Terry Prone: A Heritage Week tower trip with feline friends

People who have never been inside a Martello tower decide Heritage Week is their chance. People who have been in several such towers regard this as a compare-and-contrast opportunity

Dino, Terry Prone's cat, on the roof of her Martello tower, where he leads guests up the spiral staircase.

"Now, ladies and gentlemen, please pay close attention to what I’m going to tell you, because it’s pivotal to your safety. You’re about to ascend two spiral staircases. First a short one, then a quite long one to the roof.

“Easy, you might think, looking at them. The stone is even scored, to make each step less slippery.

“But here’s the history of them. These stone steps were carved out for soldiers — many of them press-ganged — stationed in Ireland at the time Napoleon was regarded by Ireland’s rulers as a great threat.

They were designed, bluntly, for the products of the British slums of the time: Undernourished lads stunted by cigarettes. They were short and skinny. 

"We’re built on a different scale and that’s why these spiral staircases need to be carefully managed. 

"Please walk on the outside, where they are broader. And take your time. You good with that? Right. Let’s get to the first floor.” 

That health and safety speech has already been made, this weekend, to dozens of visitors and will be made every day for the next seven days, because this is Heritage Week, when my gardening and painting friend Bryan and I will repeatedly take overseas tourists and natives through my Martello tower.

The oddity is that although many of the built environment treasures people get to see during this specially-designated week are, in fact, open on many other days during the summer, once the details go up on heritageweek.ie, the stretched nine-day week seems to give people a sense of possibility they otherwise might not have.

Terry Prone inside her Martello tower. Picture: Ruth Medjber

People who have never been inside a Martello tower decide this is their chance. People who have been in several such towers regard this week as offering a compare-and-contrast opportunity.

This probably applies to many of the other old buildings on the list.

Booking the visitors in for the tour is Bryan’s job, and takes years off his life because this is not a man who enjoys saying no. But now and again he has to brace himself and do it.

No, we can’t take a tour with 14 people, eight of them under five.

No, we can’t take a tour at that particular time because another tour is already in that slot.

No, we can’t take a tour 10 minutes before closing time because the tour itself takes a minimum of 40 minutes. More, if the group is inquisitive.

This year’s tours are slightly complicated by me puppy-sitting. All together now, “Aah”.

Except that this puppy is the size of a polar bear and if he wants to express enthusiasm, you’d better either be six and a half feet tall and north of a hundred kilos, or sitting in a low chair so he can’t knock you down.

If you have builders’ reinforced boots handy, that helps, too, because when he stands on you to convey his love, it’s foot-crushing.

The puppy on his own would be manageable, but he is determined to play with the two cats and they’re having none of it.

Like any dysfunctional relationship, however, they seem incapable of leaving him the hell alone.

Instead, they stalk him and when this convinces him that they want to be pals, he starts the bowing and scraping puppies do when they want to be friends, which, in fairness, must be pretty scary to a cat who’s maybe a quarter of this dog’s size.

Reaction: Dino bares his teeth and hisses like a snake, while Specs, a card-carrying and committed coward, whinges in feline and lets her brother do the heavy swiping.

None of this deflects Dino from his self-chosen starring role in tours.

He leads guests up the spiral staircase, invites them into my bedroom, and heads out onto the roof ahead of them, jumping up on the perimeter to show off.

This worries the visitors who like cats, because the slope is extreme and the drop to a cobbled path is far below.

The ones who don’t like cats look hopeful that Dino will lose his footing, or whatever you call a cat’s grip on a smooth surface, but they pretend concern.

Their dislike provokes Dino into delivering personalised attention to each cat-hating individual.

He circles their ankles and meows up at them with that expressionless menace peculiar to cats.

Bryan and I check, before we start the tour, as to how much knowledge our guests have of Martello towers.

The ones we like best are those who shrug shamefacedly as if it was an oral exam they expected to fail and say “They were fortresses, weren’t they? To defend against the — the — the Spanish?” In fact, it was the French, and more specifically Napoleon.

Stubby towers

The stubby towers went up in an amazingly short period at the start of the 19th century.

Mine was completed in 1806, the cannon on the roof smoothly circling on an iron hoop, ready to make bits of any French ships that came near Portrane.

Unfortunately, at some point, the cannon was removed and in its place on the roof, when we bought the tower, was a jacuzzi.

We tell visitors about the crane removing it, and some of them look disappointed.

No other tower, to our knowledge, boasts a jacuzzi and very few have cannons, although the exception is one on the south side where every now and again, the owner does pageants and makes them do their stuff, which would be a lot more evocative of the past than a jacuzzi.

Most of the cannons seem to have been lifted off the top of the towers and brought to Beggar’s Bush, where, all shiny, black, and standing on their heads, they form the boundary outside the National Print Museum.

It’s both an advantage and a disadvantage that Portrane is one of the few towers that is surrounded by its own lands.

The one in Red Rock in Sutton, for example, stands squarely on the shore and the sea comes in around it every day.

Mine, on the other hand, has grounds filled with circular berms that look like fairy rings but probably aren’t.

It also has extensive flower beds of a vaguely Victorian cast which cause friction between me and Bryan, because he would re-wild the whole place in order to keep the bees and the hedgehogs happy.

I keep telling him that bees are never happy and that I don’t quite believe his claims of running hedgehog hotels under the pampas grass.

Nearly two decades I’ve been here and have never seen a hedgehog.

The comments from visitors range from positive to priceless.

This weekend, when the tour script described the Martellos as the biggest financial error ever made by the British admiralty, which spent thousands of millions to build 78 of them, one of the visitors muttered that it was a pity they didn’t have Public Accounts Committee at the time.

He had a point.