Week Two, Burtown House, Athy, County Kildare, Ireland

The view of the stable houses from the nut grove.

 This week at Burtown we spent a great deal of time in the Grove, clearing ivy and other difficult rhizomes, saplings, nettles, etc. It's soggy, tedious work best done on the hands and knees with gloved fingertips.  And it's rewarding to step back and admire your small patch of temporarily ivy free forest floor.  I've a new appreciation for ivy's reproduction and propagation techniques, it's a wonder it doesn't cover the entire planet.  After the collapse it'll be feral house cats hunting in rolling brambles of ivy spilling out of crumbling skyscrapers.  Forevermore I will do my best to impede the spread of ivy.
 

Messy work.

Anyways, on Thursday evening we rode a loaner tandem bike into Athy (5 miles) to hear the weekly traditional music session.  The bicycle built for two turned out to be totally road worthy and we cruised to town in less than half an hour (Ireland's pretty flat). We were able to store the bike in the back bar without a bother and sat down to two and half hours of uninterrupted music.

This is the second week we have gone. Words almost can't express how amazing it is. Clancy's pub has Ireland's longest running free traditional music session - for 45 years Irish musicians have been gathering there, practicing their art and keeping the old songs alive.

The first night we attended there were 14 players with 20 instruments between them - 5 banjos, 2 guitars, 2 mandolins, 2 Irish bagpipes, 1 bodrhan (a drum), 4 tin whistles, 2 flutes, a fiddle and an accordion. There were six spectators, although some of them turned out to be poets/storytellers and singers themselves. Great craic!

This week, again, there were so many musicians filling the tiny session room that there was almost no room for spectators. At times one musician seems to take the lead, jumping into a song without any announcement. He starts to play and as people pick it up, they jump in. Then, when the song seems to come to a close the leader runs right into another. There is a temporary lull as people quickly shift gears and they're on to the next tune. It is so lively. A woman sang a ballad, "Sonny's Dream." It was just her voice and a guitar. But when she came to the chorus the men joined in singing, "Sonny don't go away, ...." The room was totally filled with men's voices, it was so resonant and sad.

We'll have one last opportunity to visit Clancy's this Thursday and we'll be there again.  Live music has certainly been a highlight of the trip and Clancy's has been the best of it.

Stay tuned for this week's photo appendix, including a trip to Smithwick's Brewery in Kilkenny and some artsy fartsy shots from around the grounds.