The land that inspired Shane MacGowan

Summer arrives in Carney Commons with blooming hawthorn and birdsong. It’s a season of stark contrasts.
The wet cold winters and short days, still so fresh in one’s memory, are frightened away by teeming hedgerows and a landscape so vivid that at certain angles it appears unreal in its brightness.

Rolling green hills press up against a blue wall of sky on clear days, yet the land still seems close, like the secrets around the next turn in the lane. Only a month earlier, on May Eve, legend has it that the veil between the human world and the Aos Si – the fairy people – is at its thinnest.

It is in this rural hamlet where Shane MacGowan spent many childhood summers with his sister Siobhan at his grandparents’ cottage exploring the fields and woods that still today remain nearly the same as they did then. In the winter the waters of the caladh rose and in summer it
subsided and strange flowers blossomed in the rich soil. Indeed it was this place that inspired him to write some of the most poetic and evocative lyrics about an Irish landscape and the people inhabiting it.
Even the small things – a discarded sliotar and a rusted tin can – find their way into the Broad Majestic Shannon. A song so steeped in childhood memories and yearning that Pogues fans from far flung parts of the world, who had never set foot in Ireland, could conjure up these
shining stations of Shane’s past so clearly in their heads. For when Shane wrote “and the next time I see you we’ll be down at the Greeks, there’ll be whiskey on sunday and tears on our cheeks, for its stupid to laugh and it’s useless to bawl, ‘bout a rusty tin can and an old hurley ball,” we are lead to believe that he had – despite himself – shed a tear for those far-off memories of Carney Commons and the places around it.

The Unravelling Shane MacGowan Tour is an evocative trip through the landmarks of Shane’s childhood that influenced many of his lyrics - from the hidden shaded lane that leads into Cloughprior Cemetery to the rain-soaked banks of the broad majestic Shannon.

The tour is a fascinating insight into how Shane’s exceptional writing was directly influenced by a landscape – its people and places – and, ultimately, some of the most memorable songs in the Irish canon.
 

Callows Studio, based in Carney Commons, has recently partnered with The Unravelling Shane Tour and makes the Official Shane MacGowan Candle. These unique cement vessels are handmade, filled with natural soy wax and have a subtle sandalwood scent.

Each candle is a true original and features the lyric from A rainy night in Soho: “Still there’s a light I hold before
me, you’re the measure of my dreams.”