Sunday morning I went to deliver a magazine to my friend who wanted it. Eight am and the sun was already three fingers above the trees. Quiet…well, quiet from human noise. The birds were fully awake. After slipping it through her mail-slot I turned towards the river and enjoyed the crunch of gravel under my
The former Mission Hall is located on York Road, Ringsend, facing the river Liffey. Its beauitful facade has been kept as it was over 100 years ago, when two sisters of the famous Bewley cafe family decided to build it as a YMCA. The sisters were both very interested in helping people get a foot
Water is a liquid formed when two gases come together to form H O. The whole world would starve as nothing would grow without it. Everything would be barren like the Sahara Desert. Let us think of where water has done a lot of good and made the world a very beauitful place. My mind
Our minds weren’t on the foot cocking, that sultry July afternoon; the air as still as the breaking dawn. Tomas remarked “it will be a perfect evening for Dereken; the perch will be in shoals there”. I was so enthused by this optimism, I began to gather speed with my wooden rake. Worms were already
There is a lake in Ireland once regarded as the finest trout water on earth. Anglers came from far and wide to fish it. Fifty years ago, it was poisoned to death’s door by sewage from a nearby town. Since then, it has been slowly, lovingly, nursed back to health by those who care for
In memory of my Dad James J. Galvin CHAPTER 1 For me, it all began back in 1942 when I was 4 years old. My Dad would say to me “right hop up on the crossbar of the bike”. He would take me down to the Grand Canal and we would feed the swans, ducks
As a young boy growing up in 1970’s Ireland, at lot of my youth was spend splashing and dipping our toes in the local river that passes through the village of Killeagh in East Cork. The rivers name ‘Dissour’ means ‘twice wetted’, which supposedly meant it had better bleaching qualities than other rivers in earlier
My dad was a plumbing contractor and we lived in a council house in Limerick City. His greatest love was fishing. Looking back, I think there were times he loved fishing more than his family. He had a little rowing boat which he kept at various moorings up and down the majestic river Shannon. During
We knew it was time to pack up and go home, but it was Midsummer’s Eve on the Shannon, and how could we leave? And so we hummed gently upriver from Banagher in that last, long live glow from the West, as a slim, slight moon hung above us -waiting. Engine cut, we drifted in
In 1174 AD a fierce sea battle raged in Dungarvan bay that was to be recorded as Munster’s last Norse battle. The Hiberno-Norse were descendant of the Scandinavian Vikings that had settled on the south east coast a few hundred years earlier. They had likely established a settlement along the bay as several Viking/Norse place
I was born very near the Brown Flesk river in the early forties. In my youth I spent a lot of what spare time I had at the river. To me at the time it was a very big river as I knew no other river. As our small farm was bounded on one side
An eel, a dipper, a tomato, a kingfisher or a heron, is there an odd one out on a stretch of the River Dodder? For a very brief time I saw an eel, a small, black, viper looking yet harmless eel wriggling across the shallow river bed out to the middle bed of the low