An Irishman's Diary: Well-remembered places

On Tuesday night I found myself in a place called Toberbunny – I’ll explain why later – and was amused, given the name, to see that it was overrun with hares.

This shouldn’t have been a surprise. Toberbunny is beside Dublin Airport, which seems to have become a hare sanctuary in recent years. I’m told Belfast Airport has them too. The species must have found some evolutionary advantage in sniffing jet fumes, because it’s scarce everywhere else now.

Anyway, the coincidence set me wondering about the placename. The “tober” bit meant a well, I knew; presumably a holy one. But I’d never heard of a saint called “Bunny”, unless he was the one Bunny Carr was named after.

So I turned to the oracle on these matters – the database Logainm.ie. And it turns out that the “Bunny” was not a person – it’s just a corruption of bainne. The name therefore means “the Milk Well” – an interesting concept and apparently unique among the recorded wells of Ireland.

Logainm didn’t offer an explanation. But I did a bit more digging, via the variant “Tubberbunny”. And like Alice’s White Rabbit, this led me down into the wonderland of a website run by Dúchas, inheritors of the National Folklore Collection.

As I discovered, the collection’s many treasures include a survey carried out in Irish schools during the late 1930s, comprising half a million manuscript pages, now digitised. And there, at the click of a button, I found an entry explaining Tubberbunny, written in the careful script of a student at St Pappan’s, Ballymun, circa 1938.

It told the story of a well (“a beautiful well”), near which had once lived a poor widow, “with a lot of children”. The children were sick, and their mother had no milk. But a priest assured her God would provide. Sure enough, the next time she visited the well, she found it full of milk, which kept flowing until the children were healthy again.

I love the way you can delve into Irish placenames like that, starting with the anglicised version – often meaningless – and working back through to the original. Part of the fun is the ambiguity you usually encounter, requiring further detective work. Toberbunny is a case in point. It seems almost in bad taste to mention it after the charming story of the widow’s children. But this newspaper’s “Where’s That?” column once speculated on an alternative translation, rendering Toberbunny “the Well of the Flood”. The relevant Irish word here would be buinne, (“a spouting”); hence, as our columnist added indelicately, “buinneach, diarrhoea”. I don’t know. For the sake of the poor widow, I’m going with milk.

The hares in Toberbunny are doubly apt because, these days, the townland is also home to the ALSAA sports complex and running track. This is why I was there. While thousands of other runners prepare to complete 26 of them in a row next Monday, I have decided this winter to try and improve my time for a single mile.

There aren’t many mile races, unfortunately. But ALSAA runs a series of them between now and spring. And I won’t mention my time from Tuesday’s first attempt. Suffice to say, in case he’s reading this, I’m coming after you, Roger Bannister. About a lap-and-a-half after you, on current figures.

Tuesday’s mile and the impending Dublin marathon were not mutually exclusive, it turned out, if only because of an extraordinary man called Dave Brady. An inspirational figure or complete lunatic, depending on your opinion, Dave is ubiquitous in athletic circles – running a race somewhere in Ireland every day of the week except Monday, his day of rest.

He only entered his first event (for Live Aid) in 1986, when already 36. But he hasn't stopped since. According to a profile in the current Irish Runner magazine, he completed his 400th marathon in August.

On the previous occasion I met him, he had just finished a 6km event in Dublin and was heading to Cork for an ultra-marathon. He would have to travel through the night, he told me. But luckily, he didn’t need much sleep. Two or three hours would do, he said.

Readers might assume he has a sedentary job, allowing lots of pent-up energy. But no, he’s a builder. And you might also think he recovers his running reserves periodically during the inevitable long lay-offs when injured. Wrong again. In 28 years, he’s never had an injury. I don’t know what his secret is, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it involves a miraculous well.

@FrankmcnallyIT