Hobnail boots on a country road in Connemara. We counted the steps in sound. Each step sending a thud into the night time sky. Echoes across a silent rural townland. A neighbour’s walk to a neighbour’s house. Christmas Eve.
Pádraig Shéamuis Mhóir was our neighbour a few rough and stone clad fields from our house. Surely on Christmas Eve he would hit the road as far as another neighbour known as Pat Shéamuis Pháid an Gheata.
People were known by their antecedents’ Christian names in the Connemara Gaeltacht; they still are. Pádraig Shéamuis Mhóir’s surname was Cosgrave and Pat’s surname was Conneely.
The ‘geata’, or gate, came into his lineage because it appears his grandfather had a gate on his property which was very rare in those far off times.
Footsteps in hobnail boots
Both men were childhood friends and I think they spent some time together working in Clydebank in Scotland, where many Connemara men found employment in the past.
As children we were fascinated by the thud, thud, thud of the hobnail boots moving along to their destination road until they faded into Pat’s home and fireside.
There must have been times when the rain was swept in torrents from the Atlantic on Christmas Eve. But the ones we, as children, remembered were the nights when a full moon, sometimes battered by windswept clouds, provided a Christmas lamp in the darkness.
And the hobnail boots would thud and thud.
The sound of hobnail boots has almost been silenced. I think the ones of old were made by Governeys of Carlow. They were sometimes simply called ‘Governeys’. Soon they may only be seen as old mementos.
Memories
In our windswept place where the mountains meet the sea we have a centre honouring our emigrants – The Emigrants and Diaspora Centre in Carna in Connemara. A pair of hobnail boots are among the artefacts.
I noticed one day last summer a visiting lady looking a lot at the hobnail boots. Why was she so interested? It was about her father.
“My father never had a pair of shoes”, she explained in a voice which had traces of an American accent. But she was Ukrainian and she had lived in California for many years.
“Yes”, she said verifying her first statement. “he never had shoes. It was a long time ago and there was poverty”.
With that memory in her heart she always had a fascination for shoes. If only that poor man had shoes or hobnail boots, every day would have been Christmas.
Talking about special days, and still anchoring our boots in the area of Carna in the west Connemara Gaeltacht, there was a story about a man around here who had a special relationship with his footwear.
He came from a local island and each year he would head for the St. MacDara’s Day pilgrimage and festivities. St MacDara is the patron saint of this area and his July 16 feast day is considered a ‘national holiday’ in in these parts.
So the man from the island, as he was heading for the festivities, used to go into a local shop in the village and buy a pair of shoes. That was fine.
When he got outside the door he would throw off the old shoes, put on the new shoes and then, in one wild swipe through the air, he would fling the old shoes over the wall on the far side of the road.
There, they would join several other pairs that he had flung to the wind in the same routine that went on year after year. But there was more to the shoes than met the eye.
The island man was a sean nós (old style) step dancer and he knew he would be asked upon the stage to perform. There was no way the assembled crowd were going to see him in old shoes, even though he must have suffered blisters as he danced whatever music was thrown at him in brand new shoes.
It might be a topic of conversation as another Christmas makes its way onto the calendar.
Sometimes as Christmas beckons again, I wonder what the conversation was between our neighbours Pádraic Shéamuis Mhóir and Pat Shéamuis Pháid. A year had passed, many years had passed. They were surely recounted and recalled.
Now, we who listened to the hobnail boots have reason to recount and recall too. And somehow still, there is distant sound that steals into the mind and memory on Christmas Eve. Hobnail boots on a country road in Connemara.