The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #34282   Message #719630
Posted By: Joe Offer
29-May-02 - 02:08 PM
Thread Name: Where is Spancil Hill (continued)?
Subject: RE: Where is Spancil Hill (continued)?
In the DTStudy thread on this song, IanC posted a link to this story from the Irish Independent. I think it's worth posting, but not for inclusion in the DTStudy.
-Joe Offer-


Wednesday January 30th 2002

LEG ENDARY balladeer Robbie McMahon, who for 40 years has been known as "Mr Spancil Hill", nearly raised the roof of his cowshed when he forgot where he had hidden an antique grenade.

The 75-year-old singer was in good spirits yesterday after an army bomb disposal squad was scrambled to his Co Clare farm.

The specialist unit safely removed a live hand-grenade and a stick of gelignite found by Robbie as he repaired the roof of the shed.

He admits hiding the hand-grenade there 20 years ago but then forgot where he had put it. But he said he can't fathom where the gelignite came from, although it may have belonged to his late father.

The unit carried out a controlled explosion which in the words of the great song itself, could be heard from "the parish church of Clooney, a mile from Spancil Hill".

A Defence Forces spokesman described the grenade as a Mills 36 type. The gelignite had deteriorated and was beginning to weep.

The alarm was raised after Robbie revealed his find to local Garda Sergeant Con Ryan, who called in the Explosives Ordnance Unit at Collins' Barracks in Cork.

Robbie told how the army triggered a blast that sent the soil of his top field soaring into the sky.

He said: "Two big van loads of them landed here today. We all went off to the big field. They dug a hole and put sand bags over it.

"I heard a bang and I leapt up. There was scrawbs seventy foot up in the air, by God."

The singer revealed how he and a relative had discovered two grenades in a nearby ditch 20 years ago.

"I went to put my grenade in a place where no-one could find it. But I couldn't remember where I put it," said Robbie.

The singer was "given" the song Spancil Hill by the nephew of its writer, Michael Considine.

Michael Mulqueen

© Irish Independent
http://www.unison.ie/irish_independent/ & http://www.unison.ie/