You would be reading a more coherent account of the Royal Enfielders Ireland 2023 Powers the Pot rally – if it wasn’t for Niall Carroll. On the Sunday after the rally had dispersed, I had stayed on at the site to try to write up the skirling, excellent event. Fair weather, despite the odd shower, had graced the weekend; not a given, way up the slopes of the Comeragh Mountains, south of Clonmel, where the site is located.
So I was sitting under a 150-year-old weeping ash on a bench in front of the main building, with a clear, tree-framed view north to the mountain opposite, starting my notes, when Niall (pronounced ‘Nile’), who owns the site, came out to join his dog Kevin and sat down with me.
Base Camp
A distinctive figure with a trademark red sweater and snow-white hair, I already owed Niall. He had not only let your antiquated correspondent, whose camping days are done, sleep in a room in the rambling main house. He had also, since I was a friend of John ‘Janner’ Nicholls who organizes the rallies (see TCM, November 2022 for more about John), only charged me the more than reasonable camping rate for the room – because, as Niall put it, “the Enfielders have been very good to me. What goes around, comes around.”
Very much the creator of the site – bar that weeping ash, “there was not a tree or shrub here when I moved in” – Niall and (intermittently) his five grown-up children live in the main house – in fact I had displaced his daughter Miuran from her room.
We started talking about the 2365ft mountain opposite. Niall told me that it was called Slievenamon (‘Siabh na mBan’ in Irish), meaning ‘Mountain of the Women’. He pointed out the cairn just visible on the peak, marking a burial site seen as a portal to the otherworld. He told me the ‘Women’ name came from the story of how the legendary hero Finn McCool (in Irish, ‘Fionn mac
