Terry Prone: Heritage Week trail brought 472 strangers through my home last week
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Not wanting to boast, but I figure I am the only Irish Examiner columnist whose bedroom was visited by 472 total strangers in the past week.
The visits were occasioned by Heritage Week, during which my Martello tower joins countless other heritage sites in opening up for tours. Tours every hour on the hour from 9am. Sometimes made up of one large family, sometimes of three groups of unrelated adults.
In age, a mix, going from 89-year-olds right down to six-month-olds in papooses attached to a parent. All with different motivations.
One day last week, we had a sudden glut of tours piling up without notice and the second group announced that they were all staying in Ger Lynders’ mobile home park next door and the first group had texted the later groups that the tour was not to be missed.
Many of the visitors holidayed in Portrane as children, looking up at the hulking, looming shape of the tower and wondering what it was like inside.
Godawful, at that time, is the short answer, because the people who owned the tower then seem to have hated the fact that it was a tower, scrunching into it those little details so reminiscent of the 1950s like electric fires with pretend flames.
They also covered up all the blue limestone from which it was built with cement, plaster, masonry, plasterboard — and, for all I know, powdered pig bones from the 19th century piggery in the ground.
We tell the visitors about the shot-blaster who peeled off all the garbage that had been applied to the walls, about the structural engineer who worried about the strength of the second floor, which is now buttressed with steel beams hidden in the 200-year-old wooden ones, and about how Bryan found the spiral staircase that had been bricked into a wall. (Bryan Greene worked with the building company that renovated the tower 15 years ago and now keeps it reasonably presentable with painting and gardening.)
We tell them about the heritage officers from Fingal County Council who watched over the restoration of the building and who suspected us of evil intent until we proved we wanted to do right by the tower.
Heritage Week visitors wonder aloud as they’re encouraged to enter the bedroom and admire the view from my bed.
Do I not hate the invasion of privacy?
I am always taken aback by this worry: Unless you have an over-bed swing or mirrors in the ceiling, I can’t see that the actual physical structure of a bedroom is that private.
Visitors may be disappointed that I have a cheap bed cover from TK Maxx and that I don’t have 17 satin pillows pleasingly arranged on the bed, but they get over it.
The questions vary, but some recur.
“How many books do you have?” Answer: 15,000, give or take.
“Have you read them all?” Answer: Pretty much. Which averages at about 300 a year over 50 years. Not a lot, really, for a card-carrying recluse.
“How many pairs of shoes do you own?”
Answer: 83. Once upon a time, I had 156, but I began to see reason in recent years. Not much reason, admittedly.
Bryan, who takes care of the gardens around the tower, shares the tour-leading with me and the two of us have a common dread: That someone on one of the tours will know more about the history than we do.
That happened last week when Wayne, the guy who owns the Coffee Carriage up on the Fingal County Council viewing place behind the tower, turned out to be an expert on the RMS Tayleur, the ship known as the “first Titanic” that went down off Lambay on its maiden voyage in 1854 with the loss of nearly 400 souls. But a guy who brings a gift of chocolate cake and wild strawberries — as he did — can be permitted to be expert on pretty much anything.
The visitors go up the spiral staircase to the roof, from the first floor, where the single bedroom is, beginning to understand that when you have walls that are nine feet thick, the interior of a tower can be pretty pokey.
Once they’ve taken photographs from the roof, they come all the way back down, sign the visitors’ book and make comments in it, then head out for a tour of the gardens with Bryan.
He could be telling them he has a secret marijuana breed in the boathouse for all I care.
The minute they’re out the door, I’m up the stairs to pull the curtains and get the place ready for the next group.
The timing is crucial and outside of our control. Some groups arrive 10 minutes before a tour, only to find that the group with whom they’re sharing that tour arrives 10 minutes after the designated time. Which generates a need for coffee and a kind of busking, to keep the first group from getting cross, entitled as they are to get extremely cross. They never do, though.
That’s one of the things we’ve learned from Heritage Week. People who come to visit an old building tend to be warm, rather than exigent, in their expectations and attitudes.
Deeply kind and fundamentally lawless, they are, too. Irish people are brilliant at anonymous enmity but brilliant at kindness to strangers when the strangers are right in front of them.
Groups visiting the tower silently note human discrepancies. The child whose special needs are not obvious but nonetheless inescapable. The elderly lady whose response to the opening spiel about Martello is subtly off. The man with the softly slurred speech and the high-tech walking sticks.
If anyone can’t handle the spiral staircase, someone always volunteers to stay on the ground floor with them. But that’s my job. The cause can be neurological conditions, a recent knee replacement or claustrophobia.
Last week, one woman in her early 40s couldn’t handle the longer flight of stairs, turning to show me her hands. Young hands warped — she explained — by psoriatic arthritis over 25 years, as are her feet.
When the group came back downstairs, they were at pains to tell her what could be seen from the roof and offer to help her around the garden.
The fundamentally lawless trait surfaces when they book in. No, we tell them, we can’t take the number they want us to take. It isn’t safe. Ah, just one over the safe number would be no harm, they tell us.
No, we say. Unsafe.
So they pretend to accept and then turn up with the extra person anyway, confident in the Irish blackmail that “they won’t make a scene in public”.
Heritage Week means seeing your old building anew and having your delight in it reaffirmed. On Sunday night, as the last tour exited, I was grateful it happened. And twice as grateful it won’t happen again until this time next year.