The Village Read Online Free Page A

have been accompanied by a fanfare of trumpets.
    In another office was a young man with a laughing voice who was always very pleasant, so we gave him great attention.His name was Gabriel and sometimes if I was on early morning duty I would ring him for a chat when the switchboard was quiet. Soon after my arrival in Bandon I met him when I went dancing with some of my friends to the nearby village of Innishannon.
    They had there an old parish hall with a very unusual dancing arrangement. The hall was small but they had overcome this problem by extending the dance-floor outside the building. This dancing space was known as “The Platform”. Early in the evening people danced outside and as it grew cooler they moved indoors, though the big old timber door was left open all night so that couples had the choice of dancing inside or out. When the main crowd was outside, any couple whose dancing gymnastics required extra space could dance in through the open doorway and have the entire hall to themselves.
    As the dance-hall was on the side of the main road, passing motorists stopped and swelled the crowd as the night wore on. Many people sat on the stone wall across the road listening to the music and watching the dancers. The music was provided by records played over an amplification system. There was no entry fee but tickets were sold for a raffle if you wished to try your luck. The hall had a gay carnival atmosphere and I was delighted to have found this source of entertainment. The whole idea – a one-man show in aid of parish funds – was the brainchild of Gabriel: he provided the records, played them, made the announcements, sold the tickets – and succeeded in dancing every dance. On my first night there he swept me off my feet.
    Being five foot seven I had often had to resort to flat shoes to counteract a lack of inches in my boyfriends. But after my second date with the six-foot Gabriel I bought the highest pair of high heels I could find in Bandon. It was an instinctive act of trust in our future, as I must have felt that we would at least wear out one pair of shoes together. From the day of my firstdance there, Innishannon was to become a very important place in my life.

V ILLAGE R OOTS
    I NNISHANNON LAY ON the banks of the river Bandon, cradled in a sheltered valley between wooded hills on the upper reaches of Kinsale harbour. Swans drifted back and forth behind the houses of the village and above them pigeons fluttered from the Gothic windows of an old church tower. This church had changed hands between different denominations down through history but now Catholic, Protestant and French Huguenots slept peacefully together around the ruins, serenaded by the dawn chorus and by the crows coming home in the evening to the wood across the river.
    The Huguenots gave their name to the hill behind the forge, while midway along the main street a hill curved up to the Catholic church whose grey-white steeple looked down over the village. At the western end of the village a Church of Ireland steeple saluted the old square tower where once its faithful had prayed. On calm summer evenings the two elegant steeples and the tower lay reflected in the still waters of the river.
    In medieval times an ancient ford beside the old tower had marked the first point at which animals and wagons could cross the river, so it became a major commercial route linking West Cork to the rest of the county. Innishannon developed around this ford, and grew into a large walled community surrounded by many castles. But when a bridge was built in Bandon in 1610 Innishannon was no longer vital to local commerce and soonafterwards the Bandon garrison destroyed many of its castles. Innishannon was then granted by Cromwell to an Englishman named Thomas Adderley and he built the present village in 1752. He brought in a linen industry and gave free houses to the French Huguenots; he also introduced a silk industry, for which mulberries were grown around