Discover the hanging bath mats of Portrane Tower this Heritage Week

I HAD 14 men in my bedroom this weekend. Separately, for the most part, although two brothers visited on Saturday at the same time.

You could say it’s sad. You could even say it’s not something you wish to read at breakfast on a Monday morning in a respectable newspaper.

Not that the visitation was confined to men. Perish the thought that we’d be sexist. On the contrary, at one point yesterday, three women were in the bedroom, two couples were in the kitchen drinking coffee and tea and eating bikkies, and an organised group with both sexes represented was out in the garden taking slips off the red carnations.

God knows how many will arrive each day for the six remaining days of National Heritage Week, which runs until Sunday. That’s stretching a week, a bit like a baker’s dozen, but who’s going to argue with the Heritage Council, which is behind it all?

Earlier in the year, someone contacted us to ask if we’d like to open our Martello tower to the public during this August week and we said yes, of course. All casual, like. Nearer the time, I cursed a bit, because if you’re a born slob who lives a reasonably reclusive — well, OK, a completely reclusive life — not many people are privy to your grottiness. The man in my life decided a long time ago that as long as I was personally clean, he’d gloss over everything else, although he silently disapproves of the GreenCone into which leftover food goes, to be broken down environmentally into nutrient-rich liquid for the flower beds.

But he doesn’t notice kitchen surfaces not being eye-challenging in their shine or the odd smear on a window. This suits me perfectly. However, when you know you’re going to have total strangers going through your home, you look at it in a different way and try to get it passably clean. I did my best. I even over-fed the cats in the hope that it might discourage them from decimating the local wildlife and presenting the dead bodies to visitors. This is a bothersome aspect of cats at any time, but it seems particularly untimely for Specs and Dino to be very publicly doing away with the natural heritage of the area during this particular week.

I expected a few visitors. The sheer numbers of total strangers eager to see the inside of a Martello added up to a hell of a lot more than a few. They came not single- file but in battalions. They came in family groups and singletons. They came in cars, on bikes, and on foot. Sometimes, two different groups would arrive together, although they never wanted to be taken as belonging to each other. I’d asked my friend Bryan to “drop around just in case two groups came together”. He did. And he stayed. If he hadn’t been a constant presence, I’d have had a queue outside the gate.

As it was, every now and then I had to put visitors in a holding pattern. None of them seemed to mind. In fact, they put the most positive interpretation possible on everything, right down to the cheap biscuits I put in front of them.

“You’ve taken care of every little detail,” one woman said, pointing at the brand on the biscuits: Heritage.

“Never thought anyone would notice,” I truthfully replied.

I could, of course, have told her it was pure coincidence, but that would have lost me the brownie point. Show me a person who willingly loses an unjustified brownie point and I’ll show you a puritanical pain in the ass.

The woman who credited me with brand-value-cohesion was not an exception. For some reason, heritage visitors tend to be positive thinkers. One group told me they had no real interest in Martello towers but loved the name of this one.

“How do you mean, the name of this one?” I asked.

OTHER than Number 7 North, nobody, to my knowledge, had ever put a more official moniker on the Portrane tower. Beaming, one of them opened the Heritage Week booklet, a solid paperback with more than 300 glossy pages in it. Top left, page 133, two biro’d asterisks drew the eye to “Terry&Tom’s Tower”. Somewhere along the line, a casual heading had turned into a title for an historic building. It looked to me like ego on steroids, although most of the visitors seemed to see it as unthreatening and friendly.

But then, most visitors to an historic building, in my experience, assume even your mistakes to be evidence of virtue. On Sunday, I forgot to take the damp bath mats off the Sheila’s Maid hanger in front of the stove before the first group arrived. One of that group seemed to find hanging bath mats the best aspect of the visit.

“It’s so real,” she said.

Of course, some of the mistakes I made I didn’t even notice until after the last tour left. God alone knows what they made of the empty two-litre milk bottle sitting comfortably on top of a book about embroidery in a tapestry chair on the first floor. The minute I saw it, I wanted to run after the most recent group and tell them it was washed and perfectly clean and used for saving the water that would otherwise be wasted by the shower, which runs for about an hour before it gets warm.

Because you don’t want to bore visitors with data with which they’re already familiar, I usually ask people at the start of the tour how much they know about Martellos. One in 10 knows a hell of a lot more than I do and has visited every Martello into which it’s possible to get. Those tours are dead easy, because the visiting expert happily takes up the slack.

At the other end of the scale are people who know not the first thing about them, and somewhere in the middle is the young woman at the weekend who was certain sure they were built to protect Ireland against the Spanish Armada of 1588 (they were built in the 19th century).

Once the tour is under way, the differing interests of the visitors manifest themselves. Younger women like the kitchen and make notes about the built-in coffee maker (I don’t volunteer that the bloody thing is way too complicated and never gets used).

Middle-aged men and women often came to the wee beach in Tower Bay overlooked by the tower and always wanted to get inside. One admitted to having snuck into the grounds over the wall several times in his teens. Some are fascinated by the story, the stone, and the sense of retracing the steps of the invalided soldiers based in the tower in the 1800s — with their own piggery.

If they can, they donate a fiver for an adult, a euro for a pensioner, to help cover the insurance premium to protect them if they fall off the narrow spiral staircases. If they can’t, they don’t.

Have a look at www.heritageweek.ie if you want to know more.