Cavanman's Diary: 'Along the Finn, there riz a din...'

Cavanman's Diary

When I was in school, someone – a future county footballer whose interests, even then, lay solely on the football pitch, seeking relentlessly to improve, the ball an accomplice in all manoeuvres – asked me what was so good about fishing.

“There’s nothing like it,” I said, searching for a metaphor related to the pursuit of perfection with the O’Neill’s Size 5.

I told him that when you land a fish it’s like scoring a good point. You keep making the runs and nothing is happening and next thing you know, you’re on and you get a rush of adrenaline. And if it’s a big fish, it’s as good as scoring the winning goal in a county final. You’ll never forget it.

I was hooked on fishing back then and, all of a sudden, I quit. A couple of years ago, I got a rod as a present and give it a go again but I didn’t keep it up. Didn’t, that was, until last week when a few of us decided to head out for the day.

We started at Killabandrick, outside Redhills, which is well appointed with jetties along the shore but didn’t seem so well appointed with fish so, after a while, we left.

From there, we headed for Keeny, a remote lake not far from Cloverhill, close to the old railway line and national school.

The last time I was at Keeny lake was on July 3, 1998. I know this for a fact because I came home, empty-handed, and watched France defeat Italy on penalties in the World Cup.

Nothing has changed since. It’s still weedy and you’ll spend a lot of time reeling in snags but there are big pike there, too, if only you could figure out how to lure them.

It was time for lunch and then off to Annies Bridge, outside Scotshouse. This is where I did most of my fishing as a teenager; I don’t know why because the fishing never seemed to be great there but it’s a beautiful place.

The bridge itself skirts the border. The fishing in on the Monaghan side; the opposite bank is Fermanagh. The bridge was built around 1860 and, if it could talk, what a story it would tell.

“The work of skilled craftsmen is displayed in this bridge, particularly in the execution of the stone work to the voussoirs and cutwaters, which make it visually appealing,” reads a note in the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage.

The next line is most interesting.

“It is of additional social and political significance,” it says, “as it crosses the border between the two jurisdictions on the island.”

There is a lot more to this location than just fishing. The entire area is steeped in history. The ancient names of the surrounding townlands - Cloncumber, Corriskea, Lisabuck, Corcummins and so on – tell as much and the townland of Annies itself backs on the Hilton Demense.

The River Finn rises near Roslea and flows into the Erne at Derrykerrib, meandering through Cavan, Monaghan and Fermanagh. At one point, it cuts off Drumully, through which the “broad road” runs. This was thought to be a “ballybetagh”, a territorial unit of 16 townlands under the rule of a single family.

It wasn’t far from here, at Drumswords near Scotshouse, that, in 1828, an Orangeman was disinterred and posthumously hung from a tree, as Frank McNally wrote about in his Irishman’s Diary in the Irish Times.

How long have people crossed the river here? A silver coin “the size of a half crown”, dated 1376, was found at Annies Bridge…

Back in 1923, two men were convicted of stealing timber from ‘the big house’, Hilton Estate. They plundered a couple of ash trees and made their getaway down in the direction of ‘the Annies’ and, presumably, across the newly-formed border.

But this was late February and it had rained heavily for the previous couple of nights. Their carts left track marks on the muddy lanes, the deeper ones – from when they were fully loaded with Colonel Madden’s ash trees – easily discernible as going in the opposite direction to the light ones.

In the last century, the Finn (“Along the Finn there riz a din, when Cavan had a team…” is the opening line of a long-gone song, Shane Connaughton told me) was most famous for smuggling.

“We would go to Mrs Nicholl’s shop at the Finn Bridge,” Shane recalled in an interview on these pages in 2013, when the Garda barracks in Redhills in which he’d grown up was closing.

“You’d buy a pound of Lough Egish butter there, which was made in Monaghan, and you’d buy it for two and six, and in Joe McMahon’s it was five bob. You had to smuggle it. Many’s the chase happened on bicycles with the customs men looking for a pound of butter.

“I went down to Mrs Nicholls, she gave me the butter, I gave her the half a crown and I rode the whole way home and back in here and I never tried to hide it, and my father went mad. He said ‘ya bloody idiot, couldn’t you have done what everybody else does, at least cover it up’.

“If I had been stopped! A sergeant’s son smuggling butter… It was a common thing. There were men drowned on the Finn at Clonandra smuggling butter and sugar.”

‘The Annies’ is a couple of miles upstream of Clonandra, incidentally, which is near Leggykelly.

In the early 1970s, the bridge was spiked and closed but, unlike some others, never blown up. Contractors came in from Enniskillen for this job and were guarded by RUC men armed with Sten guns.

A theory back then, true or not I don’t know, as to why the bridge was never rendered permanently out of use was that some of the land surrounding it was owned by wealthy Protestant farmers.

An article in Life Magazine, no less, in 1972 had a Provisional IRA volunteer describing in detail how he planted three Claymore mines there, booby-trapping a dummy made up to look like a body. The subsequent explosion caused no fatalities.

In the summer of 1981, a cache of explosives and other military equipment was found here, along with American and British manuals on the use of guns.

The pages of the Anglo-Celt, Northern Standard, Fermanagh Herald and Impartial Reporter newspapers contain countless references to the smuggling at the bridge.

In 1942, it was reported that over 50 men “made a fierce attack on smugglers from Eire who were loading a lorry and car with white loaves, tea, bicycle tyres etc. Sticks and stones were used in the attack and the goods taken away.

“Residents along the border took exception to smugglers increasing the price of white loaves from 5d to 9d and then retailing them for 1s-3d to 1s-6d with the same tactics increasing the price of tea. The smugglers made their escape in their battered lorry and car.”

At one time, farmers heading to the bog in Connons walked their horses across a shallow part of the river to get around the closure of the bridge; the authorities soon erected barbwire to put a stop to it.

There were stories in print of “fat bullocks” being seized and of cyclists being stopped with soap and loaves of bread. Until fairly recently, Redhills people would commonly meet an oil lorry on the northern side of the bridge and fill up on home heating fuel.

But my favourite yarn was a breathless and hilarious page one report in this newspaper from 1958.

“Hundreds of people in the border areas of Monaghan and Cavan were provided with a front seat view of a dramatic motor race last weekend, which had all the thrills and excitement of a professional Grand Prix,” it began.

“The contestants in this thrill-a-minute encounter were the driver of a small 5 cwt can and a high-powered Clones Customs car equipped with radio-telephone and all the modern pharaphenalia [sic] employed in the detection of smuggling.

“The impromptu motor race, believed to be the most dramatic and gruelling in the eventful history of smuggling in this country, took place in the early hours of Friday morning and centred mostly around the lanes and byways of Cavan and Monaghan between the towns of Clones and Cootehill.

“Skid marks are still to be seen at bends and crossroads along the 20-mile long arena.”

It was fair day in Cootehill and, the report concluded, “the two-and-a-half hour speed test was the chief topic at Cootehill fair and, between deals, farmers shouted to one another ‘did they catch the smuggler?’”.

Alas, the smugglers, on that day, were like the pike the day we visited – they got away… But like them, we might be back before the summer is out…