Again as with most of the lockkeeper cottages along the canal there were always the usual hens running around. I remember – when I was a young lad of about thirteen – Patsy Crawley who owned the grocery shop in Canal Street, paid me two shillings to take his big Labrador dog for a walk. 

Few of our streets have remained substantially unaltered over the last century – but those featured below from the Newry Street Directory of 1906 are among them. 

After the usual round of gossip and comments on the weather and the horse-racing, people on their ceilidhe in the old days invariably lapsed into stories about banshees, pookas, fairies and ghosts. 

The houses about Drumbally were scattered – I doubt if there were more than a dozen in a radius of a mile – and there wasn’t much by way of entertainment available.  What there was, was talk.