THE LONG READ: A sidelight on a Grand Canal boat trip through Offaly in the 1950s

PEOPLE trying to find some tranquility in life have found boating on the canal most relaxing. I remember a boat trip to the Barrow and Maganey in Carlow in the 1970s with the benefit of one of the Thomas slimline boats from their hire fleet at Cappincur, Tullamore. In those days there was fun in sending a postcard home from Naas after three days of voyaging towards the Barrow.

Voyage in a Bowler Hat and other writers

Hugh Malet's, Voyage in a Bowler Hat, was first published in 1960. Malet, a Wellington and Cambridge man, described the account of his voyage in 1958 on the canals of Ireland as a young man's book ‘filled with what were for me, wonderful new discoveries’. Malet was following the canal way so vividly described by L.T.C. (Tom to friends) Rolt in his account of a decade earlier in Green and Silver. Patrick Campbell (the third Lord Glenavy and better known as Quidnunc to Irish Times readers) has recalled his, mostly pleasant, stay on the Shannon about 1940 (in My Life and Easy Times) – getting away from conscription in England. He began his voyage from Athlone in a very shaky boat.

In 1958 there were few pleasure boats for hire – few ferries in England and none in Ireland. For the canals were dying of weed. Some say they will again, but now they are ‘the linear parks of the countryside’. This is especially true for north Offaly where there are no great public parks because Durrow is not open and Charleville is by courtesy.

Cycleways, walking and ruined infrastructure

Millions are now being spent on cycleways by way of parliamentary grants much as was done for the building of the canals. The same cannot be said for the infrastructure such as the former hotels, harbours and stores. Tullamore had all three but the hotel was knocked in 1974. Today only one store remains at Convent View and the harbour will soon fall vacant. The plans of Grafton Architects are laid and implementation agendas will soon be published.

Malet turned more to religion than waterways for solace in the 1980s. Writing of the new 1985 edition of his 1958 voyage he hoped that his text would go out ‘as a plea for Christian co-operation peace and tolerance in an age seemingly obsessed by violence, intolerance and destruction – the antithesis to that ordered grace which makes the waterways such an ideal retreat from our worried, hurried and turbulent world’. Perhaps he was thinking of the North or the coal miners and Mrs T. at the time. He would have more on his plate/lectern since 2022.

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Malet was a canal enthusiast and made the 1958 trip in his very small boat the Mary Ann from England to Ireland. The trip was followed up with a series of radio programmes for BBC Home Service and a further trip in 1960 and later, another book In the wake of the Gods (London, 1970). I see there is also one YouTube talk by him online.

Brown sherry in McCann’s of Daingean

In 1958 there were few pleasure boats for hire and the canal was on the verge of being abandoned. In his book he talks of his having a drink or two in Daingean.

‘At Philipstown (now Daingean) I found a bar which added the sale of petrol to the general store, groceries, and alcohol trade, and as it also happened to be a hotel I asked for lunch, but was told that it was early yet and would not be likely to be ready for a while, so I said politely that as it was a fine day I would not wait. I would, I said, drink a glass of stout and go on my way, for the weather was too good to be indoors, but I had not reckoned with the Irish either in myself or in the local inhabitants. I remained in that hotel for the next three hours, and during that time I consumed no less than five glasses of delicious brown sherry, only two of which I paid for myself, and one of them was paid for by the landlord! During that time we discussed almost everything from numismatology (with exhibits) to early Irish sporting cups, and the root of the trouble was Mr. MacCarthy [one wonders is this not the late Jack McCann and intended reference to McCann's hotel].’

The overgrown Kilbeggan line

Mallet passed the Kilbeggan line, and with no coffee at Ballycommon, but you could stop for groceries in what was an Egan branch shop. ‘I passed the Kilbeggan branch which has become overgrown with weed and practically impassable, and battled down through several locks, against a wind which was rushing in unchecked from the open Atlantic, until at length I came in the late evening to the crumbling harbour at Tullamore, nestling under the tall spire of a cathedral (parish church).’

Stories of old days from Mr Larkin

In Tullamore he met what was to be the last harbour master, the late Mr J. Larkin. Mr Larkin said the old harbour was a barrack square before the arrival of the canal. If it was such I have never found any account of a barrack (save in a 1935 lecture on Tullamore and presumably copied by Moran and other local historians since. There is evidence that the harbour area was once the site of the first Lord Tullamoore's house, erected in c. 1700, and probably abandoned after 1740 when Lord Tullamoore and his rich wife moved to Charleville.

Malet felt that there was sad air about the old harbour in Tullamore with warehouses crumbling and weeds growing everywhere. The stores on the Store Street side had been demolished about 1952 leaving only a high wall and a rectangular site that was foolishly sold by CIE to Anglo-Irish Mart in 1956–58. When they moved to the cattle mart on Ardan Road this site was acquired by the Tullamore UDC and is void of use for almost sixty years. That is up to now.

Tullamore ‘bred from quarries’

Malet noted of Tullamore that it was a town ‘bred from quarries of grey rain and surrounded by the Great Bog. A sinister lightning without thunder flickered on the horizon, and the hunched outline of the Slieve Bloom Mountains was blurred in a lashing rain. At Tullamore as at Langollen [a town in Wales with a famous 46 mile-canal and 21 locks] I felt that I had entered another country beyond the Pale of English influence. The harbour master, Mr J. Larkin, told me of the days when the passenger boats were running, for he remembered many old people who had lived and worked along the canal in those far-off times, and he said that often enough the canal hotels were so full that they could not accommodate all the passengers. He said that a great bell hung in each hotel; it rang the first time as a signal for the horses to be harnessed, a second time for the passengers to board the boat, and a third time for the boat to leave. He also said that, according to an ancient bye-law, a man could still claim a passage for himself and his horse on the ferry at Shannon Harbour, but the ferry boat had almost vanished into the mud. It was from Mr. Larkin I learned that Tullamore Harbour had once had the peculiar distinction of being a barrack square before the arrival of the canal.’

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‘There was something inestimably sad about Tullamore Harbour, with the weed creeping out from the corners and spreading gradually towards the centre, the warehouses crumbling into decay, and the staff waiting patiently as the cargoes gradually diminished on what was until recently one of the most bustling waterways in these islands.’

Hugh Malet died in 2005 (aged 77) and Mr Joseph Larkin in 1973 (aged 80), both gentlemen of an earlier age.

Now, 65 years on, the harbour will again be buzzing with life just as the Lloyd Town Park is today – a Lark in the harbour awaits.