Ballykissmyarse
I had a little problem the other day.
I may have mentioned before but it is damned difficult to give directions to anywhere from here. Even the simplest directions are going to involve several junctions so any visitor is well advised to have a decent road map, an up to date SatNav or a death wish.
I am frequently accosted by tourists who pull up beside me, all red faced and desperate and looking for directions to Dublin or Rosslare or Powerscourt or Blessington or Ballykissangel. The latter is a favourite and for those who live on foreign shores, it doesn’t exist. It’s just an imaginary name used in a television series many years ago where most of it was filmed in Avoca, which is a real village but impossible to direct people to.
So my solution to the giving of directions thing is simple – I direct them up to the bogs. Just follow this road up the hill says I, you can’t miss it.
Now the bogs are the top of the Wicklow Mountains. They are rolling carpets of heather, gorse and very little else, but they are beautiful in a lonely sort of way. It’s very peaceful up there and the views are spectacular. The only problem with the bogs is that unless you know precisely what you are doing it is very difficult to find your way out of them as they are criss-crossed with little bog roads that meander between turf cuttings and generally end up going nowhere. To make matters worse, clouds and fog can drift in very quickly and visibility can soon become zero.
What about road signs, you ask? We are not very fond of road signs in Ireland. They tend to be few and far between and most have been twiddled around by the local bright sparks so they point in completely the wrong direction anyway. Generally the only accurate signs are the ones that are actually placed within sight of your destination.
So back to my little problem.
I was minding my own business hacking away at a hedge when a car stopped. I played my usual mental game of guessing which impossible destination they required and I was wrong on all counts. They wanted directions to the bogs.
What the fuck was I supposed to do? Sending people to where they wanted to go was not only against my principles but would get me a very bad reputation in the village.
I gave them directions to Ballykissangel.
I’m a quick thinker.
Here in Norfuck, where instead of bogs we have marshes and fens so complex to circumnavigate that you could easily chance upon Grendel still looking for Hrothgare’s pub and ,as I have no doubt mentioned before, there is the additional fun to be had of English tourists trying to pronounce the name of the fair burgh they wish to locate. Even such intellectual heavyweights (no I’m not being sarky, the mind on that man is impressive) as Dick Puddlecote recently discovered when he mispronounced ‘Acle’ as ‘Akkel’ (its ‘A-cool’). Then there are the ever popular villages ‘Greater and Lesser Hautbois’ which is actually said two different ways depending on your particular flavour of Norfolk dialect -as “Hobbice’ or ‘Habbice’….as I found out to my embarrassment when asking directions down to Anna Raccoon not so very long ago. I asked for ‘Habbice’ and the nice lady pointedly corrected my pronunciation -and I have lived here longer than any sane person should. Hell I went to school in the village of “Roughton” -said ‘Row’ (as in argue) ‘tann’ ! The classic however is ‘Happisburgh’, said ‘Haze borough’. (PS. I wasn’t quite joking about ‘grendel’- they still call some of the pools of quicksandy, brackenish, foul smelling, dead water in the fens ‘Grindles’…).
On the topic of ‘making life hard for Outsiders’ it transpires that I shall have to drive over to a Norfolk village I have never visited before to collect Eldest Son of The Dwarf this afternoon. He lives on ‘Field Waye’ (yes with an ‘e’) which leads off Field Ave, and next to Field’s Rd, Drive and Lane…I kid you not!
Our Great Gubmint had an absolutely brilliant idea a few years ago. They wanted those who had a few words of Irish to use the lingo a bit more, and what better way to do it than to ditch all the Anglicised names for towns and villages in the West and replace them with the old Irish. The road signs that are normally bilingual were all ripped down and replaced with Irish only ones. As a result, tourists hadn’t a fucking clue how to get anywhere [and I suspect, quite a few locals]. Surely though anyone would realise that An Dangan was actually Dingle?
Perhaps they were turf cutters who will have been delighted to have spent the day in the pub instead of swinging slanes!
German turf cutters? At least I think they were German.
Ah, it wasn’t Ballykissangel they wanted, it was Killnaskully – they are friends of Dieter!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJ64XjH0EYQ
If they were German, maybe they were for once just trying to get away from the football . . . . . .tee hee.
Here in Vermont, especially the further north you go, it’s not so much sending the flat landers (flat landahs is how it’s pronounced) where they need to go rather than the telling itself. For example (accent included):
“A shawt way down the rud thayahs a wrought iron bridge. ‘Bout half mile or so befo-ah that bridge ya’ need to take a left. Go up the rud a bit and take anothah left wheyah Irene Limlaw’s old bahn used to be. The place ya’ lookin’ fowah is a-ways past Hiram’s old manuah spreadah. If you come to a big bouldah that’s blockin’ the rud, you’ve gone to fah.”
And, of course, there’s always the classic:
“Well…….ya’ can’t git thayah from heyah.”
“A shawt way down the rud thayahs a wrought iron bridge….”
Proof positive, if proof were needed, that many of your Founding Fathers indeed came from Norfolk. A slight change in accent (Norfolkers hold no truck with fancy things like diphthongs) and wrought iron bridges are uncommon hereabouts but otherwise a normal day on the side of the B123345666 (all minor roads in the UK are designated ‘B’-although the Norfolk ‘roads’ I used today wouldn’t even class as an ‘E’ on a good day).
I know what you mean about “minor” roads although we use “class of road” (1 2 3 4 etc, the higher number the worse type of road it is) just to keep things on the simple side. And over half the roads in Vermont are dirt and all of them are classified as
hystericalhistorical. This classification, of course, doesn’t help the “washboards” that show up on every curve of these roads nor the joy of driving over these “historical” roads during “mud season”.Here in New Zealand there is a big push to get more maori spoken. The problem is that Maori did not have a written language before the first european settlers arrived and so maori was written in what the first settlers thought it should be. The pronounciation is being changed,but not the spelling so a town called Taupo is pronounced TOPAW and a Kauri tree is a COERI. It does not help when tv announcers and newsreaders give their own mangled versions.
Best way to give directions is to shove a straw between your teeth for the full yokel effect, scratch your head, look perplexed and finally announce “If I were going to go there, I wouldn’t be starting from here”.