Traveller wagon puts down roots at museum

Cork 2005: Paper flowers, camphor balls and buttons are the coded mementoes of a tradition now enshrined in the permanent installation of a newly-built Traveller wagon at Cork's public museum.

These small items, along with "swag baskets", aprons and shawls, all speak of the Traveller women whose homes were made in these wagons.

"Each one was the structure women lived in and where they reared their children," explains Bridget Carmody of the Cork Women Travellers' Network. She shows how the domestic arrangements were fixed in the interiors with the wide shelf bed, the collapsible seating and, when a superfluity of boys crowded the inside, the sheltered bedding provided for them underneath the wagon itself.

The wagon was built as the network's project for Cork 2005. Community events director Tony Sheehan told Carmody and the network secretary Mary O'Sullivan to think of something big. "So we decided to build a wagon, and the minute we mentioned it to our members it just exploded. It meant so much to them, and we had been hoping for that reaction."

Originally, the wagons were built simply as accommodation; they were abandoned as the more sophisticated caravans offered more space and convenience. Some were rescued by enterprising tourism companies offering the novelty of horse-drawn holidays, but even these now are disappearing. "The only thing we had to start with were the wheels, the lock, the ironwork and the springs. Everything else had to be made."

That made the project more interesting, as it meant the network, consisting of eight affiliated Traveller groups, had to work with men who initially didn't see the point of the enterprise. That changed, especially in the case of John Carroll, who had built his last wagon nearly 40 years ago. Funded by €70,000 from Cork 2005 and carried out mostly at the National Sculpture Factory in Cork, the work was as much one of excavation as of construction. The old processes were re-discovered, such as steeping the timber bows of the roof in river-water to make them pliable. With them came the stories, the family reminiscences, the treasured items handed down, such as the buttons which Traveller women exchanged in acknowledgement of their meetings on the road.

The decorative design of each wagon was a family signature. Usually composed of horses painted or carved, or studded with horse-brasses and leather-work, these could be read by colour and arrangement as indicators of entire clans. Re-creating all this took the network the best part of the past three years.

Although the men involved (as is also the case with male visitors to the exhibition) were mostly concerned with the mechanism and horse-management, boys from the Traveller training centre in Blackpool made the timber steps and much of the decorative woodwork.

The curtaining and interior roofing fabric is a 30-year-old Laura Ashley print sold to the network at half price. The wooden rack at the rear is a device for holding fodder; a chicken, or tackle-box, is under the frame, and both inside and out the wagon is a model of ingenuity. The Traveller women loved roses, and sold their paper creations from their swag baskets. Their pinafores were decorated with the buttons, their shawls - one from a fortune-teller - were handed down from one generation to another.

"This is a process of regeneration, too," says Mary O'Sullivan. "We're now asking Travellers to give us items on loan so we can add to this exhibition. We see this as an educational resource which should influence Traveller children to take ownership of their identity - both the good and the bad aspects of it. We learned a lot about the hardship of life on the road when working on this and we can understand why the culture has changed so much. But the skills are still there: the copper-smithing tools on display belonged to Johnny Boy Quilligan, for example, and were given to us by his widow, but the copper vessels and utensils here were made for us by St Joseph's Senior Travelling Training Centre in Ennis."

The project has already inspired other groups, and Clonmel Travellers have got funding to build a wagon of their own. "What we're doing here", says Brigid Carmody, remembering that the first time they put a horse to the wagon was for its triumphal appearance at the St Patrick's Day parade, "is making our own history. Others may copy us, but we'll always have been the first."