Pinkeen bridge 'should be named' for tall tales teller

The new bridge, with Arthur Tapley and Billy Redmond.

With the construction of the long-awaited pedestrian bridge over Pinkeen stream completed, only awaiting traffic calming crossings to be added by Kildare County Council, a move is growing for it to be named after a famous local teller of tall tales, writes Brian Byrne.

The bridge will accommodate hundreds of crossings each day by families and their children who currently use a dodgy traverse of the stream to get to and from schools, the community centre, and local shops. Demand for the bridge has been ongoing for a decade, and thanks to sponsorship by civil engineering company HES in association with Kildare County Council, it should finally be in use during the next few weeks.

But if it does indeed become named after one Arthur Tapley, it's unlikely that those who use it will have any idea of who he was. Most of the families who will benefit from the bridge are new residents to a village grown bigger, where Arthur was once one of the local characters. I was a teenager when he died on 8 December 1961, but I have many memories of him sitting in our family's bar, always ready to spin a tale that would top anything previously in the current discussion.

Arthur Tapley — his name could also be spelled Tapliss, as his father was a British soldier of Maltese origin — was 82 when he passed away, which put his birth at around 1880. That would have put him around ten in exploits he recounted from purported experiences in the Boer War, though in any such wartime stories, including the later Great War, he was always '21'. In the 1950s, he told a visitor to his home on the Sunnyhill Road that he was 95, "but I have a brother in Portsmouth who is 125." 

That same visitor, who had been out for a day's fowling without success, had fallen into conversation with Arthur on his way home. Arthur professed not to be interested in shooting, but said he had once fired on a flock of plover to test a theory, sweeping the barrel of the gun rapidly in a semi-circle as he pressed the trigger. "I suppose you downed 10 or 15," his visitor said with a level of flippancy. "I picked up 39," Arthur replied with simple sincerity. The visitor recalled later that the answer had quickly wiped the smile off his face. "After all, you really cannot question a sportsman who, having shot 39 birds on one cartridge, refrains from telling you it was the round 40."

Current Kilcullen raconteur, writer, retired world walker, and musician Billy Redmond has been promoting the cause of naming the new bridge after Arthur for some time, ever since the prospect of its construction became real. A regular visitor to Arthur's home, just opposite the entrance to the Cnoc na Greine housing estate, he has many of his stories filed away in memory. At a recent Heritage Week event in Kilcullen he retold one, about Arthur once finding himself being chased by a bull in a local 100-acre field. According to the man himself, he jumped for safety to a branch of the only tree in the field ... but missed. "And what happened then, Arthur?" "I caught it on the way down," was the laconic reply.

There are still many in Kilcullen who will have a tale to tell about Kilcullen's tall tale champion, his place not since overtaken by anyone. There's one about him using bees to flush out a champion-sized trout in the Liffey, uncatchable by rod and line, so he could win an angling competition. Or his winning the Tickell Cup at Punchestown riding a mare, which foaled at the first fence and subsequently carried Arthur first past the finish line, 'with the new foal coming in second'. Or the competition between Arthur and a rival about who could tell the tallest tale. His rival thought for a moment, then claimed that he had once driven a nail through the moon. Immediately Arthur agreed, "that's right, because I clinched it," he said before lifting his beloved pipe for a quiet puff of triumph.

Now that the bridge over Pinkeen is finally almost ready, Billy Redmond is upping his campaign that it be named after Arthur. "He is part of the heritage of Kilcullen, and who else could the bridge be named after?" he asks. That's a reasonable consideration, to mark a Kilcullen man whose life was always larger than life, and always entertaining for that. On a straw poll at the stream bank last week, there's other support evident for Billy's suggestion.

And besides, it's the families of the 300-plus homes in Cnoc na Greine estate, opposite Arthur's home, which will get the full benefit of a bridge whose prospect seemed for so long to be a kind of tall tale in a nebulous future. Arthur, had he lived, would surely have been able to build it in a morning, hauling all the stones from Ballyknockan during the previous night. "And I cut them out of the quarry, too, after my tea," he'd probably be saying between puffs of his pipe in that great bar-room in the sky.  

Note: A version of this article was first published in The Kildare Nationalist.

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