On the quiet lanes and roads of Cork, road bowling is surviving in changed times

Time was that road bowling wasn’t so much a tradition in Cork as a birthright. It’s a sport surviving in changed times and changed lives, but only just. Isn’t there an onus on us all to preserve native tradition and heritage?

A few weeks ago a corner of Twitter was lit up by the quiet lanes of rural Cork.

Some landmarks from Séamus Ó Tuama’s bowling column — the new house, the corner — in this paper were held up on the social media site as a still point in a turning world, comforting and stable in a whirl of uncertainty.