Peg Rossiter: If you or yours can recall The Mile Tree, you're an old native!

Do you remember The Mile Tree? If you do, you qualify as an elderly citizen of Clonmel.

And if your parents, or grandparents, recalled The Mile Tree, then you can proudly assume the status of being an old native. Old natives (in which category I include myself) are a rather snooty lot, who feel they carry a certain inheritance of knowledge as to who’s who and what’s what about our beloved Cluain Meala.

But back to The Mile Tree. It was a very ancient ash that grew on the border of the townlands of Ardgeeha and Lawlesstown on the main Clonmel/Cashel road.

This area on the northern boundary of the town was once green agricultural country of dairying and grain growing. Now it is the location of thriving industry and large business and shopping centres.

It has been completely urbanised, as the once medieval town broke through its walled defences and, over the centuries, crawled east and west and is now climbing northwards in expansion.

The Mile Tree presided over much of that expansion, dying before it became engulfed itself. But while it lived it assumed a certain status.

It became a landmark. It gave an identity to the area; just like other areas which became landmarks: The Green, St Patrick’s Well, St Nicholas Church, Glenaleamy (The Wilderness), Old Bridge. Everybody knew the place one was talking about when you mentioned The Mile Tree.

The Tree (and I feel it must have the upper case every time!) grew very tall, and over the decades its roots had broken through the road surface and formed a lumpy base covered in grass and wildflowers. Above, its branches grew wild and free, shading the road from the summer’s sun and the winter’s rain.

Nobody had ever tried to give it a shape by pruning or removing branches. Like Topsy in the nursery rhyme it just “growed!”

Why was The Mile Tree given a title that defined distance? The popular theory was that it marked a mile from Clonmel. I do not know if the distance was ever measured, but there was speculation.

Was it an English mile or an Irish mile? Again, in the popular memory of ordinary people, its precise nationality was never identified, but the theory was that an English mile covered a distance from the junction of Cashel Road and Queen Street, and the Irish mile started at The Mall or the post office.

This probably referred to an early such office in the town located in High Street/Main Street, now O’Connell Street, approximately on the site of today’s Maher’s pharmacy, where the celebrated English novelist Anthony Trollope (1815-81) held the job of postmaster.

Distance and breeding could, of course, have been easily verified but that would have given a certainty about a landmark, and any landmark worth its salt has to have a mystique, a folklore, a tradition, a story.

But, it seems to me that the real significance of The Mile Tree was its place in another local institution - the constitutional. The constitutional?

This was the title given to a daily walk, relaxed and pleasant, taken for what was described as “the good of one’s health.” It was what the doctor ordered!

In those pre-radio, pre-television times people in sedentary work, when their shops, offices and factories closed, would, after tea, take their constitutional.

For those living in the north western area of the town The Mile Tree was their objective. They would walk to the tree, pause and return home again to supper and bed.

The same people did this every day from spring until the dark nights of winter. It became a social occasion as much as a healthy exercise.

They became friends. There was gossip, a sharing of news, laughter, even theories about distances and English and Irish miles. 

But times were changing! The car was taking over the roads and road-walking made the old constitutional a life-threatening activity.

Then, one night in the late 1960s, The Mile Tree came crashing down, its ancient branches fractured, its knotted roots torn from the grassy mound and the wildflowers.

The verdict was that it was the victim of old age and high winds.

Some few years later, the Clonmel Historical and Archaeological Society felt it should be replaced and, with the permission of, and on the site designated by the county council, planted a well-established ash, but that was sacrificed to road realignment.

In that realignment the council planted several attractive trees, but none with the untamed distinction of that ancient ash.

It seems to me that The Mile Tree died when its time was up, when it could no longer survive the control and cement of inevitable urban expansion, just as the simple charm of the old constitutional had to ultimately succumb to the sweat and expensive puffiness of the modern gym.