Classic country pub at heart of historic hillside village

O'Connell's pub on the Hill of Skryne, Co Meath, has a timeless quality much valued by its owner and customers, writes Rose Doyle

KNOWN FAR and wide beyond its Royal County hinterland, O'Connell's on the Hill of Skryne is more than a pub, far more than an institution.

O'Connell's of Skryne is a statement, there for the people of Skryne and Tara, not to mention Navan and Dublin, since an unknown date in the 19th century, there in spirit on Tara's sister hill since the high kings of Ireland fought their battles and a widowed queen wept at its foot and it was called the Hill of Weeping.

Unprepossessing, a statement in itself, comforting on the best and worst of days and unreconstructed in the real sense, O'Connell's is where the philosophy of plus ça change, plus c'est la même chosecomes to rest. The earth all round has been excavated for the motorway to run through Tara's old fields but in O'Connell's, being one of the things which draws people together to talk, laugh and make music on good nights, remains unchanged. There's a snug and fireplace, wood panelled walls and a pool table and a white-washed yard outside. A whitewashed shelter for smokers acknowledges the no-smoking rule. This is the way it will be too, so long as Mary O'Connell runs things. She's the reason it's known as Mrs O's, her deceased husband James the reason its aka was The Yank O'Connell's or The Yankee. Wise, all-seeing and elegant, Mary O'Connell's got a sophistication bred of long familiarity with life and its ways. We don't discuss age, or other vulgarities. The present being as vital as the past we take tea and talk about both, snug in a nest-like room as summer rain torrents outside.

"The place itself is here since the early 1800s, I don't have an exact date and don't know if it was an O'Connell started the shop/pub here either," she says. "My great-granddaughter Muireann is the sixth generation of the O'Connell family in this house. I came here with my husband James when we married in the early 1940s. He'd been living in New York but came back and that's where the Yank O'Connell name comes from."

James died in July 1984. His widow, albeit with encouragement, tells her own early story. She was born in Dunsany, "just over the road. My father, Peter Clynch, died when he was only 30 and my mother, Bridget, brought me up on her own. She was determined she wouldn't bring in another father for me. It was lovely to grow up in Dunsany. My mother and I were close. It didn't matter if the whole sky fell as long as we were together. Glory be to goodness but she was the best of mothers! I never wanted for anything."

Schooldays over "there wasn't a lot available here so I went to England to do nursing. But I was lonely for my mother and came home. I met my husband on the road soon after. Another girl and myself were coming back from playing tennis and he drew alongside us on the road in a car and stopped and we talked, anything for a laugh! There was no harm in it and I was well tutored by my mother anyway. We met for about a half hour that evening and a year after got married in Dunsany."

She wore blue satin, her bridesmaids wore pink and everyone wore "high garlands" in their hair. There were about 60 guests and the honeymoon was spent touring an Ireland in which "the weather was absolutely beautiful!"

James's mother Margaret and sister Helen were looking after the family business on the Hill of Skryne, then a shop as well as a pub, when he and his young bride arrived, post-honeymoon, to live and work. "I'd always loved selling," Mary admits.

"When I was small I used play shop and sell till the cows came home. We once sold everything here; veterinary needs as well as rashers, sausages, jam, bread, butter, tea - weighed to ration portions, cups, saucers, paint, wellington boots, tyres for bikes, meal of all description, every mortal thing. We delivered groceries four times every week, out in the cold and rain. It was unbelievable.

"My mother-in-law, Margaret, was terrific and so was Helen, whom we called Nellie. Margaret and I got on really well."

The shop's business, in time, gave way to the supremacy of that of the pub. "When Nellie got married James worked more behind the bar. We had staff as well, always have had, then as now, great staff. The pub was the same then as now too. The first day I went into the bar to work I thought stout was served in a bottle on the counter; my husband had to teach me how to pull a pint. I loved working here as long as I didn't have to cook or sew."

Mary and James had two children, Thomas and Marguerite, both devoted to the pub. Their mother talks of them - "the best two children in the world" - with unselfconscious affection and of her husband's life with vigour. "When he went to the Galway Races he'd go to Lough Derg on the way. He fought for Ireland with the old IRA. He got medals but that's all he got!"

She leads me to the chimney brest over the fireplace in the pub, to the many articles written on its history hanging there. The hill and surrounding lands and O'Connell's place in it all are a source of pride, the avid interest in the pub a source of wry, if appreciative, amusement. Guinness has used Mrs O's in ads, customers from around the globe write and have written thrillingly in the guest book provided by daughter Marguerite.

Skryne Hill, 500ft high, has a lively place in Tara's royal history and its present name since 875. The Normans came in 1185 and their man, a lieutenant of Hugh de Lacy, built Skryne Castle. The nearby church, in ruins now, was built in about 1341 by his descendant. "So much history," Mary says. "The local hounds and beagles used meet here over the years too, the racing crowd; everyone did."

She thought she too would die "the day my mother died, here in 1974. My husband was awful good to her; she lived with us before she died. She'd gone on living in Dunsany as long as she could, coming to us for Christmas but going back before the end of the day to play cards with her friends."

O'Connell's customers are "all very nice people", she says. Her daughter Marguerite is involved with the Hope Foundation, a charity working for the street children of Calcutta and, in just five years, she and her mother have raised more than €30,000 in sponsorship from O'Connell's customers alone. "I've got a few great people running the place with me," Mary says, "couldn't do it without them. All of our customers are treated the same, famous or not, they're all equally welcome. We've had, oh Brian Faulkner from the North, Paul Darragh from show jumping, Matthew McConaghty the actor, all sorts and all of their anonymities preserved. I think the world of my customers, they're the best."

Change is ongoing. "The whole drinking scene has changed," she says, "for instance, with all the new drinks on the market. It used be too that people would come with stories to tell, about the racing and such, but that's changing too. We need the new motorway badly in Co Meath. As things are people are on the road, sitting in their cars from the small hours trying to get to Dublin."

Some things don't change. "You'd take Tara and all of those things for granted until you go out on a starry, frosty night, up onto the Hill of Skryne and see the lights of the houses and the countryside all around. You have to be aware of it then."

So what's the future for O'Connells? "Now that," she gives a wise smile, "is the big question."