Neat and tidy in Trim

In all the years I’ve passed through it, usually in a hurry to somewhere else, I’ve rarely stopped to appreciate Meath. But by coincidence, it was my terminus for two separate day-trips last weekend. And as I now realise, the place is a veritable cornucopia of human and cultural charms.

On Saturday morning, for example, I found myself in the Town of the Elderflowers, which you probably know by its less poetic name, "Trim". The anglicisation is apt, for once, because it's a conspicuously well-kept place, several times winner of the Tidy Towns. The only thing it's littered with is medieval monuments, including the castle where Braveheart was shot.

But “elderflowers” was apt too, at least on Saturday, in that the event I was attending was a “trail race” organised by the Business Houses Athletic League – a group that prides itself on having runners of almost all ages.

Thus, my fellow competitors included Trim-born Terry Mee, who as he told me, could remember seeing scenes from a much earlier Hollywood film being shot locally, Captain Lightfoot (1954), with Rock Hudson as the eponymous highwayman.

Despite which longevity, Terry still runs like a whippet. Indeed, he beat many people half his age on Saturday, when even Captain Lightfoot would have struggled to escape from him.

The race hosts, by the way, were the Office of Public Works, a fact that added to the event’s interest.

Readers may recall the controversy a few years ago when the OPW headquarters were decentralised to Trim, forcing the provision of a notorious bus service to decentralise staff from the city every morning and recentralise them again at night.

In effect, they were only on day-release from the capital (I’m told the vehicle was nicknamed the “Loser Cruiser” by hard-bitten inmates). And that this notorious example of inefficiency had been achieved in a place called “Trim” would have had the flavour of satire even if “Jonathan Swift Street” was not the address of the new headquarters, which it was.

But the cruiser is retired now, and the decentralisation project seems to be bedding in, at last. As for the OPW-sponsored race, well, in a metaphor for my athletic career, it took place some distance from Swift Street.

So for that and other reasons, the start-time had to be delayed a few minutes. Also, according to those with GPS watches, the course proved slightly long, at 5.13km.

Naturally, this combination of circumstances led wags to suggest that the OPW event had come in late and over budget. But it was very enjoyable, for all that. And with so many picturesque ruins – the castle and 12th-century abbey, I mean, not the runners – around a course that also bordered the river Boyne, it was hard to beat the setting.

Anyway, 24 hours later, I was back in Meath, on the banks of another river, the Blackwater. The occasion this time was an old-style threshing of the kind I wrote about last week (September 10th). On foot of which, I had learned that the Carey family of Enfield hold an annual event showcasing a restored mill.

They were kind enough to invite me to its latest performance. And that’s how I spent a couple of blissful hours on Sunday watching a lovely, vintage Garvie machine – all belts, wheels, and wood-panelling – being put through its paces by Willie Carey and fellow enthusiasts.

Not for the first time, I marvelled at how neatly these ancient contraptions separate the wheat (or oats, in this case) from the chaff. Then I relived my childhood by getting a turn on the top deck, cutting the cords from sheaves for the man who fed the “drum”. Afterwards, with the oats all bagged, we celebrated with tea and poetry readings (including Kavanagh of course), supervised by the highly civilised woman of the house, Betty Carey.

The Garvie mill was made in Aberdeen, as its nameplate announced. But I learned with a moistened eye that it had spent its working life among the little hills of Monaghan. And as we stood around admiring it, I was introduced to a veteran mill-man whose face was vaguely familiar.

We swapped biographical details for a while, closing in on each other in circles, before realising we were long-lost neighbours. He had worked with my father, and knew more about me than I did myself. Now he and the mill had something in common. They had both escaped the drumlins and were living the Monaghan dream – retirement on the lovely flat fields of Meath.

@FrankmcnallyIT