Good to hear Davy Hammond's unique voice on Ciaran Mac Mathuna's Sunday programme, singing about the Giant's Causeway tram, now long gone. Today it would be worth millions to Irish Tourism. It was closed before the big tourist boom, of course, and for the sake, it is said, of a debt to the bank of something like £30,000. But we in Dublin weren't yet aware, either, of the tourism industry that was to come.
It was a tram, not a rail train and powered, we are told, by water, the first passenger system in the world to use this means. And that meant the Bush river. The brain behind it was a Dr Traill of Trinity College, Dublin. Two nostalgic photographs of the tram in action in Arthur Campbell's Return Journey, a slim picture book of "Belfast and Beyond", published by the splendid Friar's Bush Press.
Anyway, back to Davy. His song included the famous reference to the cleric who complained regularly of the screech that the tram made as it passed a corner or just a squeaky place outside his church, often when he was in full flight. He thought it shouldn't run on Sundays, and just as he was giving off about it, there came the dread sound: "There you are, Lord, You can hear it for Yourself," he shouted. And, it is claimed, at the harvest festival service, the same outspoken cleric said: "All is safely gathered in, except for a wheen of stooks at Ballywillan and it is their fault, for they are lazy, Lord."
But the tram, closed saloon cars or open toastrack style, was a delight. Along and above the great strand of Portrush and the white rocks (cliffs), past Dunluce Castle, past Bushmills and Portballintrae and then, oh joy, across the river and through glorious sandhills with, and you have to imagine this, skylarks in their huge choirs, serenading you. And on to the terminus which was beside the then Kane's Hotel.
Hugh Shearman in his book Ulster (1949), writes that a small blue geranium (geranium pratense), found widely along this coast, which is locally known as the Flower of Dunluce. And the same Hugh writes of "a powerful astringent presence" that seems to brood over much of the area. "When I read that a certain individual, a bishop, claimed to have seen great angels in north Antrim, I did not feel at all inclined to question it." And then there are Susanna Drury's two magnificent paintings of the east and west prospects of the Causeway, later engraved by Vivarea and published in 1777. The Causeway is a wonder, and leave it at that. The tram was in its own way remarkable and unforgettable. Y