Wexford to Wicklow Great British Railway Journeys

For Victorian Britons, George Bradshaw was a household name.

At a time when railways were new,

Bradshaw's guidebook inspired them to take to the tracks.

I'm using a Bradshaw's guide to understand how trains transformed Britain

and Ireland, their landscape, industry, society and leisure time.

As I follow its roots 130 years later,

it helps me to discover these islands today.

At the time of this 1882 edition of Bradshaw's guide,

Ireland was part of the United Kingdom.

But because its population had been drastically reduced by famine and

emigration, many Irish resented British rule.

I'll be interested, on this rail journey, to see how Irish culture

strengthened during this period,

with a new devotion to the Irish language and Irish sports and national

pride celebrated on the harp and the fiddle,

in song and in dance, and in literature and poetry that rejoiced in the

loveliness of this Emerald Isle.

My Irish journey begins in the south-east.

I travel north to the political capital and cultural centre of Dublin,

then cross the country westwards,

delving into the core of Irish identity and Victorian ingenuity

before ending on the wild Atlantic coast in County Mayo.

Today's route starts in the old port of Wexford.

I'll travel through the musical valleys around Arklow northwards to

County Wicklow, where a trot around the surrounding hills ends this leg.

'Along the way, I take to the seas in a hundred-year-old lifeboat...'

It's wonderful to feel the sense of teamwork...

..as I pull the oars with this wonderful crew.

'..learn of a much-forgotten political poet...'

He deserves to be remembered as someone who spoke up for Irish culture and

Irish political rights at a very, very dark time.

'..and abandon the trains for a taste of the travelling life.'

Reins in hand, and we're all ready.

My first port of call will be Wexford.

The guidebook tells me it's the capital of a county of that name

at the mouth of the River Slaney.

Steamers from here to Bristol and Liverpool.

Many Victorian travellers arriving from England would have started their

journey here and would have been struck by the town's relationship with

the sea, which was to have an extraordinary influence across the ocean.

Wexford was a transport hub for Victorians travelling between England and

Ireland on the steam ferries.

The quayside railway station opened in 1874, a decade before my guidebook,

as part of the Dublin, Wicklow and Wexford railway linking this port to

the capital.

I'm meeting historian Jarlath Glynn.

Michael, welcome to Wexford.

Thank you very much. The town is looking absolutely gorgeous and you've

got the bunting out. You've got a festival going on?

We have. Wexford Maritime Festival.

It's in its fifth year.

And it celebrates all things maritime and Wexford.

And I notice you've got a lot of lifeboat posters up today.

So you have a lifeboat, do you?

We have a lifeboat. We've one here just behind us at Wexford Bridge and

we've another one in Kilmore Quay.

And there are lifeboats from England,

Scotland and Wales here today to join our celebrations.

And it's a great institution,

saved so many lives, and the volunteers are wonderful.

And here in Ireland, it's still known as the RNLI,

R being for Royal.

Yes, that has continued.

I suppose that's surprising, but I think, because they do such marvellous work,

that the name has just continued.

I'm not sure people pay any attention to the name now.

Wexford has had a lifeboat station since 2002.

This life-saving service is celebrated as part of the festival.

We gather to bless these boats and all those who sail in them.

-BOTH:

-God of love, at the beginning of time, your spirit hovered over the deep.

And from these oceans, you brought forth life.

We ask your blessing on these boats

and all who will work and travel in them.

I've donned this life jacket because I've been given the privilege of

riding with the oarsmen today on the lifeboat.

Hi, guys. Can I come aboard?

Yes, of course you can.

Thank you.

This oar is tremendously heavy.

I'm a bit nervous. I just have to follow what the others do.

Oars in, lads.

Away and pull.

Pull.

This hundred-year-old lifeboat and its crew are visiting from Whitby in

England, where lifeboats have been operating for over 200 years.

Since the foundation of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution in 1824,

its crews have saved over 139,000 lives.

I'm concentrating like mad on trying to keep the same rhythm as my fellow

experienced oarsmen.

Rowing boats like this set the standard until the 1850s.

To feel the sense of teamwork...

..as I pull the oars with this wonderful crew.

Get rid of the blue oars, please.

Thank you.

Michael, would you like a drop?

Oh, I would. Thank you, cheers.

-You're welcome.

-What a very lovely crew this is.

Well done!

Ah! I could row the Atlantic now.

Wexford's maritime history goes back to the Vikings,

who named the place Veisafjoror, meaning Inlet of the Mudflats.

It's long been a busy fishing harbour and, since the 18th century,

it's also been an important trading port.

This strong maritime culture spawned one of the town's most famous sons.

Commodore John Barry, United States Navy.

-Who was he?

-John Barry has been described as a Wexford-born American hero.

He was born in South Wexford in the mid-1740s,

he came from a maritime background.

And he emigrated to the United States at the age of 14 and he started as a

cabin boy, started at the lowest ranks,

and worked his way up to the highest ranks.

And he became a commercial sea captain.

At the start of the American War of Independence,

commercial sea captains were drafted in to fight the British.

Loyal to his new nation, John Barry commanded numerous warships,

winning crucial victories,

including the final sea battle of the revolution against the British

in 1783.

He became a naval hero and President George Washington appointed him

senior captain of the United States' new naval force.

How was he recognised for those achievements?

He was given the title Father of the American Navy and he is really

recognised in America.

Four US destroyers named after him, and the two American presidents have come

here to lay wreaths at this statue.

Dwight Eisenhower came in 1962 and the following year, of course, John F Kennedy

came to Ireland because his ancestors come from Dunganstown

outside New Ross.

And he came to Wexford town in June 1963, and people are still talking

about it.

Should we be surprised that Wexford produced a naval hero of global

-significance?

-No, not really.

Wexford has always had a very proud maritime tradition and Wexford has

always looked out to the sea.

Before I leave, there's just time for a quick peek in the food tent,

where some rather unusual local produce has caught my eye.

-Hello, there.

-Good day, sir. Michael, and I'm another Michael here.

Michael, it's very nice to see you.

-And you too, fella.

-I imagine Wexford's pretty famous for seafood.

It's absolutely, yeah. We're obviously by the coast.

That's a seafood sausage, if you want to try one.

-A seafood sausage?

-It's salmon and haddock and herbs and spices.

They're gluten-free, they're high in Omega-3 oil, low in fat,

seriously healthy. What do you think?

Well, I think they're wonderful.

-Yeah.

-They are delicious and, may I say, you are the best-dressed man here today?

Well, I think you beat me on that one, sir. Fair dos to you.

-No, no, no, no!

-Thank you very much.

-Thank you.

-Cheers.

-Bye-bye.

Bacon marmalade, that's intriguing.

It's very nice.

-Thank you.

-It seems very strange, bacon and marmalade,

-but it works very well. Have a good day.

-Thank you very much.

-Thank you.

I'm leaving County Wexford and heading north up the coast to the very

scenic county of Wicklow.

The arrival of the railways opened up this region to the 19th-century

traveller, who could enjoy the view from the window, just as I do today.

This is a beautiful train ride.

The guidebook says, "The greater part of this county is mountainous.

"Towards the sea coast, it assumes great splendour and variety of scenery.

"The railway can be taken to the famed Vale of Avoca,"

or meeting point of the waters.

And where the gurgling stream meets the babbling brook,

you can expect sweet music.

I'm alighting at the town of Arklow.

It's the closest station to the Vale of Avoca, mentioned in my Bradshaw's,

which became a popular destination for Victorian tourists.

It's where the River Avonmore meets the River Avonbeg, and where I'm meeting

Maynooth University professor of English Emer Nolan.

Emer, hello.

Michael, welcome to County Wicklow.

Thank you very much. So, the waters meet here.

-What makes them so famous?

-This is the setting for a very,

very famous Irish song, composed by Thomas Moore in the, er...

19th century.

It became one of the most popular musical pieces for performance in

Ireland and beyond Ireland, as well.

And he sets the story of the song exactly at this spot,

contemplating the meeting of the two rivers.

Give me an idea of his popularity in his heyday.

It was enormous.

He was one of the best-known English or Irish writers of the early 19th

century, and he really put Ireland on the map, in literary terms.

He was the first person who found all the kind of stories and symbols and

images of Ireland that we would recognise today - the shamrocks, the harps...

..rediscovered many of the old airs and melodies and really made them

available to a vast audience throughout the world.

Considered by some to be Ireland's national bard,

Moore had left his homeland as a young man to work in London.

Through his nostalgic, patriotic poetry and songs,

he championed a proud Irish identity, and his work inspired the masses and

those working for independence.

Did people make a connection between Thomas Moore and politics?

I think they did, yes.

There was a very important connection between Moore's poetry and music and

Irish politics.

He was associated with Daniel O'Connell,

the great leader of the Catholics in the early 19th century in the great

movement for Catholic emancipation.

Thomas Moore has probably been almost completely forgotten in

Great Britain and substantially in Ireland.

How should he be remembered?

He deserves to be remembered as someone who spoke up for Irish culture and

Irish political rights at a very, very dark time, and remained so important to

millions of Irish people in Ireland and beyond as someone who had kept a

gleam of nationhood alive.

Thomas Moore's emotive Irish poems were set to traditional Irish

melodies - famous amongst which are Minstrel Boy, The Last Rose Of Summer

and The Meeting Of The Waters.

-Hello.

-How are you?

Very well. You're playing The Meeting Of The Waters.

Yes, we are. Well spotted.

It's meant to be a little bit old-fashioned,

but you still get something out of it?

We do, absolutely. It's a beautiful air, the lyrics are beautiful.

It still resonates today, particularly here.

Any chance of hearing it through?

-Yes, we'd be happy to.

-Love to play for you.

Ready? Three, four...

THEY PLAY THE MEETING OF THE WATERS

# There is not in this wide world

# A valley so sweet

# As the vale in whose bosom

# The bright waters meet

# Oh, the last rays of feeling

# And life must depart

# Ere the bloom of that valley

# Should fade from my heart

# Ere the bloom of that valley

# Should fade from my heart. #

Following my Bradshaw's to the letter,

my stop for the night will be the Woodenbridge Inn, now a hotel.

Good evening.

Good evening, Michael. Welcome to Woodenbridge.

Thank you very much indeed.

My guidebook, which is 130 years old or thereabouts,

says that tourists can spend the night here.

-You've been here a while.

-Woodenbridge Hotel dates back to 1608

and would have been a stop on the main coaching route from Dublin to Carlow.

-You'll have had some famous visitors.

-We've had many famous visitors.

We've had Eamon de Valera, a former president of Ireland,

who would have fought in 1916 and the War of Independence,

and Michael Collins, who turned out to be his arch nemesis in the end, also

stayed here. And most famous of all,

-John Redmond made his famous speech about Irish men joining the British Army.

-1914.

-That's right, yeah.

-Wow!

What history. What politics!

-Absolutely, yeah.

-I thought the place smelt of politics. I feel very much at home here!

-Good, well, enjoy your stay.

-Thank you very much.

Thank you.

This morning, I'm returning to the mainline,

continuing northwards in the direction of Dublin.

My first stop today will be Wicklow. Bradshaw's is not very complementary.

"A small town, the capital of the county,

"made up of streets that are narrow and ill-built.

"It stands on the little River Vartry."

Unfortunately, Ireland in the 19th century suffered not only famine but

also cholera and typhoid, and the little River Vartry played an important part

in bringing clean water to the capital.

During the middle of the 19th century,

about a million Irish people starved to death, and close to two million more

abandoned Ireland in waves of mass emigration.

I'm making my way towards the Wicklow Mountains, where a grand Victorian

project hoped to combat another threat from disease.

I'm meeting plant engineer Ned Fleming.

-Hello, Ned. I'm Michael.

-Hello, Michael. How are you?

Ned, how does it come to be that a tremendous reservoir is built here?

Dublin in the 1850s needed a new water supply, and the main problem really

was that cholera had appeared in Ireland in the 1830s and killed over

50,000 people. And it was only during the 1850s that, due to the work of

John Snow in particular in London, that they realised that water,

contaminated water, spread cholera.

Prior to that, the Victorians had the theory of miasma -

that all fevers were spread by bad air.

But with these new thoughts, a medical doctor in Ireland, John Gray,

drove this idea of a new water treatment works

and new water treatment supply for Dublin.

John Gray was not only a medical doctor but a businessman who lobbied hard

for a new, clean water system for Dublin.

He believed that could be achieved by damming the River Vartry 25 miles

from the city and piping water into Dublin.

Why would they choose this particular location?

This location was largely dictated by the prior building of the railway

down to Wexford. The city fathers realised that the city would expand to

follow the railway and hence the idea of building a waterworks in this

part of the country because it could supply on the way back into Dublin.

Work on the reservoir began in 1862.

Digging to a depth of over 18 metres and creating a capacity of over 11

billion litres, the scheme was a huge engineering feat.

Using mainly picks and shovels,

the navvies completed the project in just five years.

These filtration beds that we see here,

these are essentially what were built in the 19th century?

Yes, seven of them were built in the 1860s.

The scheme was so successful that three more were added almost

immediately, within ten years.

So now, where are all the levers?

They are over in the valve house under the dam.

We'll go across and look at it.

Very beautiful machinery. Victorian?

These are Victorian. They're the original valves and they control the

amount of water that we take from the reservoir into the water works.

-So, what is the system?

-The system is simply gravity -

water's stored in the reservoir,

the pressure of that water drives it through the pipes underneath our feet,

and these valves then, by opening or shutting,

we control the amount of water that comes in.

And so that gravity is sufficient to take it all the way to Dublin, is it?

-It is, yes.

-And how would you operate these things?

It's very, very simple. I suggest we walk across and look at this valve here.

And it's a matter of turning this wheel.

As you turn, you are now opening the valve and, if you turn the wheel the

other way, you're closing the valve.

Surprisingly easy.

Yes, because of good gearing, 25 turns,

you will only open that tongue one inch.

The Vartry water supply scheme still provides drinking water to around 15% of

the Greater Dublin Area and today it's additionally treated with chlorine.

Why do we have this tower and this bridge?

This tower is called a draw-off tower, where the water's taken from here,

it's like a vertical pipe.

But, of course, in Victorian times, a pipe had to be beautiful.

It did, yes, and they did it in the Victorian Gothic style.

Beautiful. And how significant has this been for the people of Dublin?

It's probably the most significant public health engineering project ever

for Dublin because it supplied 200-300,000 people with clean water and,

in doing so, it eliminated cholera.

I'm gazing at the Wicklow Mountain district

which, according to my guidebook, "no tourist should omit visiting.

"It extends from Donnybrook to Arklow."

I'm interested in that subset of Irish people whose view of it is always

changing as they travel from place to place, never settling.

Irish travellers have roamed the countryside for generations.

Victorian writers romanticised their nomadic lifestyle and today, for a

taste of life out on the road,

visitors can hire traditional caravans from Dieter Clissmann.

-Hello, Dieter.

-Hello, Michael. You're very welcome.

Thank you very much indeed.

These beautiful horse caravans, would these be typical and historical?

Yes, they are historical.

We copied them from the pattern that we got from the old travelling people

-themselves.

-And how different are what you had today from the traditional

-ones?

-Well, obviously, we have a lot of modern conveniences that they

didn't have in the old ones.

The old ones had a potbelly stove, which was used for heating and for

cooking. The travellers were famous for having lots of children and there

would be sometimes up to a dozen children or more even, and they would

start off life in the caravan,

being minded by their mother and father, and then migrated to underneath

the caravan,

when they were getting a bit older!

Is it possible to take a ride in one of these?

Yes, we'll take a drive rather than a ride, and we'll just have to find

ourselves a horse first.

We certainly will. Where do we do that?

Let's just do that.

These barrel-top caravans flourished in Ireland at the turn of the

20th century.

A good pulling horse was essential.

-Hello.

-Hello, welcome.

This is Neasa, my youngest.

-I'm Michael.

-I'm Neasa and this is Paddy.

-Hello, Paddy.

-He's going to be your horse for today.

Would this be a typical horse from the travellers' days?

Yes, it would be. They come in all shapes and sizes, in a sense.

A lot of them would have been black and white and they were called piebald

horses or brown and white are skewbald.

They typically have this little moustache at the front and a little bit of

a beard underneath.

Big, friendly giants.

-Very good.

-OK.

Come on, Pads. Good boy.

All yours.

-Thank you.

-Left is left and right is right.

And pull both and it is to stop and say, "Whoa!"

Reins in hand and we're all ready.

Come on, Paddy.

Today, there are around 25,000 Irish travellers living in the Republic of Ireland.

Dieter, what sort of relationship did the Irish travellers have traditionally with

the settled people?

Sometimes, they're regarded as being, if you like, outside normal society

but, essentially, travellers, as we know them today,

used to be called tinkers because they worked in tin and they used to make

tin implements and tin containers and all kinds of things.

Tin kettles. And they were a valuable part of the community.

They were itinerants.

So, if you had a kettle that sprung a leak,

you waited until the next tinker would be passing by and you'd get it

-repaired.

-And what about the culture?

What about the folklore?

The horses have been a central part of the culture of the Irish traveller.

And the horses that we use here, to a large extent, come from the

travelling people, we buy them from them.

And they're very good horse dealers.

For the 19th-century tourist,

horse-drawn transport was common and riding the new steam trains would

have been the thrill. But for today's visitors, like me,

seeing the country at the gentle pace of a horse and wagon is the treat.

When the young John Barry emigrated to the American colonies,

he was typical of Irish people who felt they had little future at home,

although his success as Father of the US Navy was truly exceptional.

The great hunger of the 19th century turned that emigration into a flood,

many of them leaving from the port of Wexford.

As political agitation also increased,

writers like Thomas Moore sought to recreate an Irish national identity,

hoping to create a society from which young Irish would no longer feel

compelled to escape to find their fortunes.

'Next time, I discover one of Ireland's greatest treasures...'

This embodies the soul of the nation, this instrument.

I don't think that's an overstatement.

'..hear how the British tried to calm relations across the Irish Sea...'

So, despite the political agitation,

using the royal family is a good card to play.

It's always a good card to play,

especially if they're young and good-looking.

'..and get involved in a bit of Dublin culture.'

A few of them and you'll be having the craic all night!