"Where are you from?" says he.

"Ballyshannon." says I.

"Never heard of it." says he.

"Well," says I, "it's up in Donegal where-"

"I know where you say it is. I even know you believe that. But that's not its name at all!"

He was old. Grey haired and old. With a beard. And the remnants of a moustache that must have looked fierce when he was a young man. He walked with a limp, and carried a stick.

I thought I'd humour him.

"How do you know?" I asked. "Tell me more."

"I remember it like it was yesterday," said he, settling his back into a comfortable position on the park bench.

And I settled in to listen.

"I can still see the young boy standing on the bank. Skipping any kind of flat stone he could find across the river. Four hops, five hops, six hops. The river was coming into spate, and it was hard to make the stones hop any further before the current dragged them under.

In summer time, when the water was low, and the current slow, he could manage eight, nine and ten hops. Once, just once, a really, really flat stone had bounced eleven times before sinking. He had never managed to equal that again.

That one time the stone had skimmed way out. It seemed to go on forever. But even then it had only reached a quarter of the way across the river, what people at the time called the Samhaoir.

The boy was fascinated with the river. It provided his family with an abundance of fish. He himself, with the hand-held net his mother had woven for him, had been scooping young salmon, grilse, from its shallows since three summers ago.

At first he was only allowed to wield his net when his father or older brother was there to see he didn't fall in. When the river was high, the river was dangerous. And then there were the Falls. He didn't want to think about the Falls. Big, grown men feared the Falls. His uncle had been swept over the Falls just the previous year.

Trying to cross the river at any season of the year presented danger. Even on a raft. And a coracle, although it could be steered, was no guarantee of safety.

Now, in his eleventh summer, the boy wished he could join his father and big brother as they stood far out in the stream, and with their strong nets that took two men to handle, hauled in the big fish, the fully grown salmon, the King of Fish.

He had an idea. The sloping river bank on which he stood, which provided him with his skipping stones, was also littered with bigger stones. If he collected a few and placed them carefully, he could build a little path of his own out from the bank. And it didn't have to rise above the level of the river.

If his mother saw him venturing too far out, she always called him back. But if she thought the river bed where he stood was shallow, her worry would be eased.

Slowly, over a period of days he picked his big stones, and one by one carried them to the bank. There, one by one, he placed them in the water, always trying to keep their flatter sides turned up.

It was slow work, and hard. He wondered if all by himself he would make any great progress.

"What are you doing?"

It was the voice of his sister, three summers younger. When she wasn't minding the baby and doing the other chores her mother gave her, she was always following him around. He didn't mind too much, but sometimes she was a nuisance.

"Go 'way!"

"Let me see."

"You'll only get in the way!"

"I will not!"

"You will too!"

"Let me help. I'll tell if you don't!"

Hugh, young Hugh, knew when he was beaten.

"All right. You can carry stones-big ones."

If he thought that would stop his younger sister, he was badly mistaken.

Cath, for that was her name, was strong for her age. She was also clever. Instead of carrying the biggest stones, she pushed and shoved until she got them to where she could roll them down the slope. Hugh hadn't thought of that.

Soon he had more stones than he could handle, and he had to beg her to stop.

"See! I can help."

And Hugh had to admit she could.

Cath and Hugh worked all day, and when they were finished, a little narrow causeway stretched ten yards out from the bank. Its surface was just below the level of the river, and Hugh could stretch further out with his net than he had ever dreamed possible.

"Let me try. Let me try!"

"Oh, all right."

A scream. A splash. And Cath was gone.

It was years before young Hugh walked again near the river bank. The little causeway he and Cath built had long since been swept away by the river's current. Well did he remember the exact spot.

He was a man by now, Young Hugh, to distinguish him from his father, Old Hugh, who had seen a full forty summers in his lifetime and couldn't be expected to see another. Young Hugh's mother had died the previous spring. Soon he would be alone.

Hugh had never mated. The clan wondered why. It was expected of him. It was his duty. If the clan was to grow, it needed new members to replace the old, and the more the better. But there was something different about Young Hugh. Some said it stemmed from the time his sister Cath had died so tragically, so suddenly. Who could tell?

True, he played his part in all other ways, hunting the elk, pig, wolf, spearing salmon, snaring wild fowl, something which he had mastered, and providing food for the clan in every way that men could devise.

Still there was something that set him apart. He didn't talk, at least not much. Sure, he observed the annual rituals when neighbouring clans gathered with his own to mark the principal seasons, spring and harvest. He bowed to sun and moon. That was only right.
They reigned over all, earth, and sky, and stars. The rising sun brought the day, the moon marked the passage of the seasons

Hugh contributed his share to the offerings made by the clan. And placed his trust in the benevolence of both gods, moon and sun.

There was another god that dominated his life, a god he feared, and rightly so. That god had snatched his sister Cath away, that fateful day long seasons ago. The river god. That god sought sacrifice. That god behaved in ways none could foretell-angry, powerful, peaceful, gentle. A moody god, a god of currents so strong none could resist, a god of limpid stretches, curling eddies, shallow depths, deep pools; a god of treachery, of hidden dangers, tempting the unwary, step by step, until it enticed them beneath the river's surface or crushed them in falls of raging waters.

Unlike the sun, unlike the moon, the river god was never silent. It spoke in many tones, in unceasing sound, softly lapping, stone slapping, a soothing swish, and an all-pervasive sound of falling water heard above all other sounds, a sound that carried through night and day, a sound that inspired wonder. Man, bird, animal, the very fish were accustomed to the sound. They woke to it, fell asleep to it. Always conscious of it, yet unconscious too.

Like breath itself, the sound was part of life.

And when people moved away, they missed it.

This was what set Young Hugh apart. The river god. It had taken his sister. It continued to take others. From his clan. From other clans.

And in the quietness of his own thoughts a terrible resolve came upon him. He would challenge the river god. He was only one man but, for the first time he, Hugh, was willing to fight a god.

Seasons passed, seasons spent studying the river, its moods, its power, its currents, backwaters, pools, its strengths, its weaknesses. Yes, the river, for all its force in its never ending race to the sea, had its weaknesses.

Everyone knew the river fell in summer. There was nothing new in that. But only Hugh, watching year after year, saw there was a pattern to the river's summer run, saw that it ran deeply only in certain channels, with shallow depths covering its bed in other places. And those shallow depths were nearly all alike. There the river bed was smooth. With care a man might walk a goodly distance out from either bank. Or so was Hugh's reasoning.

And if he could somehow make it possible to unite the shallow places, why, a man could walk the whole way across the river, from bank to bank, at least in summer season.

There was already such a level crossing an hour or two upriver, where the river narrowed and its bed was flat, but the current was strong, even in summer. And who wanted to walk all the way upriver, risk the narrow crossing, and then walk all the way downriver, to get to where he wanted on the other side?

Five and more seasons did Hugh, now nearing middle age, watch and learn, until it seemed he knew the river's coursing as well as he knew the blood channels on the back of his hand.

Something else he learned was that where the river bed was flat it had broken into slabs, flat slabs to be sure, but with crevices all round them. If he could wiggle one of those slabs free and get it into position, it might, just might, cover one of the channels where the river always ran free even in dry summers.

Moving big chunky rocks on land was not something knew. The clan had learned to do that many, many, many generations ago. A well seasoned tree branch, carefully slanted, could pry free even the biggest stone from its bed in the earth and start it moving in the desired direction. Only on flat land, of course, or downhill. One man with such a branch could do wonders. It took many men to haul a stone uphill.

I remember the summer Hugh moved his first slab. Nobody would help.

"He's crazy!"

"Why doesn't he help us fish and hunt like always?"

Hugh paid them no heed.

He began a little upstream from the closest inshore channel. First he chose a slab of limestone big enough to bridge the channel. Then he set to work with his stripped down tree branch, fashioned into a rough point at one end.

That point he prodded and poked into a crevice that ran the length of the rock slab, until he found a spot where the branch could be used as a lever to raise one edge. Time and again he managed to raise that edge of the slab, and time and again the pole twisted and lost its leverage.

Almost beaten before he had really begun, he puzzled why he couldn't manage to keep the slab from sinking back into its well defined position in the river bed. Finally he determined he need to place a prop under it once he had raised the edge. But how to lever and how to prop? He was only one man, and no one watching on the river bank offered to help.

When he pried one edge up, the river's stream flowed under that edge. Maybe he could get the water's flow to carry something with it, something that could jam itself under the raised up edge.

It being summer there wasn't that much flow, not enough to carry the small stones he first thought of, but there was enough to carry small sticks, sticks that would be sucked under the levered edge by the current.

Back to the river bank went Hugh, and along it he went gathering sticks, until he had a small bundle around which he twisted a pliant sally rod.

When he returned to his chosen slab, once more he levered its edge up from the river bed, and as the current swished into the space beneath he dropped his little bundle of sticks. More with good luck than good guidance, the current carried it beneath the raised edge, where it became jammed in no time. When Hugh pulled out the lever, the slab remained raised, if only just a little. Now he knew how to do it! It was a beginning. And he ached in every muscle of his legs and arms. That was the first day.

Next day Hugh went gathering more sticks, and more sally rods, and made a whole bunch of bundles just like the first one.

With infinite patience he pried with his lever, raising more of the edge, seeing more bundles swept underneath, building a bottom on which the slab was raised higher and higher. Many times a bundle was carried to one side or the other, and drifted away with the river before being swept over the falls downstream. But he persisted, until one day the slab stood clear on all sides.

Then came the hardest part, maneuvering the slab into position where it crossed the first little channel near the river bank. It was backbreaking work, and it could not be rushed. One wrong thrust and the slab could slide hopelessly out of place.

Hugh learned much working on that first slab. All season he worked on it, and by the time the river started to rise at the end of that summer, the slab was in place. When the river rose, no one could tell that the slab was there at all. A hand's breadth beneath the surface it lay hidden.

"What's he going to do now?"

"All that work, and for what?"

"Touched, that's what he is."

Hugh helped the clan through the next three seasons, performing his normal work, hunting, fishing, birding, making sure no one went hungry, even in the snow covered depths of winter. But when the next summer's drought set in and the river ran lower than usual, he was back with lever and bundles of sticks, prising, prodding, prying. By summer's end two more slabs were in place.

He should have been happy. But the river god had started to play tricks with Hugh. What should have been an underwater causeway leading out from the south bank in a straight line to the north bank, was veering off at an angle. To reach the other side, the causeway would take a much longer route.

Originally he had aimed it toward the ancient cloch, incised with strange markings, that stood on the top of the slope some distance above the north bank. He intended that this stone would serve as marker for the route across the river. Now that would no longer be possible.

Summers came and summers went, and slab by slab Hugh built his passage, until it reached just beyond the midway point in the river.

It was then the river god stopped playing tricks and launched a heavy duty power play. It sent flood after flood coursing down mid stream, widening and widening the next channel Hugh hoped to bridge.

There was nothing Hugh could do about it. He was beaten. The river god had answered back, showing a fury and power mere man could not best.

"Halfway, halfway, halfway Hugh!" That was what they called him, and he didn't like it one little bit.

For the next three summers he endured the taunts and the catcalls, until one day the clan awoke to the fact that Hugh had disappeared. So had his belongings.

Where had he gone?

"Maybe we were too harsh."

"What do you mean 'we'? It was you named him 'Halfway Hugh' "

"It was only a joke. And anyway, you all called him that. You can't deny it!"

"You started it!"

"Hey-look! Look across the river!"

"It's him. It's Hugh!"

There he was. Directly below the cloch. And in his hands a lever, and on his back bundles of sticks.

Hugh had left the clan's camp, made his way to the narrow water upriver, crossed the treacherous, slippery flat-tabled rock to the north bank, and here he was directly opposite them. In actual fact, he was directly opposite the point where he had worked so hard that first year when he managed to bridge the first channel with his first limestone slab.

"He really is crazy!"

There was no arguing against that. The clan went about its daily routines, and Hugh went about his summer's work, separated from them by the broad river's flow.

Away from distracting catcalls Hugh toiled with a relentless fury of his own. He had grown expert in wielding his lever, knew the precise spots to place it, and was skilled in sliding flat slabs over the smaller channels.

This time he did not attempt to build straight out from the bank, but was content to follow the lay of the riverbed.

When that summer was over, he had three slabs in place, and their angle from the bank almost matched the angle of the slabs leading from the opposite bank.

It rained and poured water from the heavens all that winter, and the following summer the river ran in full spate throughout a whole rainy season. Hugh could do no work. But still he studied the river's flow from the north bank, noting where it ran fastest, where its channels cut deepest, until he knew its shallows and currents as well as those he had studied long years ago on the other side.

The passing years had taken their toll. Now the clan called him Old Hugh. He was still muscular. But the long seasons spent wading and working in the river brought aches and pains to his joints. It was getting harder and harder for him to get moving in the mornings. He needed sunshine and dry weather, and these were in short supply that long wet winter and equally long rainy summer.

For a second time felt he might be beaten, that the river god was mocking him, and that he would never complete the work he had begun.

At last the rains ceased, and the following summer the level of the river fell. Old Hugh returned to his lonely task, and three more slabs were in place by season's end.

By now his plan was becoming apparent. Since he couldn't build his causeway in a direct line from bank to bank, he would build it in two intersecting lines, using the natural lie of the river, its channels and its seasonal flows, which he had spent his lifetime studying, and charting in his mind's eye and memory.

Two more seasons and Hugh's work was done. The lines intersected, and Hugh could walk freely from bank to bank. So could all his clan, and their successors. And they guarded the secret of the ford jealously.

It was a secret Hugh had not intended. While his underwater causeway from the south bank was halted by deeply treacherous currents, that from the north bank ran at a slightly lesser angle. In fact it met the southern leg a full two slabs earlier than he had originally planned.

Without knowing the exact point of intersection, anyone intending to force the ford from the south ran the danger of continuing until the southern leg led them into the river's deepest part.

It was a feature that saved the settlement that grew up on the north bank on many occasions when it was threatened by southern raiders and would-be invaders.

Thousands of years later his successors, the engineers of the twentieth century, would devise another plan for the same river, now named Erne not Samhaoir. Their modern-day Erne Scheme would lay dry the river bed over which Hugh had toiled so many, many generations previously, and reveal the path of the ford that Hugh had built.

There was one big difference. What Old Hugh had wrought, and the bridge builders who followed him had achieved, did not interfere with the natural world, with the timeless eons during which the river's salmon swam freely in their seasonal migrations between wild Atlantic waters and their spawning grounds in the upper reaches of the Erne and its tributaries."

"What became of Hugh?" I asked.

"That's the whole point of my story," said the old gent sitting on the park bench.

In my school days I would not have described him thus. "Old cove" was the term we used. But since I'll be an old cove myself not too many years hence, now I prefer "old gent".

"Hugh lived on, and his ford lived on, and in time it became known as Old Hugh's Ford, Ath Sean Aoidh. And its entrance, some would say its mouth, in time became Beal Atha Sean Aoidh."

"But-"

"I know. " You'll find many spellings for it, in the Annals and elsewhere, and nowhere do they agree-Ath Seanaidh, Seanaighe, Seannaigh, and in more recent times Seanach. Some say Seanach was a Christian monk, others that he was a great warrior. Let me tell you there were no monks at the time Hugh built his ford. Then came the twisted, tortuous attempts to wrench away all its ties with Hugh and replace the name with Ford Entrance of the Hill-Slope, and Fordmouth of the hillside.

Ford Entrance of the Hill-Slope! What an abomination! You could apply the same to any ford, any hill-slope. It ignores the underlying native topography, where prominent features were associated with proper names or historical events. Ross Nuala, Leath Aoidh, Eas Aoidh Ruaidh, Tir Hugh. The list goes on and on. Hill-slope-my granny!

Then came its anglicisation, and the settlements on both banks were called a baile, meaning town, which eventually came to be called Ballyshannon by its English conquerers. How "shannon" could replace "seanaidh" in its many spellings is a mystery. And how it could be tolerated for so long is another mystery."

I thought about what my companion had just said. It made sense. Not only that, it appealed to me.

As a youth I often heard Belashanny from the lips of my elders. It was a name they had clung to, a name they heard from their elders. It was a name preserved in the collective consciousness of the local people.

Why else would local poet William Allingham pen his famous opening line "Adieu to Belashanny, where I was bred and born," if it was not the name he heard used when he was growing up? It was "Belashanny" he wrote, not "Ballyshanny"

Why would a present-day Internet correspondent refer to "Helen o' Belashanny" if the name were still not in use?"

I must have been concentrating, thought upon thought, memory opening on memory, for when I turned to tell my bench mate that I agreed, agreed thoroughly, with him, I found he had moved without my noticing, and was half-way across the park.

I thought I would see him again, on the morrow, or the next day. But he never returned. When I asked some of the park regulars about him, they couldn't tell me much. All they knew was his name, Hugh, or Old Hugh as they called him.

J. W.
Christmas 2001.

Footnotes:

Ath in Irish is a ford, prounced ah.
Aodh in Irish is Hugh, pronounced eh.
Aoidh is the possessive case, pronounced ee.
Sean in Irish is old, pronounced Shan.
Ath Sean Aoidh is pronounced ashanny.
Beal in Irish is mouth, pronounced bail.
Beal Atha Sean Aoidh is pronounced Belashanny,
which is the name preserved in the collective
consciousness of the local people.

Some reclaimed Irish names: Londonderry is now Derry; Kingston is Dun Laoghaire; Queenstown is Cobh; King's County is Offaly; and Queen's County is Laois.