THREE COFFEES, ONE VILLAGE

Three coffee trailers, three corners of Glenbeigh, County Kerry — and a much older story about the places where we stop.

I went out for a run and came home with a story.

That seems to be happening more often these days. Perhaps it is retirement. Perhaps it is simply having the time to notice things that were always there. Either way, somewhere between finishing my run with my usual skinny latte with sugar-free caramel at Upcycle, drinking a matcha and blackberry iced coffee while talking to Jackie O’Connor at Coffee Yerra Ya, and standing at Kev’s Shed chatting to Cliona Griffin about teaching, retirement and what on earth I intended doing with the rest of my life, I realised that Glenbeigh’s three coffee trailers were telling a much more interesting story than I had first imagined.

Because this isn’t really a story about coffee.

It is a story about a village.

UP-CYCLE

Upcycle was the first. Nici and Dan O’Shea originally opened on the Rossbeigh Road, close to the entrance to the Fairy Forest. Dan is from Cromane and Nici from New Zealand, although at this stage I think Glenbeigh can safely claim her as one of its own.

Their first location might have remained their home had another change not been taking place around them. Work on the South Kerry Greenway meant the council needed the site and Upcycle had to move. For any small business, being told that the patch of ground on which you have established yourself is required for something else cannot have been particularly welcome news.

There is, however, something rather fitting about what happened next.

They upcycled Upcycle.

The trailer moved to the entrance of the Glenbeigh/Glencar football grounds, practically across the road from us, and found itself immediately beside the main road through Glenbeigh. What began as an enforced relocation gave the business a different kind of visibility. Local traffic passes its door throughout the day, as do visitors travelling towards Cahersiveen and further along the Ring of Kerry, while the football grounds bring their own flow of matches, training sessions and people coming and going.

Nici and Dan’s interest in giving things another life extends well beyond the name. Look around the trailer and you begin to see it everywhere. Old cable reels have become tables. Barrels have been pressed into service. Used coffee grounds are bagged and offered free for people to take home rather than simply being thrown away. There is a bowl of water for dogs and a little green tin of treats tucked underneath one of the tables.

None of it feels staged to demonstrate environmental credentials. It is simply how the place works.

I had arrived there that morning after a run with Sinéad. Meabh was serving and remembered my order — skinny latte, sugar-free caramel — before there was much need for explanation.

It is a tiny thing, but these are often the details by which a place becomes familiar. Hospitality does not always require a beautifully laid table or somebody opening a front door. Sometimes it is simply a person behind a hatch seeing you arrive and remembering how you take your coffee.

COFFEE YERA YA

A little further through Glenbeigh, another road carries another kind of traffic. Where the main road veers towards Rossbeigh sits Coffee Yerra Ya, at the entrance to O’Connor’s Caravan Park. All summer there are families coming and going from the park, while others make that familiar journey towards the beach, cars carrying towels, windbreaks, children, dogs and all the paraphernalia required for an Irish day beside the sea, where one generally prepares for four seasons before leaving home.

Jackie O’Connor runs Yerra Ya with her daughter Natasha. Together with Jackie’s husband John and son Jake, the family also owns and runs O’Connor’s Caravan Park, so the trailer sits naturally within a place where welcoming people has long been part of everyday life.

For Jackie herself, there is an even longer thread. Before Yerra Ya there was Rumours, the coffee shop and restaurant she ran in the village, and before that a craft and gift shop. I have known her long enough to know that whatever she turns her hand to will be done properly. She has taste and ambition, certainly, but behind both is something much less glamorous and considerably more useful: she understands hard work.

I met her there while drinking one of Yerra Ya’s newer additions, a matcha and blackberry iced coffee, with about half an inch of dark blackberry sitting beneath the pale green matcha. Jackie was taking a well-earned break herself, coffee in hand, and we got talking.

It was one of those conversations that wanders pleasantly until, without realising it, you have found the thing you were looking for.

Jackie told me that waffles had been important to her when developing Yerra Ya. She wanted to offer something different from Upcycle rather than simply reproducing what was already available elsewhere in the village. She had taken the same view of vegan food. Upcycle had established that as one of its strengths, and Jackie was quite happy to leave it to them.

That stayed with me.

There are only so many customers in a small village, and everybody knows that. Yet Jackie wasn’t talking about another business as something to be copied or outdone. She was talking about finding her own offering while leaving room for somebody else’s.

It felt strangely familiar.

When I was growing up, Glenbeigh had, at one stage, as many as seven small grocery shops. It seems almost impossible now that a village of this size could sustain them all, but it did. Inevitably, much of what they sold overlapped. Bread was bread, milk was milk and the same familiar tins and packets appeared on shelves around the village. Yet certain things belonged particularly to certain shops, and doing a proper shop could involve calling to several of them. You bought one thing here and another somewhere else. There was a conversation at one counter, another at the next, and then you went back out onto the street and carried on. Of course they competed. They had families and bills and businesses to support. But they also had to meet one another in the village when the shops closed. There was an understanding in that which seems rather old-fashioned now, although perhaps it shouldn’t.

Jackie’s decision about waffles and vegan food suddenly seemed less like a modern business strategy and more like a continuation of something I remembered from childhood.

Our conversation then wandered further back, to Mrs Foley’s little tea shop at Rossbeigh Beach. In the 1970s, and probably in the 1960s before that, Mrs Foley served tea and homemade scones. That was essentially it. Tea and homemade scones.

There is something almost radical about the simplicity of it now. No enormous menu, no attempt to anticipate every possible preference, no syrups, no alternative milks and certainly no matcha. People came in from the beach, had tea and a scone, and went on their way.

Half a century later, not far from the same stretch of sand, I was looking through a clear cup at a layer of blackberry underneath green matcha. The menu has certainly changed. The pleasure of stopping hasn’t.

KEV’S SHED

The newest of Glenbeigh’s three trailers sits on yet another route. Kev’s Shed opened alongside the South Kerry Greenway and stands immediately beside its car park, catching walkers and cyclists as they arrive along the old railway line.

The trailer is only part of it. Behind it, the site opens onto seating beneath mature trees beside the River Behy, with the old stone bridge beyond. Alongside is the shed itself, a building that had lain largely unused for as long as I can remember and which now provides additional seating.

That alone would make the place interesting to me. Heron & Moss has always been drawn to the idea that something does not have to be swept away simply because its original purpose has gone. Sometimes an old thing needs remarkably little intervention. It just needs somebody to see another possibility in it.

But the Griffin connection with this particular piece of ground goes deeper. Inside Kev’s Shed are old family photographs showing James and Mary Griffin with three of their fourteen children beside the railway. James worked on the railway as milesman and Mary as gatekeeper. The photographs belong to a time when the line was not heritage, recreation or picturesque background. It was simply part of working life.

Eventually the trains stopped.The rails disappeared and the route fell quiet.

Now people are travelling it again. They come on bicycles and on foot rather than by train, passing the same ground along the South Kerry Greenway, and beside it another generation of the Griffin family is serving coffee.

When I called in, it was Cliona Griffin who served me. I’ve known Cliona for years. She is a teacher, as is her sister Muireann, and their mother Patricia was a teacher too. That particular family connection reaches unexpectedly into my own story.

In September 1991, I was completing my final teaching practice. I wasn’t yet a teacher, although I was close enough to the end of college to be imagining what it might feel like finally to become one. Patricia gave me her class for the month. There is a peculiar mixture of confidence and terror involved in taking somebody else’s class as a student teacher. You stand at the top of the room trying to appear entirely certain of what you are doing, while being acutely aware that somewhere nearby is an experienced teacher who actually is. Patricia trusted me with hers.

Thirty-five years later, her daughter was handing me a coffee beside an old railway line, named after her dad Kevin Griffin, and asking how I intended filling my retirement. I told Cliona about Heron & Moss and the website I had been building, and that I was putting together a piece about Glenbeigh’s three coffee trailers. She was, she admitted, a little envious of my new-found freedom. I can’t say I was entirely sorry about that.

Standing there afterwards, I was struck by the odd symmetry of it all. Patricia had appeared near the beginning of my teaching life and now, entirely by chance, her daughter had appeared near the beginning of whatever comes after it. Around us was a railway route that had begun another life as a Greenway, and an old shed that had found another purpose of its own.

Sometimes the connections are better left alone.

By then I had visited all three trailers, and what interested me most was not their similarities but the way each had found its own particular place in Glenbeigh. Upcycle sits beside the road through the village. Yerra Ya catches the turn towards Rossbeigh, with the caravan park behind it. Kev’s Shed sits beside a route that did not exist in its present form until very recently, although people had been travelling along the same strip of ground for generations.

Three different routes. Three reasons to pull in.

The more time I spent at the trailers, the more I thought about those seven grocery shops and Mrs Foley’s tea and scones. Not because Glenbeigh was somehow better then, or because we should try to recreate a village that no longer exists. Nostalgia becomes rather useless when it insists that everything was superior in the past.

What interests me is what survives without us necessarily noticing: the casual stop, the familiar face behind a counter, someone remembering what you usually order, meeting a person you hadn’t expected to see, buying one thing here and something different somewhere else, or finding that a conversation has lasted considerably longer than the errand that brought you there in the first place. None of these things depends on a particular kind of building and, as it turns out, they don’t really require a building at all. A hatch in the side of a trailer will do perfectly well.

I had thought I was going to write about three coffee trailers.

Instead, I found myself thinking about seven grocery shops, Mrs Foley’s tea and scones, an old railway, a teacher who trusted me with her class in 1991, a daughter handing me coffee thirty-five years later, and three small businesses finding their own place in the same Kerry village.

Perhaps that is what places do. They change constantly while somehow carrying pieces of themselves forward.

The kettle may have taken a back seat to the coffee machine, but the old ritual of stopping for something hot and staying for the conversation carries on.