I'll be honest with you before we even start. This one is hard for me to write without going a bit soft, because Spancil Hill is more or less down the road from me.
I'm in Ennis. Spancil Hill is maybe six miles east, out the Tulla road, a crossroads you'd drive past and not think twice about unless you knew. And I knew. My granddad knew it as the place you went for the horse fair, the 23rd of June every year, which — and I only copped this writing the post — is more or less the date I'm sitting here typing. Funny how that works.
So what is the song actually about? People hear it for the first time and think it's a love song, or a sad pub song, or one of those weepy ballads you put on at the end of the night when everyone's three pints past sense. And it is a bit of that. But underneath, Spancil Hill is about EMIGRATION. It's about a man who left and can't get home, and the only way he gets home is in a dream.
That's the whole engine of it. The narrator falls asleep in California — the words actually say "near to California, a long, long way from home" — and in his sleep he's carried back across the water, back to Clare, back to the fair at Spancil Hill on the 23rd of June. He walks the old ground. He meets the neighbours. He goes looking for the girl, Nell, the one he calls "my own heart's delight." And just as he takes her hand the cock crows in the morning and he wakes, and he's still in California, and none of it was real.
I cannot tell you how badly that ending gets me every single time.
Here's the part that makes it more than just a pretty melancholy. The song is supposed to be REAL. The man it's attributed to — Michael Considine — was an actual Clare emigrant who went to America in the 1870s, ended up in California, and was apparently dying young. The story handed down is that he wrote the verses for a nephew back home and posted them across, homesick out of his mind for a townland he was never going to see again. Now. I always have to put the honest folklorist hat on here, because you lads know I will not feed you fake certainty: a lot of that origin story is the kind of thing that gets polished smoother every time it's retold, and the version we sing has been trimmed and rearranged by a hundred singers since. Some of the verses you hear most often may not even be his. The murk is part of it. But the bones of the story — Clare man, California, died young, sent the words home — that bit has held up well enough that I believe it in my chest if not always in my head.
And the genius of it, the thing I want you to notice, is how SPECIFIC he is. He doesn't dream of "Ireland." Nobody dreams of a whole country. He dreams of Spancil Hill. He names the fair. He names the day. He names the people — "I went into a neighbour's house," he names Ned, he names the tailor Quigley, he names Nell. That's not a man being poetic. That's a man being precise, the way you're only precise about a place you've gone over and over in your head until you've worn a groove in it. Homesickness isn't vague. It's a list of names.
That's why it stops me, living where I live. I drive past that crossroads. I've stood at the fair — they still run one, you know, the 23rd, horses and dealers and the lot, smaller than it was but it never died. And every time, somewhere in the back of my head, there's a man in California a hundred and fifty years ago who would have given anything to be standing where I'm standing on a wet Tuesday, bored, half-thinking about my dinner. I do not take it for granted. I try not to anyway.
If you want the full set of words and a proper bit of the history, I put it all together over on the Spancil Hill page in the songbook. And if you're building out a singing night and you want something to sit on the quiet end of the evening, after the rowdy ones have had their go, it lives in the songbook alongside the rest. Sing it slow. Don't rush the verses. Let the last line land in silence — do NOT start clapping over it, I beg you.
It's a strange neighbour to have, a song. But that's the one I got. And I wouldn't swap it.
Slán go fóill, BogLord2002 (Seamus)
P.S. — Rattlin the cat sat on the windowsill the whole time I wrote this, facing east, towards the Tulla road. Probably the heat off the glass. Probably.