Colm O'Regan: Olde Photos of Ireland is my new favourite group

A hungry wanderer arrives at a starving village, carrying nothing but an empty pot. 

The villagers, unwilling to share their food, watch as the wanderer fills the pot with water, add a stone, and light a fire, claiming to make “stone soup”. 

After about 300 messages fly around the village WhatsApp and the guards say they’ll “send someone out but don’t have a car available currently”, someone asks about the soup. 

The soup maker says it’s lovely, it only needs a carrot and it will be perfect. 

The villager digs up a carrot they’d been hoarding. The wanderer tastes it again and says it could do with a spud. 

This carries on until many villagers have contribute ingredients like potatoes, onions, and meat. 

Soon, the pot is full of lovely soup. I don’t know what happens after that. Maybe he sells the stone to a venture capitalist for millions. 

But anyway the moral is, we all have little specialities or knowledge that we can share. Sometimes all you need is a catalyst.

My recent version of ‘Stone Soup’ is a photograph group on Facebook. 

Now, olde photos of Ireland groups can be weird places, a place for comments about “forrdiners” or hyper-nostalgia. 

You could have side-by-side photos of Dublin where the city is literally in the middle of the civil war in the old one and still people are saying, “ah, it was better in them days”. 

But there is none of that in the ‘The Old Drone: Norman Ashe Aerial Photographic Collection’. 

Norman Ashe was an Irish photographer and Second World War pilot who took thousands of photos of Ireland from the air in the 1950s and Patrick Kiersey found 1,000 of his plates and is now posting these photos on Facebook.

They are exquisite. They show long forgotten demesnes and woods and countryside that is now built on. It’s tantalising. You want to see what’s beyond the edge. But you can’t. That bit is missing. 

But not knowing everything is, in it’s own way good for you. It forces you to look at what’s in the photograph. It’s like a no-pressure leaving cert geography exam when we looked at grainy black and white photos of rural towns and diagnosed “ribbon development”.

The bittersweetness comes in photos near the edge of towns. You see dotey fields with massive hedges and wild corners that are now ‘mews’ and ‘crescents’ and ‘ways’ that ‘views’ are named after the countryside townlands they swallowed up.

“I hate the way they build houses on lovely countryside, except for when they built my house.”

And the ‘Stone Soup’ bit is people bringing their own knowledge of the area in the bottom left of the photo.

“You can’t see it from here but that used to be a handball alley.”

“Is this your old house @john murphy?” “It is!”

And I think about the aerial photograph of our own farmhouse. It’s buried somewhere in an album. 

You may remember a mid-’80s craze for aerial photos of farmhouses. Some blistering hot day you looked up and saw a small plane and a few weeks later a fella was at the door with the photo, making an offer very few could refuse. 

I can still “picture it”. The angle is unfamiliar, the sheds are a different colour, some trees are smaller some big trees are blissfully unaware of the storm that will hit them in 1988.

I must dig it out. There’s a soup somewhere it would go lovely with.