Clifden And The Connemara Pony Fair

Location: Ireland

Clifden Fair

The Annual Connemara Pony fair was today(or rather yesterday).

The fair has grown to be massive, with buyers from all around the world.

I noticed the English race horse trainer Henrietta Knight was there, interviewed and was telling how she has fallen in love with the breed and is now breeding them with her ex top jockey husband Terry Biddlecombe (he won the grand national at least once). He was watching the ring looking like a kid who knows where Mammy hid the christmas toys.

There was a farmer interviewed, obviously delighted with the recent high prices being fetched, his mare and foal fetched 8000 euro, feck ye can buy more than 20 pack donkeys for that. so it's more a show for those with little sense and too much money today.

But then to be fair the Connemara Pony is a very special breed, a beauty tough as boots, yet gentle nature. A guy near me has two foals at the moment and they stick out like little fantasy's amongst the other horses in the field.

Connemara is a beautiful part of Ireland, I have many relations there to stay as I please, which is a good enough thing as I all but lived up there a few years back now, but then hospitality works both ways mind. One of My G Grandfathers was from Connemara, and his son born up the way in Westport, born there Laughing

after his auld fella went to a market and fell in love with a massive headed woman (I have the picture and God bless her in heaven she could have scared crows tame) and got better land into the bargain, he was a handsome man so it must have been a tough life back home. Ironic that today his auld couple of acres of land, (which still has visible some of the footings of the house he built with his bare hands all those years ago), that sits overlooking Ireland's only Fjord in Killary harbour would now be worth maybe a million.

I still have a rake of relatives in Connemara, none in Clifden I know of but a hoard of them still in Leenane, Erriff, Ashleigh falls, the Rock (where some of the best bare knuckle poteen fighters in our clan now live Laughing

the childer are tough in the quarry mts around there than city Irish adults) and all the way up to Westport as they wandered to marry many years ago.

That G Grandfather I must take after, he had shovels for hands and was the strongest man in the village of Leenane, as they say as strong as a fecking ox bhoy.

The image of the auld one stood there, it is a good memory for a human being, (especially an ancestor) how locals remember him as the man who never put a heavy load down if he stopped to chat; he was the original man of rock long before the film the field, which the fecking bar in Leenane is now called after. Laughing

Richard Harris me arse, I am of the mountain and would ate him whilst ateing me brakefeast, before having his wife for supper.

Anyway if ye are ever up there, go and get to see the fair.

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Clifden And The Connemara Pony Fair