OPINION (AN COLÚN): A pleasant ramble in a tranquil part of North Tipp

WHAT A FANTASTIC Vintage Week we have enjoyed here in Birr over the last ten days! The numbers of people attending were considerably higher than usual at many of the events, which clearly showed the massive appetite of locals to return to a pre-Covid normality.
The Vintage Weeks of 2020 and 2021 were pleasant enough affairs, but in truth were pale imitations of the real thing. In 2022 the real thing triumphantly returned. There was an awful lot of events in the programme and I had to subdue my natural tendency to bite off more than I can chew. I have an ambitious streak which, if left unchecked, habitually ticks a lot of events on programmes for me to attend; usually I run out of steam after attending much less than I had intended. Anything I did attend last week was blessed with a good atmosphere, with a good audience mood of people who were attentive and wanted to sit back and enjoy themselves.
The boost to morale and the strong sense of community spirit created by festivals such as Vintage Week are invaluable things.
Another place I recently visited where a strong community spirit is evident was the small village of Ballinderry. I was there to visit a new walk which was opened on July 31st, part of which follows the Ballyfinboy River.
The Ballyfinboy River rises at Moneygall and flows past Cloughjordan and through Borrisokane.Downstream of these two towns, the river is joined from the north by the Borriswood Stream and the Ardcrony Stream. The Ballyfinboy continues northwest past Ballinderry and into Lough Derg south of Drominagh Point. It's a narrow but pleasant watercourse running through pasture-land and fields of crops.
The walk follows quiet backroads and the river's bank. As I walked I passed vast fields of wheat and potatoes and I thought about the big amount of work entailed in sowing and harvesting such enormous fields. However, a lot of the landscape is the classic Irish landscape of relatively small pastoral fields with herds of cattle and sheep, defined by lines of hedgerows (hedgerows are one of the jewels of our countryside). 25 years ago I used often horseride with friends in the Ballinderry area. Sometimes we'd gallop across the fields and jump the hedges. They are fond memories and my walk evoked them. After the rides we used to drink in one of the village's pubs, still in our jodhpurs and riding gear (sometimes muddied from falls), bantering and laughing. The camaraderie was good. Sadly, the pub went the way of so many rural pubs and closed in 2010. Fortunately, the building hasn't been allowed to go to rack and ruin (as so often happens) but has kept the pub furnishings and has been restyled as “The Holiday Pub”, a place which can be rented out by groups who want to stay overnight and have a bit of fun.
There's still one regular pub in the village, Dé Róiste's, which was doing a good trade on the day I visited. There's a restaurant beside the pub and the food is good apparently.
The walk takes you past a former RIC barracks and a dilapidated mill. You pass Ballinderry Sport Therapy (run rather appropriately by a Mr Foote). One roadside house was offering wooden Ogham posts for sale (a nice feature for my garden, I thought). Beside the ruined mill is the elegant Georgian edifice called Ballyfinboy House, which is surrounded by a variety of deciduous trees. The owners run a business transforming these trees into house furniture, when the trees fall for whatever reason.
Along a very quiet backroad there's a fascinating structure called the Mouse House Toll Bridge. This bridge (which spans the Ballyfinboy) and its intriguing Mouse House was constructed in 1776. The Mouse House is a small stone shelter for the toll collector who would have sat here asking travellers for money to cross the bridge.
During the 18th century, a network of tolled turnpike roads developed across much of midland and southern Ireland and along the eastern corridor north from Dublin to Belfast and Coleraine. Many of the turnpike road developments involved the building of new sections of higher-quality road - developments that are also distinguished by their long, straight stretches.