Kilmacleague was the first house we actually owned.
Up to this we had been living, happily, in rented houses in various towns in Ireland , England and even France.
This was supposed to be the moment when we finally put down roots.
Of course it wasn’t what our peers were buying into, suburban and semi detached.
Nor was it a romantic old cottage with stone walls and a cottage garden.
Our house in Kilmacleague was a modern,, bungalow bliss, prefab which had been hurled into the middle of a 1 ½ acre site close to, but out of sight of the sea near Dunmore East in County Waterford.

We moved in on Eileen’s second birthday, October the 30th 1981.
Caitriona was 5, and Deirdre was still 15 months away from being born .

Note water in estuary in background. This meant the tide was in.

Mrs. Ashley, the old woman who sold it to us had moved back to England but had asked us to her going away party before she went- “To meet the neighbours”. A good omen. And the good will lasted .
We were to be extremely happy there.

At that stage I was working in Ballinakill House, a small country house restaurant in Waterford, Sile was in Scoil Lorcain, a primary school also in the town where she still teaches.

Buying a house put us financially at the very brink of disaster.
A larger than normal milk bill was enough to push us close to bankruptcy, and if the calor gas ran out of the cooker at an inopportune time of the month we just shifted cooking the tea out into the garden and continued the operation on a fire of twigs. There was no fear of what the neighbours might think of our conduct, we were surrounded by green fields peopled only by cows and the odd fox.

True we couldn’t see the sea, just a brief glimpse of the estuary when the tide was in, but we could hear it booming gently on the nearby back strand and at night the sky was lit by the regular flashing beams from the lighthouse in Dunmore.

The children loved the country from the beginning.
They were a solitary pair anyway. Not particularly gregarious (unlike daughter number three) they enjoyed their own company and wandering through the fields, making potions from wild flowers, and houses under thorn trees.

The house had its problems, every summer our well ran dry and we had long dry periods of being careful not to flush the loo and borrowing baths from friends.

Not having any money meant that we couldn’t afford booze.
This we remedied by concocting various country wines and beers.
I remember that the Blackberry Wine was successful, I also remember the phenomenal hangovers which the Rose Hip gave us.

We made various attempts to conquer the “garden”.
The truth of the matter was that it needed some heavy machinery to tame it, this would have been way beyond our means. We did plant little bits here and there and on occasions would find traces of the old gardens the Ashleys had planted years ago.If you beat your way through the brambles you could sometimes find raspberry canes and blackcurrant bushes still bearing fruit.

Our neighbours were wonderful, kind helpful and generous.
We were never lonely there, even though it was very isolated.

I suppose the main nostalgia for Kilmacleague is that it was there our girls spent most of their childhood.
It is amazing now to remember the days when all three were bathed together

(Sorry Girls)

Or when they went of “Tricking or Treating” to our (few and far between) neighbours.

(Deirdre’s costume was a jumper of Sile’s, Caitriona’s school tights and a “Free a Nipper” on her head. She was convinced that she was indistinguishable from a wolf and anxious that she might be too scary for the neighbours)

Even though we never managed to make much of an impression on the garden its very space was a marvellous luxury.
Loads of room for a swing

Or for the two older ones to learn to ride bikes.

Even the adults managed to enjoy themselves
in a ceidhleidh in the kitchen for my 40th in 1989

With Sile’s sisters Maire and Una and brother-in-law Padraic on the feadog.

But in late 1989 the prospect of a Restaurant in town raised its head so we decided to pack up and go. It was just getting to the stage that the girls social life was being hampered by living 7 miles out of the town without any public transport. (Except for the Saturday morning bus) and Sile and I were getting rightly sick of being a taxi service.
Sad to go but a perfect house to have a childhood in.

The ubiquitous Ariel View

We often go back for a sentimental wallow.

Caitriona took this picture of the gate earlier this year