By John Fitzgerald
(Part Two)
As a rule, mariners shunned the North Side of the King’s River, despite the attractive potential berth located at the bottom of the steps at the rear of Mickey Kealy’s house. Boatmen also avoided sailing on the side of the river under Kealy’s hay barn. One possible deterrent, according to veteran boatmen, was the risk of navigating around the famous Callan Stone.
Some river men, discussing it around blazing turf fires or in the pubs, darkly compared it to the perilous Tusker Rock, and were loathe to tempt providence by venturing close to it in the water. No one in Callan knows how the stone came to be in the river.
A rumour to the effect that the four-pound man threw it in over the bridge in his younger days was proved unfounded after men older than him recalled it was there before he ever set foot in Callan at the turn of the century.
The stone, though not much talked about these days, was once dear to the hearts of Callan folk, much as the Blarney stone is treasured by Cork people. Anyone who had never stood on the stone could not rightfully claim to have been in Callan, and that sacred rule knew no exceptions.
The local wise men and women deemed even people resident in the town or any part of its catchment area for many years, or generations, to be non-citizens of Callan until they had set foot upon the Callan Stone.
The early fifties witnessed a notable breakthrough-the last of its kind- by local mariners. In 1951, Sean Holden launched The Niall Caille, on the King’s River.
Named in honour of the Monarch who allegedly drowned in Callan, the craft had the distinction of being one of the strangest and most original vessels ever to sail under the Big Bridge.
The story of how the boat came to be built is already the stuff of legend in Callan. Word reached Sean at his workshop in Mill Street that a fuel tank from an American B-17 heavy bomber was about to be consigned to a scrap heap.
A close confidante of the well-known carpenter, who had met him during the Emergency, tipped off Sean that the tank could be delivered to him for re-cycling purposes if he had a use for it.
Sean immediately instructed three of his apprentices to drive up to the midlands to rescue the unwanted fuel tank. From his experience as an intelligence officer in the Callan LDF (Local Defence Force), he knew that fuel tanks from American bombers could be converted to make excellent cattle or pig troughs for farmers.
But he was aware also that they would make ideal water craft, as the tanks had proven themselves sea worthy when jettisoned over the Atlantic and the Pacific during the war.
When you neatly sliced the fuel tank in two, you had a pair of canoe-shaped metallic containers to press into service either as state of the art farming contrivances or as makeshift sea or river craft.
Sean, with some help from his brother Haulie, and applying the proverbial Wisdom of Solomon, cut the large empty container in half with a hacksaw.
One half would suffice as a trough, they decided, and this found its way onto the land of a local farmer who admired the skill and proficiency that had gone into fashioning a nifty feeding apparatus for his cattle.
Little did he know that it had seen action in 1944 at the height of the US air force’s unrelenting attacks on German industry.
Bullet holes punched by German fighter planes and framed by circles of rust had been neatly patched and repaired by the enterprising duo. These caused no hitches whatever for the farmer: The trough stood the test of time, serving his herd until well into the sixties.
But the other half of the tank- the part free of bullet holes and other damage inflicted by the German war machine, became the object of close scrutiny and detailed on-the-spot analysis in the workshop. Sean lined the inner sides and sharp edges (created by the hacksaw) of the boat with wood. He painted the boat red- it was the colour of his favourite flower, the rose.
Members of the Town Development Association, local clergy, the nuns, and flag-waving locals gathered along a stretch of riverbank in the Moat field for the launch. The boat resembled an extra large canoe and could take three people at a time.
A loud cheer went up as the craft splashed onto the Avonree. In the days and weeks that followed, many townspeople took to the water in Sean’s boat.
They swore by its comfort and reliability. Nobody was ever refused a trip on the Niall Caille, and it was a familiar sight on the river even when not in service. After its first year, Sean donated the sturdy craft to the community. The only rule to be observed by each person who used it was that it be tied securely to the riverbank after a cruise.
The only mishap with the boat involved a visitor to town who lost his balance in the vessel as he attempted to demonstrate his sparring skills to a man who “dared” him from the Big Bridge.
Standing in the craft, he punched the warm summer air in jest, calling the other man’s attention to a match he had fought. The boat rocked back and forth perilously.
Sean, who adhered to a “safety first” code in all his maritime dealings, admonished the naïve young thrill-seeker from the abbey meadow riverbank: “Don’t mind him”, he shouted, “concentrate on the boat or you’ll come a cropper.” Too late, the boat keeled over and the man fell into the raging torrent.
Luckily, Sean and three other members of the Town Development Association acted quickly. They shouted at the gentleman to stay calm… to refrain from thrashing about in the river. Expert swimmers rescued him from the choppy waters and after a little mouth-to-mouth resuscitation he was back in top form again.
The Niall Caille brought joy to many locals throughout its four-year presence on the river. But Sean, in consultation with the Town Elders, decided to scuttle it after a sharp object perforated its bottom near the Dark Walk.
The scuttling committee took the boat to an undisclosed section of the river where it was weighed down with rocks and sunk. The people of Callan sadly missed their leisure craft. It had won its way into their hearts and the town would never be the same again without it.
The recreational use of boats in the river declined in the years that followed, and had virtually died out by the late1950s, apart from a number of low-key unsuccessful attempts about which the less said the better.
In the seventies, a large boat that took fourteen months to build on the Fair Green literally fell apart when it hit the water. The unofficial public…house inquiry into the cause of its premature demise lasted longer- about thirty years.
The King’s River today is a lot quieter than it was in the first half of the twentieth century. The fish have it to themselves. Our Mariners have gone to sail on that great ocean in the sky, far away from today’s hi tech society, where such characters are few and far between.
In 1958, Peter Roughan lamented their passing:
The waters flow on
In their race to the sea,
But the boats are all gone
From the calm Avonree.
