DISPLACED IN MULLINGAR:THE PRICE OF caravans is dropping all the time. Perhaps that is because they are associated with Travellers and no longer in fashion among the middle classes of the nation, writes MICHAEL HARDING

The sight of a white caravan behind a white van moving across the bridge of Athlone often signifies the seasonal migration of Westmeath families, the prospect of which causes publicans to close the doors of their lounge bars and hide under the counters.

When I was a child, Travellers camped on the back road, a small lane beside the golf course, and we envied them because they were better than us at finding golf balls. Collecting golf balls was what children did on Saturday mornings, to earn the price of an ice cream in Johnny Reilly’s shop.

The Travellers would scour the lawns, the greens and the bunkers, and hoover up every last one, to earn a few bob, and after that there was nothing left for the children.

At night their campfires were lit under ash trees that still stand on the same ground, although magnificent suburban mansions have been built in the shade of those trees, with manicured lawns of ornamental shrubs copied from glossy design books.

The Travellers of my childhood lived in tents, discreetly hidden on all the back roads of Ireland, and they moved about the towns in fear of shopkeepers, whose ancestors probably put slate roofs on those same shops during the Famine, with the profits they made buying meal from the Government and selling it to the starving poor in the countryside.

The Travellers of my childhood did not have the gall to drive swanky vans. Nor were they confident enough of their beauty to dye their hair blonde or adorn the lobes of their ears with bling, or wear hot pants.

“They knew their place,” as my granny might say.

I reached the age of 21 before I had an intimate conversation with a Travelling person.

When my father died in July of 1976, I drove his old Morris 1100 south on my own, with a small two-pole tent in the back of the car.

I didn’t know where I was going. I just wanted to flee from his grave, and Ireland back then was a world without telephones, so to get away from people all you had to do was drive off down the road.

As I drove south, I imagined Offaly as if it were Kentucky, Birr as if it were Kansas, and I camped on the Cliffs of Moher like I was on the lip of the Grand Canyon.

And by simply moving from place to mythic place on my pilgrimage of forgetfulness, I opened a door to the other world where my father was sleeping.

That night, in a pub, I met a Traveller with a banjo, who had no place to stay and was only delighted to accept the offer of my tent.

The tent was just big enough for one. So I slept in the car. And he slept with his legs sticking out of the tiny canvas house.

However, neither of us could sleep beneath the rising sun, so we lit a fire and spent the morning discussing banjos and guitars.

But Ireland is different now. The hills are flattened, and the valleys filled in, and the coastline is plastered with tar and cement and holiday homes.

Every flat, grassy expanse where Travellers halted for decades has been neatly edged

with boulders so that no one can ever halt there, or light a fire there, or dream there again.

When you consider that the earth was greatly ruined by the invention of plastic, and consider the cement required for the four-lane toll-road that will soon cut through the complex halls of Tara, it’s comical to hear people complain of Travellers blighting the landscape.

Admittedly, the roads are better now for big cars, but the mythic dimensions of Ireland have shrunk, and there are no hiding places left for the soul.

And yet, occasionally, when I see a white caravan glistening in the sunlight, or slipping past in the night as ominous as a pallid horse, I think about the week my father died, and the fire on the side of the road near the cliffs of Moher, with a stranger whose memory I cherish as dearly as my father’s ghost.