Stirred by memories of green and gold

THE one remaining regular reader of this column will know of my love for Ballyhea, a love that has been sorely tested by a succession of personal rebuffs in recent years, the price regularly paid for being part of the large and passionate family that goes to make up any decent GAA parish.

Before Ballyhea, however, and ever since, there was another love, and no, it wasn’t Newmarket, where I was born in 1953, nor was it Mitchelstown, to where my father moved the family when he was transferred two years later from Kanturk Vocational School to take up a post in that famous football town.

It was Castletownroche, my father’s parish, also the parish of my mother after her father had finished his wanderings in New York and bought a farm outside the village, a mile or so from where the Awbeg meets the Blackwater.