In royal company with road bowling's King and Queen of the Roads
MARKING THE SPOT: Further down again, another acts as an aiming post, holding a flag high in the air like a cavalry officer calling his horsemen to the front.
The things people get up to. Here’s a little thought experiment for you. Close your eyes. Picture yourself on a country road, a boreen, the kind that has countless twists and turns. An uneven surface flanked by trees shedding their first coat of autumn leaves. There are no cars on this road. Not a one. But there are many, many people. Young and old.
And in the middle of this road is a person, holding in their hand what appears to be a spherical stone. This person can be male or female, it matters not. They toss the stone - about the size and weight of a paperweight - from hand to hand, while undergoing a deep visualisation that seems to remove them completely from their boisterous surroundings. This person is surrounded by a team of people, each one of them tasked with a job.
One, standing directly in front of the stone-holder, will line them up with another, who is positioned a hundred yards or so further down the road. Further down again, another acts as an aiming post, holding a flag high in the air like a cavalry officer calling his horsemen to the front. Everyone is speaking in tongues, everyone except the person holding the stone, who - like I already said - is so deep a Zen-like trance, they may as well be in another thought experiment, all by themselves.
Another team member picks grass from the roadside, and with great care lays it either side of the stone-holder's feet on the road, an imaginary gate for them to move through. The stone-holder, barely averting their gaze from the road in front, suddenly hands the stone to his or her caddy, unzips their top to free their torso, and - reclaiming the precious stone - moves back up the road in the opposite direction from whence they so diligently gazed.
The crowd - suddenly mobilised by this act of intent - simultaneously gather in the middle of the road and spread to the sides, as if starlings in murmuration. Think Tour de France meets the final hole of The Open. They make noise, too, shouting exotic names in weird accents, numbers too- perhaps referring to the odds of something happening. “Seven-to-four Silke!”
The only person unbothered by the noise is the stone-holder. They are back facing the way they came now, deep in a meditative breathing exercise, hopping the stone in their hand, staring at an imaginary portal they intend to move through from where they stand, past the crowds of people, to the grassy gate on the road. Like a long-jumper in an Olympic final, they then begin to sprint until, just as they reach the grassy gate, they leap through the air and fling the stone from their throwing hand in an action so controlled yet violent, you know only they could pull this off.
The stone - an apple size ball-bearing now, moves at great speed as if propelled from a canon down the road in the direction of the hundreds of people who skip and leap and contort their bodies out of the way of the projectile, but, as each person unsights the next behind them, it's a lottery and a miracle that nobody gets clipped in the shin, or flush in the knee.
The crowds shriek as the stone passes them, not a scream of fear or relief, but of excitement, willing the rock to hop farther down the road, or - depending on where their money went - to collide with a tree stump or a stone wall and stop dead. “Pull!” they yell, as if the inanimate object that just flew by them will react to their demands and spin around the curve of the country road. When the rock finally does settle and stop all together, roughly 200 yards from where it was thrown, there is a delirious whooping and a hollering, both in appreciation of the stone just thrown, and in anticipation of the one coming next.
YOU CAN open your eyes now, comfortable in the knowledge you have visualised one complete cycle of what it is to watch the ancient sport of road bowling, where, in much simpler terms than what's described above, competitors attempt to take the fewest throws to propel a metal ball along a predetermined course of country road. Nothing beats being there, and those who attended the King and Queen of the Roads in Ballincurrig, east Cork, at the weekend did not do so as some novel experiment of curiosity exploring lesser-spotted Ireland, but as experts, players, fans, gamblers, and lovers of a sport that thrives in those areas of the country in which it’s played.
And while Cork is most definitely one of those places, Ballincurrig was not a sea of red, but of orange on Sunday, as Armagh and the Netherlands went bowl-to-bowl in the headline events of the three day festival. But before they took over, there was some big business to attend to.
If you told me I was going to see Ethan Rafferty compete this year, I’d have guessed it was in Croke Park, not a boreen in East Cork, yet there he was, bespectacled and deep in concentration, yet unable to repeat his All-Ireland winning form of July, bested as he was by Munster champion Tommy O’Sullivan in the intermediate final. There was some Rafferty revenge, however, as Ethan’s brother Colm comfortably defeated European champion, William Hobbelink of the Netherlands. The best wine was served last, as the Queen of the Roads head-to-head between Dutch giant Silke Tulk and Armagh’s Kelly Mallon ebbed and flowed like a Ryder Cup singles match. At one point, so confident was I that Mallon had secured victory I was about to start shouting odds myself. Then, disaster struck, a stray bowl opened the door for the supreme Tulk, and she closed out the match with the finish line in sight, securing an historic four-in-row in the process.
The travelling Dutch contingent had been in the tiny village since Wednesday, and there was no leaving town that night. I envied them, for this was no quaint country stroll arm-in-arm with flat-capped nostalgia, it was a small window into a vibrant world unbothered by those who ignore it.
I was once one of the ignorant. Not anymore.
