The Trader's Gate

One of the notable features of small towns = large villages in Ireland is how wide is the Main Street. Much wider and with more generous pavements = sidewalks than a few hundred people and/or the passing traffic seems to justify.  This is not to say that through-traffic is unimpeded. 

• Children don't walk to school through the fields anymore, so Mams-Jams are normal at the start and end of each school day. 
• And commute times are much quicker during mid-term breaks 
• Automobile autonomy can jam things up for everybody. _I_ am just nipping in to the pharmacy;  so those double yellow lines fade to invisibility
• There is a papal dispensation at Mass times (more often Saturday evening than Sunday now). Cars can then be abandonned anyhow anywhere near church

In the early 90s, when Motorways were a futuristic fantasy, it was proposed to construct a by-pass round the town of Leixlip 20km West of Dublin. All traffic between Dublin and Galway, Sligo and points on the way and in between had to crawl <cof> <cof> through Leixlip. The Chamber of Commerce was vehemently against the by-pass because they would lose the 'passing trade'.

 Our post-town, pop 700, is prettier and has better amenities than many towns of equivalent size. The demesne wall of Big House occupies one side of Main Street for about half its total length. The Laird has allowed a children's play-ground to be built on a generous enough strip of grass between that wall and the road. Otherwise, the buildings facing onto the street are a mix [half&half?] of artisan cottages and business premises. In some cases, the trader's family still lives above the shop. There are very few front-gardens, with the front door opening right on the pavement. The streetscape therefore conjures something like a series of fortresses glaring rebelliously across at the road at the 4m high walls of The Big House.

Nevertheless, traders gotta trade . . . something and they can't store beer-barrels, barbed-wire, cattle-nuts, gates, bales of sheep fleece, bread, jam, oats, nails out on the street. The bigger houses [the doctor, the parish priest, the bank-manager, the vet] needed somewhere to stable a carriage and a horse or two. Each business thus needed vehicular access to the rear. And each opening needed a gate to keep livestock, stray dogs, over-curious people on the street and not galumphing through the back-yard doing damage to the lawn (if any) and knocking things off or knocking them over.

On 28 October 26, I took The Beloved to the Dublin Train and pause on the way home to clock The Gates. There are about 20 of them along maybe 500m of Main Street.

01 and 02:

03 and 04 

05 and 07

08 & 09

10 and 11

12 and 13

14 and 15 

16 and 17

18 and 19

20  and 21

There's one missing: the Gate to The Big House:

The Blob is notoriously picture-bandwidth averse, but the inventory above has burst through my pixel quota for the year . . . but it's still pretty crappy quality. Even a good snap-shot fails to do justice to the doors of perception and imagination. Each one is worth a perusal pause: 

• the material of each door and the quality of the paint job
• the voussured arches 
• the presence (or absence) of a wicket gate in the fabric of the big gate
• Mrs Doohickey must needs slip out to the pub for a pint of porter . . . for the cake, like
• the stone sheds or mighty hay-barns in back
• the clutter visible, 
• the glorious golden trees 
• the number of undertakers 
• the officiousness of the No Parking signs 

We should all take a minute (or ten) each and every day to really pay attention to the world around us. So much quirky detail deserves a moment as we hurry by to somewhere else.