I grew up in Co Carlow, in an area between Carlow Town and Bunclody over the border in Wexford. I’ve written a book about this area. It’s called Three Miles of Road.

There’s a place in the area known as the Fighting Cocks and there’s a pub by the same name there that’s pretty well known. It’s the same townland as where the Ploughing was in 2019, Ballintrane.

It’s a book of short stories about the people who lived along the road and the people who travelled it for work – the postman, the coal man and insurance man, all those guys.

It’s mostly about characters, about people. These people, they could be from anywhere. The same type of characters are all over the country and the same happenings take place all over the country.

Most of it’s set back in the 50s, 60s and 70s. There are a few stories that reference more recent times. I was growing up in the 50s, in the 60s I was a young teenager and in the 70s I was grown up.

Writing

Writing a book wasn’t really a lifelong ambition of mine.

Generally, I’d be busy with farming and I have an engineering company, so I wouldn’t have thought about it down through the years. But I suppose in the latter few years I did.

The local radio here, KCLR, they ran a short story competition and I actually won it. That encouraged me. I had a few stories published in books of compilations of short stories.

I did a writing workshop in the local library in Carlow. As part of that I wrote some stories. When I had a few written, I said, maybe there’s a book in this. I ended up with 59 different short stories about different events and different people.

When you start writing about something and you revisit the events of a good many years ago, it brings back memories and you enjoy it. A lot of the characters I’m talking about have passed on. You relive your experiences with people. It’s almost like meeting those people again.

In the book, now, I didn’t dwell too much on the drudgery and the hardships. I look more at the entertainment that went on and the colourful characters.

But there is a story in it about a local farmer whose farm I was picking potatoes on. He died at the table and I was very young at the time. My father and a few more neighbours dug the grave for him.

The following Christmas came and that man’s son brought two geese down for the Christmas dinner and a few heads of cabbage. There was certainly no question of payment, but you were paid in kind.

People lived very much together. People would be at the crossroads in the evening. They’d have much more contact than they would nowadays.

Farm and family

I grew up on a small farm. It was spread across three different townlands, a bit of land here and a bit of land there. My father worked as well with other farmers, that type of thing. As time went on my father would have bought a bit of land.

That time most farms were mixed. You kept a few cows and sheep, sowed a bit of corn and beet. Of course, in our area there was a good lot of sugar beet.

There were 12 children in the family and I was the 11th. A lot of them were gone off working by the time I was nine or 10. I don’t know if we were ever all in the house together.

Tom's granddaughter, Róisín, reading Three Miles of Road.

My mother always said she had three families? - the first four, the middle four and the younger four. All families were huge that time.

The lads in our family all worked in local engineering companies. Then we started an engineering company of our own called Byrneside, we make hydraulic cylinders. I farm part-time, I keep some sucklers. My son does a lot of it now.

Fighting cocks

I write about it [cock fighting] in the book, there were a few families in the area that kept fighting cocks. I was never at a cock fight. They’d be hardly ever held in the area. Sometimes they’d hold them near the border, the way they’d be able to slip across if the police were after them.

There was also a game called Meggers. It’s horseshoe throwing. It was reputed to come from the time of the Roman army. They would play it when there was a lull in the battle. They used to throw horseshoes at a peg in the ground and see who got it nearest.

There’s a good lot of it in our area. In the 70s, in particular, it got going. It’s still played a bit. Nowadays I think there are special shoes made, but years ago it would have been discarded horseshoes that they were throwing.

Going back the years the pub used to be closed from two to four on a Sunday. The lads at The Fighting Cocks, the pub, some of them wouldn’t want to go home, so they took to playing Meggers. They be near to hand when the pub would open again.”

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