights, cars would often stop and ask for directions to Abbeyknockmoy and of course they were only destined for one location – that looping white tent, bounded by a sturdy wire fence stapled carefully to a series of huge poles in order to prevent any free entry. SWAT teams from the ‘carnival committee’, policed this barrier to prevent free entry being gained by mountainy men who might have a pliers handy in their pockets.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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