The walled town of Wexford: ‘Some people said to us that it must be like living in a prison’

“If Billy Colfer talked to you about history, you’d sit up and listen,” Paul Walsh tells me. Walsh is walking me around Wexford town’s historic walls, which he knows so well that he regularly leads walking tours under the name of WexWalks. He is telling me why he first became interested in history. One of his primary school teachers was Billy Colfer, father of children’s writer Eoin Colfer, who made the past come vividly alive to his young pupils, including Walsh. Colfer died in 2013 but his inspirational legacy endures, not least through the definitive history books he wrote about Wexford. “Even today, if there is some argument about anything to do with Wexford, we’ll look it up, and if it’s in a ‘Billy Book’, we take that as the truth,” Walsh says. After the Vikings’ arrival in the ninth century, the Anglo-Normans came in the 12th century. They built Wexford’s walls. “There were originally 1.2km of wall. There are about 800m left now,” Walsh explains. READ MOREThe stones were quarried locally and would have been brought in by horse and cart. Wexford once had six fortified public gates. None survives, but the heavily restored Westgate Tower, a private 13th-century gateway to Selskar Abbey, is the town’s last medieval gateway.Perhaps surprisingly, Wexford’s historic walls are mostly to be found where most people probably don’t look too attentively at them, chiefly in car parks dotted around the town and in their gardens. At the Mary Street car park, the South Main Street car park, and others where Walsh walks me, modern vehicles are parked up alongside medieval walls. The challenge for any built heritage is how modern life can develop around it, while still preserving as much of the past as possible. The garden of the town’s lovely airy library, for instance, backs on to part of its medieval wall. “A lot of people have stuff like this in their back yard,” Walsh says, as we walk around the garden. I ask what awareness he had growing up of the historic significance of the walls. “When you’re a kid, you just kind of accept what’s around you. It’s not that you don’t care about it, you just take it for granted.”One couple who did not grow up in Wexford, and whose garden ends at the town wall, are Swiss-born André Tschan and his wife, Colleen. They live on Abbey Street with their two cats, Mis and Chief, who like to nap perilously high atop the ancient walls. Colleen and André Tschan at the medieval wall at the end of their garden in Abbey Street, Wexford. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw Wexford library was built close to a section of Wexford's town wall. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw “Some people said to us that it must be like living in a prison, that all you see out the back is this huge wall,” André jokes. The couple, former and current punk-rockers, had been looking for somewhere to retire to other than within Zurich and landlocked Switzerland. It was a toss up between Wexford and Nova Scotia, and Wexford won out. The two met by chance on New Year’s Eve in London’s Trafalgar Square in the early 1980s. André had just broken up with a girlfriend, and Colleen, seeing he looked sad and it being New Year’s Eve, went over to chat to him. They have been together ever since. André is a former archaeologist, as well as a co-author of art and music books, a record label operator and exhibition curator. Their Abbey Street home, which used to be a doctor’s surgery, is a work of art in itself, full of beautifully curated vintage furniture, art and all kinds of objects. “When we first looked at this house, you didn’t actually see the wall because it was so grown over,” Colleen says. Prior to their purchase of the house, an extension to facilitate patients to the surgery ran right up to the back of the wall. They removed this when renovating the property. “The idea of being inside the town walls was an amazing thing; a privilege to live in a place where its ancient wall is the back wall of your garden.”“For me it is about cultural continuity,” André says. “About all the people who have come before us, and engaged with the wall, or approached the wall for their needs. It is a bit of a memento mori, we are only custodians. History embraces us every day.”[ An Irish Diary on the ‘different dimension of historic awareness’ unique to WexfordOpens in new window ]Colleen points out that they own their house, but they don’t own the wall. “The wall is an Irish national monument.”Both of them are unsure who owns the wall, or who holds responsibility for its maintenance. The local council? The OPW? They wonder if public access is required before a State body can repair or restore or maintain a historic monument. They have asked locally, but there doesn’t seem to be any clear answer. “I don’t think anyone wants to claim ownership because the wall costs money to maintain if it gets overgrown,” André says.The 12th-century Selskar Abbey in Wexford town. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw Peter Hussey stands in front of a mural in the Westgate area of Wexford town. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw A few doors down the street is their neighbour Peter Hussey, former manager of the town’s flagship Whites Hotel. The Husseys have lived in their 1830s home for half a century, and share the same section of medieval wall that the Tschans do. Their domestic washing line is fixed to the wall. “We know from the deed of the house that it was built on the ‘sparrow’s field’. We discovered that Sparrow was a surname of ship owners back in the 1830s,” Hussey says.Hussey brings me out into their back garden to show me where, more than a century ago, a house was built against the other side of their wall. The medieval wall thus became a party wall. It towers over their own house.“They started to build the Wexford wall in 1250,” Hussey says. He shows me a map of where the wall structure originally was. It’s a rough semicircle, with the southern end running down to the harbour, and the northern end stops short of where the Wexford quays now are. “You could only come in to the place by water back then.“They started where they built the castle [the southern end]. And because it was a very busy port, they decided this place was worth walling. So they built a wall the whole way around the town, and it took 50-plus years to build it. “This would have been a huge development for the people who lived here. This new thing called a wall. As it developed, people must have been commenting, especially the people who lived outside the wall. People back then must have been wondering if the wall of Wexford was like what we think now of the children’s hospital in Dublin: is it never-ending?”How Ireland’s walled towns came to bePart of the town wall at Robert Brennan Memorial Park, Abbey Street, Wexford. Photograph: (Nick Bradshaw) By Eimear O’ConnellIrish walled towns are towns that have, or had, defensive walls. In Ireland, the earliest examples of these are associated with Viking or Hiberno-Norse settlements. Later, the Anglo-Norman conquest of Ireland brought with it a wave of town-building, starting in the southeast and expanding outwards.The new Anglo-Norman towns were often built at or near existing monastic settlements or on the site of conquered Gaelic strongholds, and the majority of them were walled. This was as a defensive measure, to protect the town’s inhabitants from attack, but also as a means of controlling the trade of goods into and out of the town. Taxes and tariffs were applied at the town gates. The earliest town ‘walls’ in Ireland were a combination of earthen ditches and timber palisade fences. By the 13th and 14th centuries these had mostly been replaced by stone walls, often with towers and wall walks and usually with several gates, giving access to the town from different directions. Today it is largely the stone walls, or remnants of them, that survive. The towns featured in this series are all members of the Irish Walled Towns Network. The network was founded by the Heritage Council in 2005 and is delivered in partnership with local authorities and community groups in 33 member towns across the island. The network supports the conservation of town walls and the regeneration of town centres in its member towns by providing training, funding and a forum for knowledge exchange. Eimear O’Connell is built heritage officer and Irish Walled Towns Network programme manager at the Heritage CouncilOn the map of the wall Hussey shows me, some towers are round, and some are square. He draws my attention to the fact different styles are alongside each other.“If you ask a schoolchild in Wexford what is the difference between the round walls and the square walls, it’s this,” he says: “This wall was being built from 1250 to 1300, which would be the Crusade era. So people went to the crusades, and they discovered, because they were attacking towns, it is far more difficult to put a ladder up against a round tower than a square tower. So they made a mental note, I suppose, that ‘when we get back to Wexford to finish the building of our wall, any new towers will be round’. And there’s one beside the Wexford Arts Centre that is round, and the next one after it is square, and thereafter they are all square.”During the time Hussey was manager at Whites, the hotel used to host a monthly meeting of the Wexford Historical Society. “I would see people coming into the meetings. You would see about a dozen people. These would be mainly elderly – very elderly – people with an interest in local history. “Scroll forward to the current day: the same Wexford Historical Society now has on occasion about 200 members attending their meetings. And they have had a couple of incidences where the lectures have had to be duplicated, because of the sheer demand. There is now a huge upsurge in local history.” The attendees, he says, are both older and younger people.Wally O’Neill owns Red Books bookshop in St Peter’s Square, and a second, Red Books Underground, at Eclectic Avenue. Between the two, he tells me his stock is about a quarter of a million books. We are talking at the St Peter’s Square location, where books fill what look to me like innumerable rooms, from floor to ceiling, in any and every genre you could possibly think of. Westgate Tower in Wexford, the only one remaining of the town's six fortified medieval gates. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw Wally O'Neill in his bookshop, Red Books, in St Peter’s Square, Wexford. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw “It’s more bohemian up here, in St Peter’s Square, even though it is so close to the other part of the town,” he says.O’Neill also stocks a selection of Wexford history books. “Per population we have more history written about us than anywhere else in Ireland. People are still buying books, but footfall is down a lot.[ Wild wonders in the enchanted sandy woods of Wexford's Raven PointOpens in new window ]“Who owns the town walls? I don’t know. It’s always been a grey area over the years.” In 1835 four of the remaining gates were taken down to facilitate expansion, so the challenge of trying to live life among a medieval layout was troubling Wexford residents 200 years ago, as it is today. Like the Tschans, O’Neill is unsure who has official responsibility for the walls, or even if parts of them are under the aegis of different entities, depending on whether or not they are in public or private locations. O’Neill is sure of one thing, though. “There was a lot of stuff taken down that shouldn’t have been, even 20 years ago. It was people wanting to build or open up gardens or have more car parking space. You can’t do that now,” he says decisively, and with relief. Next week, part two: Derry