Forging a name for himself in Paradise
Incredibly, there was a spreading chestnut tree curved like a whispering umbrella over the forge. Just like the poem. Tom O’Sullivan, though, then in his middle age, was not like the mighty brawny smith in the lyrics. He was a wiry, handy class of a man, with a bright intelligent face, and a quick gait. A lovely man.
That meeting was well over 30 years ago. They buried him, at the age of 87 years, in the local Kilchreest graveyard last Saturday. He worked in his forge until a few months ago. He was by far the oldest practicing traditional blacksmith in Clare.
He brought me outside the forge, at that first meeting he reached up and pulled down a branch of the chestnut tree. It was autumn, and the leaves were already yellowing and russet. “Look,” he said, “Those are the tracks of the hooves of the fairies’ horses.!”
And he pointed with his forefinger. Indeed, the growth marks on the twigs bear the exact image of miniature horses’ hooves. Is that, I wonder, why the trees are called horse chestnut trees? I still don’t know the answer to that one today.
I wrote a story later for The Irish Press about the chat we had. Tom was the fifth generation of his family to work the anvil. He was still shoeing horses at that time, but it was a dwindling element of his trade, and he had already diversified. The first O’Sullivan blacksmiths did not have access to electric welders, but Tom took to the skill like a duck to water, and built up a regional reputation as a man who could skilfully mend all types of the farm machinery that was taking over from working horses.
The forge was always busy any time I called, in the decades that followed. He was also a craftsman who produced garden furniture of such merit that examples of his work are displayed today in the Clare County Museum. The heavy iron wheels of old mowing machines, for example, became the central feature of his garden seats. And everything he made was “branded” with the famed scrolled O’Sullivan brand. The touch of the master’s hand.
He was the much-loved father of the village in the end, a source of all the folklore and yarns. When Father Tom O’Dea said his requiem mass to a crowded Christ The King chapel in Ballycorick, and when his son Declan spoke praise of his father from the altar, half the congregation shed tears, not just his widow Peggy, and Declan’s four sisters.
As the cortege left for the graveyard, it stopped at the little forge under the chestnut tree. The door was open. The fire blazed within, beside the anvil. The tools of an honest and gifted lifetime stood to attention at the door. Michael Griffin and his aides had seen to that.
When the hearse pulled into Kilchreest graveyard, it passed between the heavy black steel gates, scrolled and sturdy and freshly painted, which had been smithed in his day by Tom’s father, also named Tom.
And many stopped to admire them, when the funeral was over.
And the hooves of the faery horses rustled amongst the yellow leaves over the forge down the road.
And would ye believe, that the name of the next townland is Paradise? So Tom O’Sullivan had a very short distance to travel to his eternal reward.
