market

Kinvara was traditionally a market town. On the borders of Clare and Galway and accessible from the sea it was a natural meeting point. Cattle and sheep were traded and vegetables and eggs brought from local farms to sell. Turf was brought in by sail boat from Connemara in the famous Galway hookers and much Guinness was drunk in the ten pubs. 

The market now opens on Fridays between 10 and 2 behind Johnston’s hall on the main street. A covered area for coffee and teas, live traditional music and a walled garden contribute to the family atmosphere. There was great excitement last week as amongst the hens for sale were ‘giant bunny babies.’ The babies were the size of a fully grown rabbit! Although under great pressure we managed to leave without a giant bunny baby but with a pot of Catriona’s delicious tabouleh, some of Annie’s freshly pulled carrots and some excellent value fresh hake and sea bass fillets. You can also buy delicious lobster and Dublin bay prawns, a great selection of breads and baked goods, and every sort of fresh fruit and vegetables.

This week a new sweet shop opened in the village. It sells old fashioned sweets like lemon bon bons and home made chocolates. The traditional shop front is painted a pretty duck egg green and inside the owner has built a lovely wooden display dresser and hung old fashioned wall paper. It is an asset to the village and its reputation is spreading like wildfire through the playgrounds and summer camps, drawing much needed footfall to the village. Geraldine Blackwell, another local organic farmer, moved from there to a larger premises with her shop, ‘Ger’s Place’ The shop front design of buttons might give away what she sells and she also runs the popular and expanding ‘stitch and bitch’ knitting mornings. Another new venture this year is ‘DIY pursuits’ which is doing a good trade selling and renting bicycles. Cycling has become another recession hobby with a recent 60 and 120 k organised cycle drawing over 1000 participants up the Corker hill and around the Burren. Other shops on the main street have had a fresh coat of paint and this seems to be generating a slight spread of optimism.

I wont be posting for the next two weeks as we are going on holiday. We will know on our return if planning permission for the nature centre has been granted.

level headed

 

This week I have been designing a house for a friend who needs to convert an outline planning permission into full consent before it runs out. It may never be built. It is a simple, traditional design, with nice proportions and plenty of insulation- nothing flashy.

It brought me back to a few years ago when I was spewing out 3 or 4 houses a week. The fact that I had started a part time engineering degree was enough to instantly qualify me as an architect. I designed hundreds of houses, probably half of them on Nama’s books now.

Anyone who could get their head around Autocad was employed drawing up house plans. It was Celtic tiger fever. You had to learn on the job- draw up plans, take levels, survey sites, do trial hole tests and design waste water systems. I could often be seen wandering around fields with a level (those intermediate levels still confuse me), a shovel and a bucket of water, searching for a trial hole, or trying to find a JCB driver to dig it, in the pouring rain, on a random hillside, so I could look into it. And don’t bother asking the boss for advice; he was far too busy running around in circles trying to keep up with the deluge of work.

The desperation on Friday to get the applications submitted before the newspaper notices were out of date was head bursting. Each one was at least 4 inches high with six copies of all forms, reports, plans, elevations, cross sections, site layouts, waste water treatment system reports etc etc. My boss would tear off after lunch to Galway with a towering pile of paper to join the fight at the County Council office planning desk to get them in before 4 pm.

The houses got more and more elaborate. It started with en-suite bathrooms for every bedroom, then walk in wardrobes, then laundry shoots, then bar areas, games rooms, swimming pools, loggias (never quite worked out what they were) The most lavish house I designed was a home for one of the big building contractors. It included all of the above, the master bedroom was 1000sq feet (the size of a cottage) and the en-suite bathroom included ‘his and hers’ wash basins and to top it all a pair of ‘his and hers’ toilets side by side….

I then upgraded to a structural engineer’s office and was immediately employed in specifying reinforced concrete for foundations and columns. There are countless different shapes of bent steel that are of varying lengths according to the design of the building. These have to be picked and placed on the drawing with the help of one of the dullest, but most useful computer programmes called CADS RC. The steel specifying job was a race to get the lorries to site and keep ahead of the builders. One Christmas Eve I was doing overtime specifying steel for a new retail development. Every now and then I would feel a wave of panic as I ordered yet another lorry load of cut and bent steel, absolutely useless if any was the wrong size, and costing thousands. Every time I emailed a drawing to the suppliers I felt like sprinkling the computer with holy water.

That was how crazy it was. And then the deluge stopped