Laois had always seemed to me to be one of the flatter counties. But that was before going around it with a horse and a caravan. In fact, the roads of Laois go up gently and down gently all the time. It would be unfair to sit up on the caravan when the horse is going uphill; and it doesn’t feel right when he’s going downhill, either. And it’s as well to get down and lead the horse in traffic, or going around corners. Thus, the general upshot was that my friend Aideen and myself went for a rather long walk around southeast Laois. In the company of a horse. A very horsey horse. As holidays go, it was the exact opposite of lying beside a swimming pool.
There’s no getting away from it: there’s a lot of work in minding a horse and keeping a caravan shipshape. But it’s pretend work. The inside of the caravan is miniaturized, and you play at “house,” just as you’re playing at traveling. That’s exactly what stressed executives from the Ruhr Valley and Lombardy love about it: the holiday is full of innocent activity. You should see their ecstatic accounts in the visitors’ book at the headquarters of Kilvahan Horse-Drawn Caravans. They send parcels of chocolates and carrots back to the horses. They send them Christmas cards. But I, for one, prefer my horses in the parade ring. Horses smell. Horses come up behind you and snuffle. When Henry at Kilvahan instructed me to prop the horse’s huge foot on my knee and gouge the gunk out of it with a pick, I nearly went home.
Yet the very first thing that happened was that we began to admire the horse. Henry waved us off on our journey at the top of a hill in a little country lane. Birds sang. Honeysuckle swayed in the summer breeze. We were only three miles from our night’s stopping place. Nothing could go wrong. But what Henry didn’t know was that we more or less drove into the ditch any time a motor vehicle passed. Because we didn’t realize that Zulu, quite the wrong name for so peaceable a horse, could cope with absolutely anything. He took advantage, of course, of our many visits to the ditch, and we approached Timahoe with him chewing on a great wodge of weeds and branches, including, we feared, bits of trees that looked as if they’d been planted for the Tidy Towns. But if a horse can be bovine, Zulu was bovine.
He didn’t even panic when we somehow wedged the caravan between a pole and a wall coming into the village. We were trying to reverse out, in a cloud of flies with dogs yapping around us, and helpless with laughter anyway, when a strap in a bit of the harness snapped. We were as nearly in real trouble as horse-drawn caravanners ever get. But men and women appeared as if from nowhere, and within a twinkling we were mended, and parked in a lovely field, and the horse was led away for the night, and we’d showered in a bathroom attached to the pub, and we were getting a lift into Stradbally to get something to eat.
And that was the beginning of the revelation. Horse-drawn caravanning, in Laois anyway, is not about horses. Or caravans. It is about people. It only works because people react to you at every turn, whether to help you or just to talk to you or – in our case – to have a gentle little laugh at you. There is very little tourism around these parts, and the locals seem delighted to encounter people doing something as fundamentally absurd as clopping along at two miles an hour.
We got stuck up a cul-de-sac: a man came out and turned us and told us about his two new hips. We stopped to look at a strange round church: a man appeared as if from nowhere and told us it was a church of the Serbian Orthodox Rite, just being erected, in darkest Laois, by the local landowner. When we couldn’t get an Irish Times in one shop, the people came out with us to be sure we could get it in the next shop. We were pressed to sit in people’s porches, and offered water, and pointed in the right directions. When we couldn’t find a place to eat in Stradbally, and bought a loaf and cheese, the woman who gave us a lift back to our caravan in the field sent a child up with lettuce and scallions.
Henry Fingleton at Kilvahan Horse-Drawn Caravans is one of the first people to exploit what Laois has to offer. And it has skills and talents as well as landscape. The caravans, for instance, are made locally – the chassis by one craftsman, the joinery by another, the upholstery by another. Even the way they’re painted is local and distinctive. He meets the guests at the Kilvahan center and introduces them to one of the dozen or so horses who used to draw coal carts in Dublin, and who have been chosen for their quiet temperaments. Then they set off on circuits of stopping places which have been set up in Laois and Kilkenny. Just outside Abbeyleix they stay in the yard of a handsome eighteenth-century manor house, and there’s a sitting room to use as well as a bathroom. At Ballyroan you’re welcome to relax in the house’s old conservatory. At Vicarstown – where Aideen and I swam in the soft, reedy Grand Canal – there’s traditional music in the pub. Under the Rock of Dunamase, Julia does a four-course meal for £10 and English visitors told us it was just gorgeous. Every stop has some little attraction and exceptionally welcoming people.
There are drawbacks. The English visitors, for instance, remarked somewhat huffily that in England, unlike certain places they could mention, there are always signposts at crossroads. And some of the pubs should do sandwiches. But apart from that, south Laois has everything. There was one morning when I went across the dewy grass in the early sunlight with my towel and soap, to walk down the road to a bathroom. The kettle was getting ready to sing on the stove in the caravan. Zulu was munching away on the other side of the hedge. The day’s labors and the day’s laughs were still hours away. I can see clearly why the internal-combustion engine took over from the horse, but all the same, at that precise moment – well, a motoring holiday just doesn’t have moments like that.
The Irish Times, July 17, 1995