Music of the Horse

Killarney still rings with the Music of the Horse

hile the metallic music of horseshoes striking street surfaces has long ebbed from Irish towns, summertime Killarney still rings with rhythms echoing from distant centuries.

These sounds evoke for me childhood memories of summer mornings near the Gap of Dunloe when my grandmother used to lift me into my grandfather’s pony and trap for a short spin. I adored sitting into that trap but, more than anything, I longed to be older than my three or four years, old enough to sit on one of the saddle ponies following the trap to Kate Kearney’s Cottage for their day’s work. In the evenings, sitting outside my grandparents’ shop at Gap Cross, I’d see other saddle ponies trotting quickly homewards at day’s end. That was the early '60s, when roads were quiet and horses could be trusted to gallop home on their own.

My grandfather, William Joy, was a pony man in the Gap of Dunloe. My father, Brendan Joy, now retired, was a jarvey in Killarney. The terminology is specific: ponymen in the Gap, jarveys in Killarney and Muckross.

Tradition has changed little in the Gap where the ponymen have driven tub traps for generations whereas in Killarney, both the carriages and the variety of trips have changed much. The jaunting car or side car was the traditional choice of Killarney jarveys for decades. It consisted of two seats for two people on either side, the driver’s box seat, and a seat behind him with a view to the road behind. The well, a deep space in the middle of the car, stored the oats bag. When the jarvey had no passengers, the two hinged side seats would be drawn up.

In the past decade, jaunting cars have gradually been replaced by wagons or carriages, the most recent innovation being the introduction of covers about some years ago. The introduction of dung catchers or ‘nappies’, highly-contentious at first, was a success story. One constant has been the storytelling, local knowledge and jokes that are the jarveys’ trademark. How many times have I heard peals of laughter from passing wagons as I walked the Demesne?

on the jarvey trade from the early 1800s onwards, read A Sketch of a Jarvey, Killarney Past and Present by Janet Murphy (www. lulu.com, 2011), who quotes travel writers including the Halls (1865) who wrote: ‘The Irish car-driver is altogether different from a jarvey of any other country. In England and in France they bully you out of your money – in Ireland they coax or laugh it out of your pockets’.

Richard Hayward, writing in the 1940s, described jarveys as ‘companionable leg-pullers’

There must be as many stories about horses as there are about jarvey personalities. I remember Dolly, a black mare with a white star on her forehead, the calmest, most intelligent horse ever. Whenever she heard my father coming down ‘the block’ or jarvey rank at Kenmare Place, she would whicker.

There are horses who stop for the usual photo opportunities and move on after the camera clicks, all without a prompt. All these noble animals are true troopers.

When my father began jarveying in the mid-1960s, there were trips through Killarney Golf Course to Aghadoe and trips to Kilbrean Lake and Lough Guitane. The Killarney jarveys also drove tourists to Kate Kearney’s Cottage on the first leg of the Gap of Dunloe boat trip, and collected them at Ross Castle that evening. "They all faded out," my father said. The ‘radio trains’ or ‘all-ins’ brought visitors from Dublin three days a week – Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday – in high season. The trip was called ‘all-in’ because the passengers had the train and jarvey fares all included in the price. They were called radio trains because they were equipped with radio studios to provide entertainment on the journey. The jarvey drive was Muckross and Dinis. My father remembers many jarveys as great singers and storytellers but the late Paddy ‘Whitty’ O’Sullivan, known as ‘The Singing Jarvey’ was outstanding.

“Paddy was the king of them all”

The jarveys who drove guests from The Great Southern Hotel wore black suits and bowler hats. "In the early part of the year, if you had a grey horse, you’d be black and white yourself," he said.

Serving the jarvey trade well into the 1960s was a small army of blacksmiths. The town’s last three last harnessmakers were Bill O’Sullivan Howard, Jerry Kelliher and John O’Grady. Tarrants of New Street made jaunting cars.

The ebb and flow of time brings many changes but in Killarney, at least, the jarveys and their horses preserve a strand of a gently moving past.

by Breda Joy