canal walk

Last evening Una and I went for a walk on the canal. Edenderry is ringed by canals. The flat farmland was perfect for this ingenious system of transport, and there would have been much for the canal barges to carry: silage for the animals, peat for fuel, the animals themselves to market. We started at the canal harbor, an unassuming spot that, like most of Edenderry’s other potential attractions, has not been exploited. In other towns the cozy harbors have been planted out with flowers, the water’s edge dotted with benches and perhaps a pergola or two. Here the canal just ends. The few uncomfortable slab benches are perennially occupied by teenagers who have no other hangout place, the town being without so much as a playground.

            We walked quickly away from town along the slip until we reached the main canal. Here the water is about twenty feet across. The banks are covered with foliage and flowers, some, like daisies, which have inadvertently landed there. Others are true wild flowers, including a plant that resembles the frothy white astilbe (and I suppose might even be an astilbe) and a deep yellow iris just coming into bloom. The soft verges are permanently marked with two rutted car tracks, although for the most part cars can’t drive along the canal paths anymore. The tracks run in parallel all the way to the horizon line on this stretch of the canal. The walk is dead flat and the walkers are always accompanied by bird song.

There is an occasional fisherman, some quite serious with large amounts of equipment—folding chairs, flasks of hot tea,, picnic baskets, kreels—but most are there with just a rod. Last summer I was told by a mother whose two young sons were fishing off the canal at the west end of town that the canals had been basically fished out over the past couple of years since the tacit policy of catch and release had been broken by an immigrant population who fished to eat. Later that summer a sign did go up on that particular stretch of canal outlawing fishing that wasn’t catch and release, but since there is no one to enforce the law there is little chance of this having much impact. I have also read that the canal is amply stocked on an annual basis; I’m not sure where the truth lies, but there aren’t a lot of fishermen.

Una and I turned around after about 45 minutes, heading west into the sun, which still hadn’t set at 8:15. On the way back we noticed an animal grazing in the tall weeds along the bank in front of us. It was too large to be a dog and looked too small to be a horse. As we got closer Una realized it was a donkey. He stayed still until we got within fifty feet of him, then turned and made his way with not much urgency into the denser brush on the other side of the path. As we looked, we saw two more, then yet three more, donkeys in among the weeds, their ears just clearing the tops of the green stalks. It was donkeys that pulled the canal barges along when the canals were young and productive, before the railroad overtook their usefulness. How amazing to see them living there again, as if some muscle memory compels them to graze in the place of their hard-working ancestors.