In the 60s, in the late 60s, I had worked in Germany for a while and I decided that I wanted to have my children reared in Ireland. So we came back from Germany, working for the Irish Tourist Board and started this enterprise . It's lovely now with the sunshine, we don't always have it like this, but very often. We started with 12 and then 20 caravans, and now we have about 35. And it's been a basis of what which we can live as a family, raise our children in a nice environment. We work very hard for three months and then have a very relaxed time of it, nine months. And in that time then I took on as a hobby computers, and Mary took on tour-guiding. So we have various different aspects to what we do.
The horse caravans is a very intensive work just for those three months, but it's very enjoyable because we mix in the family a quiet nine months where we are very much en famille with the children, you can concentrate on them much more than if we were nine-to-five workers. And then the intensity of the three months means that we can also have our children employed, and learning how to work, learning how to deal with people. So, good mixture, isn't it.
Dieter:
When we started there was a lot of difficulty in Northern Ireland developing, because we started in '69, and it was just the beginning of the troubles in the North. As a result of which a lot of continental Europeans were very nervous to come to Ireland, so we had a lot of work to do to get them to come here, and to differentiate between the Republic of Ireland where there was nowhere activity really and the North of Ireland, which they didn't see as being a different country. And of course we lost al lot of British visits because the visitors thought that by coming here they were coming into a hostile environment. They weren't, but they didn't realise that and they were just nervous of coming. So it's only recently again, since the peace in Northern Ireland has been established the last five or seven years, that we've had a substantial number of British visitors coming back again. Until then it was mostly continental Europeans, Swiss, German, Benelux countries, more Northern Europe than Southern Europe.
We get professors, we get doctors, we get - you name it. Oh, we get a lot of separated fathers who bring their children on holidays. I think the children decide that this is what they'd like to do and the fathers have to come along. So we had a syndrome of a group of fathers collecting together and saying 'Can we not go on the same route and then you can do on Monday, and I'll do Tuesday, and someone else does Wednesday', and they'd do the babysitting and then the other fathers go to the pub. So you get all kinds of things happening.
Dieter:
The way we started was that we just told our visitors to go out on the road and ask for people - when they wanted to stop - ask for permission to put the horse on a field, put the caravan off the road, and eventually, within a year or two we got phone calls from Irish farmers 'Could you not send some more visitors?' And then we sort of asked them 'Would you not put up a toilet and a shower and then their visitors would have extra facilities?' And this has been a kind of a give and take on that basis over the years. So we have established, if you like, by the farmers themselves, this sort of chain of farmers with whom our caravans can stop then at night and see what they can find, which is a nice approach.
Dieter:
But when you book this kind of a holiday, you have to have that approach. And they have, I think, a more intimate relationship with the population. If you have a hired car and you're going from hotel to hotel or from Bed and Breakfast to Bed and Breakfast, you're encapsulated in a metal box with four wheels and it'll bring you to where you want to go and you can see things perhaps on the larger scale, but with a horse caravan you're forced to ask directions and buy your groceries because you're cooking for yourself in the caravan. You're meeting farmers in the evenings when you're parking the caravan. You have a much more identifiably visitor role than if you are going from hotel to hotel. They immediately recognise you as being a visitor - those caravans are only used by visitors. The travelling people who still have caravans have a different style to their caravans. So, immediately that somebody like that roles up - 'oh where are you from', England or Switzerland or Germany or whatever it is; and there is a very positive approach to tourisms in here. We're not over-tourist, the people that go out in our caravans would be perhaps the only tourists that an ordinary, local Wicklow person might meet in three months. So it isn't as if we are overwhelmed by tourism. The opposite, we could do with a few more.
Dieter:
What happens is that we sit them down when they come and we show them on a map the possibilities that Wicklow has to offer: the beaches on one side, the mountains on the other side, then the valleys in between, the farming areas, the forestry and so on. And people then, depending on where they come from of course, the Swiss don't choose the mountains - well sometimes, but not normally - and the Danes have lots of beaches themselves, so they're not that interested in beaches. So having chosen your own route, we then just mark the map so we avoid steep hills on the road, and we avoid the towns, and we hopefully avoid all the noise as well. But effectively, if people are leaving here they're going all different directions, we don't have a fixed route. We decided against doing that and it was a good decision.
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% Acknowledgements, availability and copyright
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% Acknowledgements: The project has been supported by the University of
% Tuebingen. The video interviews have been carried out and recorded by
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% Copyright of the ELISA corpus: Department of Applied English Linguistics,
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