Francis, The Wicked Witch Of Wicklow - Ireland 2015

Some random scenery near The Meetings, Avoca, Wicklow, Ireland

Erin

Okay, so that’s not overly fair, but it’s also a… fairly accurate description.

To understand this story, we have to go back in time a bit to before we ever even left England for our 2015 jaunt around Ireland, the Czech Republic and Canada.

Ireland was our first planned stop and with its relatively high costs, we decided to try to find ways to cut the costs back. This included doing things like hitch hiking, help Xing or couchsurfing, all of which are ways to travel based off essentially primarily a gift economy and sharing. They are hugely popular and great ways to keep travel costs down, and so after paying the small fee for membership, we joined Help X and had a look around at what options we had to do work in exchange for a place to stay and food, as is quite common on Help X.

So we found a great place in the Wicklow mountains on Help X, where a woman wanted help repairing and developing her enormous home into a yoga retreat and some kind of biomedical wellness centre. She was nice enough, but soon made us wonder. She showed us to our room, which was a huge, newly built room with a comfortable bed and stunning views overlooking her massive garden and some of the surrounding hills. We’d expected to have internet in the house, but she told us that she didn’t have it and the only place in the village - nay - hamlet that had internet was the pub at the very bottom of the hill which was aptly called “The Meetings”. The village itself was known as “The Meeting of the Waters”, which is a cute name for a village of this beauty. It truly was raw and gorgeous, very isolated but fantastic. The Meetings pub was a lovely little village thing that served craft brews and often had people come in to just practice their flute or tin pipe or any other instrument. The internet could have been way, way better, but in all it was a great experience. One I'd happily repeat.

After we got settled we decided to set off into the house and see if we could find the woman, Francis, to ask if anything needed doing and to get stuck in. We were there for a week, after all. It ended up that we couldn’t find really anyone, and anyone we did come across didn’t speak English and all the doors were locked. It became like a maze in this house, confusing, back and forth and up and down. We had no idea where to go. It was truly enormous and maze-like and we started feeling like we’d stepped into some Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ kind of situation. We fully expected any minute to be strung up and used as sustenance.

No such fate though. We discovered the doors had been meant to be left open but were frequently locked. Whew.

We eventually found the “workers” kind of area - which had a bit of a sitting room, a table and chairs and a kitchen. There ended up being two Slovakians - a guy and girl, and a Spanish woman plus both Pete and I. Another person was meant to be coming but never arrived. Whatever, we had enough people around that it wasn’t overly weird, and so we got to work doing whatever needed doing.

Francis, the owner, eventually began to exhibit what can be considered annoyances with the workers who came to help her. She needed people with skills that exceeded those that were on offer, but also agreed to have the people she had. She needed people who could tile, build, and generally do so much DIY that they’d likely want to be paid for it - not just put up in a house in the middle of nowhere. She also seemed to be very annoyed at everyone’s lack of English and even sometimes asked me if I understood English. Um. Duh.

Eventually we got to know the people we were working with and we ended up enjoying our time there, minus Francis being somewhat occasionally rude to everyone and other times being unavailable to ask what needed doing. In the end we had a great time wandering the property and did garden based jobs such as clearing weeds and nettles and cutting back some of the hedges which had overgrown. We made some new friends which we are friends with to this day and had a few good laughs. You can read about one specific memorable moment in another post “Forest Benches” (coming soon).