Family Fortunes: Long Limerick summers of salmon, song and swimming

We felt a cut above the rest when we were young. The Russian advantaged might have had their dachas on the Black Sea, but we too had a summer residence, albeit in the more humble form of a timber hut in a picturesque spot called Corbally, upstream from Limerick city.

No need for fancy names such as chalets or villas; these were simple two-room timber constructions, used mostly as weekend summer retreats, where a small community of families pleasantly disported themselves in a still-unpolluted Shannon. Kettles could still be safely filled from the river; trout and salmon abounded. The living was easy.

We had our own boat, and, having learned to swim from an early age, we were allowed to explore the river and the adjacent St Thomas’s Island, with its ruined mansion and castle. The big Guinness barges that brought stout to a thirsty city provided us with waves as they swept towards the canal harbour.

The Tail Race, the canal below Ardnacrusha dam, with its 40ft of water, was forbidden, but for us children the thrill was too much, and we dived from its cliffs and picked up the odd salmon that had been injured while trying to negotiate the turbines.

Fishing with my father one day, we landed a salmon. He put it in the locker of the boat, for a purpose. When we came ashore there was a crowd outside Cowhey’s hut (their neighbour in the city, Angela McCourt, was a regular visitor) and I grabbed the fish and proudly displayed it to the admiring throng. “You fool,” Dad said as we got to our hut. “Didn’t you know I have no fishing licence?”

Fortunes have been made from accounts of miserable childhoods, but ours was anything but. We knew and loved that bountiful river, and the night-time sounds of an accordion from one of the huts evocatively carrying across the water as a wraith-like mist denoted another fine day. The poet Gerald Griffin loved it, too: “Hail our own majestic stream / flowing ever / flowing ever / silent in the morning beam / our own beloved river.”

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