IF YOU’D told me I would fall hook line and sinker for two old codgers on a fishing trip I’d have told you where to go!
Well, that’s just what’s happened when I discovered Gone Fishing on BBC with Paul Whitehouse and Bob Mortimer. Just watching two men in total tune, a love story of old friends with bad hearts having great fun.
I encourage you to have a look – it can be laugh out loud and it can bring a tear to your eye. The most dramatic thing to happen is landing a carp, admiring it and throwing it back – but ever so gently, because this is a gentle programme set on the banks of some very beautiful rivers.
Then we come to Great Canal Journeys on BBC 4 where Timothy West and Prunella Scales travelled the waterways of the UK in their barge until recently when they handed the tiller over to Gyles Brandreth and Sheila Hancock.
The peace and tranquility of both programmes leads me the River Shannon and more peace on our doorstep and plenty of fish in the dark waters.
Thanks to Paul Clements and his travels we have a new intriguing guide to this waterway which has serviced both industry and cruise enthusiasts through the years.
It might seem a strange time to publish a book with bookshops closing all around us here – 35 years ago there were 33 book shops in Belfast alone; sadly only a few today. However, in Dublin they are still open and flourishing and apparently in one week recently there were 16,400 new publications in the UK and 600 in Ireland so Shannon Country: A River Journey Through Time will sail through these stringent times.
Paul Clements has a passion for travel writing and has published many books but his fascination with the River Shannon goes back to the day in 1980 when he visited book antiquarian John Gamble in his fine old terraced house on Belfast’s Antrim Road. It was there that the young man came across a book by Richard Hayward which proved to be a major influence on his future work.
:: Shadows of war
“At the end of the summer of 1939 Hayward set off in an Austin car towing a caravan to journey alongside the Shannon together with a photographer and a movie cameraman. It excited me and I suppose even then I wanted to follow in Hayward’s footsteps and I wasn’t disappointed," Paul says.
“It was the beginning of the war years and Hayward had to get special permission to travel south, much like the situation today with borders locked down. In those days most of the roads were little more than dirt tracks and few houses. On my journey the roads were good and the houses had satellite dishes and the mountains had wind turbines.”
So with pens and notebooks and a pair of binoculars, Paul set off in the spring of 2017. It was an ideal time coming into a busy summer, with a dance project in Leitrim, plenty of fairs and gatherings to join along the way, building up this book of 100,000 words.
Paul paints a vivid picture of this, the longest river in Ireland as it ambles here and rushes there from the Shannon Pot in Co Cavan to meet the sea at Limerick.
It’s the people Paul meets that brings this book to life. Like the duck man... The author had heard of Dan Kavanagh and was determined to interview him so he drove 300 miles to Lanesborough to discover a man living by the side of the Shannon who feeds the ducks twice a day and has been doing so for 30 years.
“And Alannah Moore stands out as she indulges in the ritual practise of water-worship at the Shannon Pot. She sings songs to the land, explores the invisible layers of the landscape and taps into the energies of the willow trees.”
He walks with American Bee Smith down Smugglers Road, fringed with hawthorn and "radiant wild flowers a tapestry of colours".
You can just imagine the birdsong along those riverside paths.
“Herons, dippers, golden plover – but it was the most elusive of all birds, the kingfisher, that I longed to see.” And did he? I’m not giving away any secrets.
One of the more modern sights Paul takes in is the statue of Sir Terry Wogan in Limerick and he conducts a vox pop beside it.
"It’s horrible," says one. Another likes it apart from the microphone in his hand which he thinks looks almost pornographic but the birds like it, it’s somewhere to rest and have a chat.
:: The Banagher horse fair
This fair comes to life under Paul's pen – horses and goats for sale, pigeon sellers and hens, shifty looking tricksters and tweed-capped and Wellington-clad farmers leaning on long ash plants scrutinising the animals.
The noise and smell of 80 horses in the town centre, a bacon butty and a cup of coffee – then "on the stroke of midday the Angelus bell signals a hush over the crowd as a minute’s silence is observed in memory of Tom Moran, a horse trader revered throughout the country who died the previous week".
The fine weather had dried out the hillsides and at one stage he watched wild fires devour the heather and the forests, wiping out the inhabitants; was it my imagination or did I smell the smoke?
Paul Clements’s mentor, Richard Hayward, is never far from this story and the two authors weave in and out of the pages which makes for an exceptionally interesting book and would certainly encourage the traveller to take this journey down the Shannon as Paul Clements did by boat, by car, bicycle and on foot.
:: Shannon Country is published by Lilliput Press (lilliputpress.ie).
