Page 143 - Greystones Archaeological Historical Society

GREYSTONES ARCHAEOLOGICAL & HISTORICAL SOCIETY JOURNAL VOLUME 8

eighteen and had just completed his first year at university.

It was here, after we had moved to Mrs George Archer’s
cottage at number two in the Bawn for the summer months, as
we had done for many years previously - although Billy lived with
our Grandfather McKenzie in the shop next to Samuel Ferns’
draper’s shop in front of the Holy Faith Convent - that we stripped
and ‘gowed up’ the hooks after coming from fishing and spread
our cotton lines to dry.

And in the evenings, or on days we didn’t go to fish, when by
then the ‘Cúl of the Rock’ was just a broad shingle bank, we
played ‘quaits’, pitching flat, palm-sized, rounded stones picked
from about our feet from one ‘motte’ to another set twenty paces
away, in a game that was pretty unique to the fishermen of
Greystones in our time.

What is ineffably sad now is that, when the opportunity arose
in the recent award-winning harbour construction project to
restore the depth of water tight into the lee of the rock that was
at the very heart of the original vision of a harbour that could offer
safety to all seafarers coming to shore, to acknowledge it for
posterity as being the seed from which this town grew, it was
instead irrevocably in-filled and the basin and the rock were
buried.

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