I guess Ballyhussa was much the same as any other cross-section of countryside out in the middle of nowhere.  But to me it didn’t seem like that.  It was home and it possessed my young soul and my growing body.  I grew up there – and bits of me stayed there.  In the hedges and furze bushes; in the groves and ploughed fields; in the streams and ponds.  In the mass-path, in Newtown school, and in ‘The Bungalow’, with its patches of stony ground that we raked and raked but never could quite rid of stones.

On some mornings the Comeragh Mountains seemed to be in our back garden, on others they had retreated to another county. A mystery never fathomed by us youngsters.  Did all mountains move we wondered?  Their nearness signalled rain according to father; the further away they appeared the more settled the weather would be.  Like most country-folk he was an expert weather-forecaster – in his own eyes anyhow – and he cast his eyes heavenwards with the same frequency that people nowadays look at their watches. For my own part, I always found the animals more reliable. Cattle, sheep and dogs were no fools when it came to the weather, and could be seen scurrying for cover long before the storm-clouds appeared.

 Sometimes the tops of the Comeraghs were capped in a layer of snow so white it hurt your eyes to look at them, a sight that had the Master urging us to describe the view in poetic terms.   

            The Himalayas never looked so bright

            As the Comeraghs do tonight

             Their new overcoats bespoke,

              Overnight.

Eight miles in the other direction lay the sea. The Atlantic Ocean gnawing away at Ireland’s coastline like a hungry beast, according to the Master, sending currents of bracing air to collide with those sweeping down from the Comeraghs. The result was a fertile plain fit for both man and beast.

Most nights you could see light twinkling in the distance.  The bright city lights of Waterford, and, further away, the dimmer glow of Tramore.  Here, the Metal Man could be seen, sweeping the Atlantic with a raking beam every ten seconds or so.  Further along the coast lay Boatstrand, Bonmahon, Stradbally and Dungarvan, the latter just about discernible on a clear night.

Ballyhussa boreen was long and winding and Newtown village lay a mile and a half distant by road.  By the mass-path, however, it was less than half that journey. The mass-path was our regular route to the village and we had used it for going to school and mass for as long as I could remember. It began about a hundred yards from our cottage at the stile (a couple of stepping-stones leading into the field) and was a clearly defined path across the land until it reached the road just outside the village. I suppose that the cows who grazed there, and who quite often followed the path in our wake, helped to preserve it. However, even in later years, when much of the land was tilled, it could still be seen scything its way through shimmering corn. Its origin was never quite clear; it may have been a legacy of the penal times, or it may merely have been a long-established short-cut to the church in Newtown.

Going to school never took more than fifteen minutes, coming home could take hours.  The first couple of fields formed part of Michael Cummins’ farm, and this halfway stage was our usual stopping point.  This was mainly because it contained a small pond and was surrounded by clumps of bushes.  Depending on the season, there would be frogs’ eggs to inspect, birds’ nests to look at, Ice to be tested with belly-slides. Then there were all those games of cowboys and Indians to be played, our bows made from young sallys sprung with binder twine, our arrows carved from ash twigs.  Tom Cummins, who was in the same class as me, was usually the one tied to the tree as we danced and whooped around him.  Well, it was his tree…

The two other fields that comprised the mass-path were fairly uninteresting, although the last one, which bordered Power’s half-acre, had us stepping lively across it.  Pat Power’s plot, with its remains of an old building, was haunted.  It was overgrown and dank in there, surrounded by twisted and tangled trees and undergrowth.  On windy nights you could hear the banshee wailing from deep within, and on a number of occasions we had witnessed several ghostly figures dancing among the ruins.

These sightings were seen on our return from attending the Lenten Devotions with mother.  Despite being fortified with her bout of prayer, she, nevertheless, lengthened her stride as we approached, blessing herself as she dragged us youngsters with her  in an undignified scramble down Cummins’ hill.  On one occasion a pair of ghosts shot past us on bicycles, their white robes billowing behind them like sail-cloths as they disappeared into the night.  I had never seen ghosts on bicycles before, and when mother found one of her best linen sheets shoved in the hedge near Galvin’s pump, relations with our next-door neighbours were cool for a while.  Dick Galvin, who sometimes fetched our milk from Cummins, wasn’t seen around our house for some time after that.

The mass-path deposited us at Newtown Cross, a dark tree-lined junction which rarely saw sunlight, and was used as a giant umbrella when it rained.  Motor transport, when it appeared, blew long and hard at this intersection – more than ever since the day a wandering ass almost spread-eagled itself across the bonnet of Paddy Nugent’s nearly-new car.  His shiny black Morris Minor, which only infrequently broke into anything quicker than a trot, slowed to an almost permanent walking pace after that.

Most of the land around the Newtown Cross belonged to Jamsie Wall, and the farmyard was almost as dark and foreboding as Power’s half acre. It wasn’t haunted, least not by conventional ghosts, but Jamsie’s scowling countenance was enough to ensure we youngsters steered well clear of the place.  Wall’s was a ‘grab farm’, its original owners, the O’Callaghans, having being evicted from it before it came into the ownership of the Walls. There was still bad feeling in the neighbourhood about the whole affair, and local farm workers would have nothing to do with the farm.  My grandfather, Tom O’Brien, had worked there at one stage, though he could hardly be described as local, having come from Ballyduff some eight miles away.  In the ploughing and tilling season Walls hired in men from outside, mainly from the Nire Valley.  These men didn’t care too much about the sensibilities of the locals, and could be seen in the early morning marching along the road as a body, banging their shovels and sprongs on the road surface as they went.

There wasn’t much of Newtown; the church, the school, two pubs and Lenihen’s grocery shop. Behind it, in the shadows of the Comeraghs, the land rose to wooded pastures and isolated groves of fir and pine. In front, the fields were barer and sloped down to Dunphy’s Cross and the New Line.  It was here that the Master alighted from the Dungarvan bus each morning, before striding across the intervening fields to try and knock some sense into us in classrooms forever smelling of chalk.

‘There are nine Newtowns in Waterford’, he would boom, ‘and eight of them are imposters.  Can anybody tell me why?’  We couldn’t, of course.  When someone suggested it might be the original site for the city of Waterford he laughed – a rare occurrence.

‘And why, tell me, would the Danes build their city in the middle of the country? How would they get their ships up the Suir?’

On one occasion he took the whole class to the playing field at the back of the school and pointed to the two rows of gnarled ash trees that ran parallel through Walls farm as far as Newtown Cross.

‘This avenue of ash is several hundred years old and was probably planted by a man called William Greatorix.  He intended to build a new town here alright, but not to replace Waterford.  He intended to replace Kilmac.  And that is how we got our name’.

‘Greatorix was, or had been, a wealthy man who travelled Ireland making up potions to cure all sorts of afflictions and ailments.  A kind of early medicine-man, one might say. His fame spread to such an extent that he was summoned by the King of England to try and cure his sick son. He wasn’t successful and from then on his fortunes deteriorated, one of the consequences being that ‘ Newtown’ never got built’.

Local history was the Master’s pet subject.  On foraging expeditions to the church we searched the graveyard for traces of old ruins.  He informed us that there was evidence of some sort of church on the site going back 900 years, and asked John Mullins, the local gravedigger, to keep an eye out for these ruins.

‘Sure isn’t the place full of ould ruins’, John replied, ‘mostly human  ones’.

The graveyard’s most famous resident was Donncha Rua MacConnamara, an itinerant Irish poet originally from County Clare. He had travelled as far as Newfoundland and lived in West Waterford before ending his days  on the Shanahan farm at Whitestown Cross, a couple of miles away.  A woman’s man and a heavy drinker, he was reputed to have frequented Cullinane’s pub, directly across the road from where he now lay buried.

As a young man he was sent to Rome to study for the priesthood, but he never completed his studies, being expelled for drunkenness and other ‘inappropriate behavior’.

After that, he led a wandering life, (this wanderlust remained with him all his life), and he seldom settled long anywhere. ‘Ban Chnoic Eireann O’ (The Fair Hills Of Eire), his classic lyric of exile, was written while in Hamburg.

            Take a blessing from my heart to the land of my birth

            And the fair hills of Eire O’

            And all that yet survive of Eibhear’s tribe on earth…

When he did return to Ireland it was to Waterford he came, and he traveled around the  countryside as a teacher, the fate of the ‘spoilt priest’, as his like were known in those days. In 1741 he was appointed assistant master at famous classical school at Seskinane, Tournaneena, Co Waterford, where he remained for several years. Of course Ireland was still in the grip of the Penal Laws in those days, but the Cromwellian diktat that all native Irish had tails, and that no Catholic could own land or be a civil servant or teach or own a horse worth more than five pounds wasn’t  pursued as vigorously as previously, so Donncha survived.

As well as the drink, Donncha also liked the women, and in 1743 he had to make a hasty departure from Waterford to escape the wrath of a family whose daughter he had made pregnant. He traveled by fishing boat to Newfoundland, where he lay low until things quietened down.

A subsequent second trip to Newfoundland, where he was said to have written his famous long poem ‘Eachtra Giolla an Amarain’ (The adventures of an unfortunate man) now seems likely to have been a hoax. It appears he got no further than Waterford city, where, instead of boarding his ship he spent his time drinking and womanizing until all his money was gone. Afterwards, in an effort to convince people he really had been there, he wrote the long poem (360 verses) which tells how the emigrant ship was attacked and captured by French pirates, before eventually making it safely to Newfoundland.

Shortly after this he changed his religion and became the church clerk at the Church Of Ireland in Rossmire, just outside Newtown.  However, his rakish way of life once again found him out and he was dismissed.

He was a happy-go-lucky individual whose poems and songs were part of the folklore in County Waterford . Unfortunately, a lot of them died with the Irish language

             One of Donncha’s last pieces of writing was an inscription in Latin on the headstone of one of his contemporaries, the Irish poet Tadgh Gaeleach O’Sulleabhain, who is buried just a few miles away in Ballylaneen.

            Tadgh is put here…

            Who will sing the praises of the Irish?

Who the deeds of men?

            With Gaelic Tadgh dead the Irish muses are silent….

The same could be written of Donncha Rua. He died in 1810 in Newtown, where he had been a temporary protestant, but is now very much a permanent Catholic in an unmarked grave to the rear of the church..  The inscription on the commemorative headstone (inside front entrance) ends with these lines

            ‘If whatever sins he committed have been wiped out by penance, give him, oh Lord, eternal rest in the true motherland’.

            John Mullins, who also dabbled in local history, liked to create the impression that he was an expert on Donncha Rua. To this extent he claimed that Maggie Bluett, who lived in one of the cottages up our boreen , was a direct descendant of Donncha. This was something Maggie neither confirmed or denied.  He also took tourists on guided tours of the graveyard and to the farm in Whitestown, presumably being paid for his trouble.  Finally there came his piece-de-resistance, a large stone by the side of the road, no more than a hundred yards from his own cottage, with the initials DM carved on it.  These, he claimed, were carved by Donncha’s own hand.

Many years later I learned it was John’s own hand. The best days work he ever done; it kept him in drink for most of his life.

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