FM Conway - Going the Extra Mile

Going the Extra Mile

From the beginning, it was a disaster. Work started early in the following year, and everything that could go wrong, did go wrong.

could build a retirement bungalow for himself and Norah. He wasn’t thinking of retiring at this point, but his health hadn’t been good for

a while, and the idea of taking it easy must have been somewhere at the back of his mind. So, he and two friends, Joe O’Brien and Joe Conmy, bought a patch of land at the southwest tip of Ireland, in the village of Tragumna, just outside Skibbereen in County Cork. They divided the plot of land into three strips, each large enough for a house and a small patch of garden. And that’s where Dad started to build his bungalow.

The beach at Tragumna.

The third thing he decided to do in that year was the most ambitious, and calamitous, thing of all. He put in a tender for the largest job that the company had ever undertaken. Angel Hill was a deep cutting with houses on either side of it. Sutton Council wanted to widen the road at the bottom and put up new retaining walls on both sides. It was a massive job and, on the back of the other good work that Dad had done for them at Throwley Way, the Council decided to award it to him. From the beginning, it was a disaster. Work started early in the following year, and everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. Concrete prices shot up from £8 to £15 a metre: extra costs that Dad could not claim. And, as soon as they had taken the old parapet walls down, and cut down the trees along the cutting, it started to rain. It rained without stopping for three weeks. The rain washed away the banks, so that the houses and gardens at the top started to creep forward into the cutting. The whole cutting had to be sheet piled,

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