How a Wexford village fed Dublin pints
The malt road
Nicholas Dixon came in 1742 and built the malt house, the dock, the canal cut, and the bridge that gave the village its modern name. The Breen family took it on; the Nunns of Castlebridge House and Conservatory ran it later. Barley came down the Slaney, malted in the long stone stores, went up to the Guinness brewery in Dublin by canal-cot and later by rail. The canal stayed in use until 1944. The trade thinned through the second half of the twentieth century. The buildings are still standing - the old maltings hold a café, an antique shop, the kind of second life industrial buildings get when the work stops.
A reserve on reclaimed mud
The geese
The North Slob was reclaimed from Wexford Harbour in the 1840s - a Dutch-style polder behind a sea-wall, 1,000 hectares of new farmland for grazing and tillage. The geese found it anyway. Greenland white-fronts started arriving in big numbers in the early twentieth century and now over 7,000 winter here, around a third of the world population. The Wexford Wildfowl Reserve was established in 1969 and is jointly run by the National Parks and Wildlife Service and BirdWatch Ireland. The hides are free. The visitor centre is open most of the year. The geese leave for Greenland at the end of April and the place feels half-empty until October.
How a country-house argument became a global book
Sir Hugh's missed shot
On 10 November 1951, Sir Hugh Beaver - managing director of Guinness - was on a shooting party at the North Slob, hosted at Castlebridge House. He missed a golden plover and got into a dinner argument about whether the plover or the red grouse was Europe's fastest game bird. The library at Castlebridge House had no answer. Beaver figured the same argument was happening in pubs across the country and that a book of records might shift a few pints. Four years later the McWhirter twins compiled the first edition. The Guinness World Records office is in London now. The argument was here.