Is Tinsmith just a memory?

Coolcower, Macroom, Co. Cork - March 2015

​Trawling through Twitter this morning, I spotted a tweet from Survivors Unite at Last in which she included a copy of her mothers’s birth certificate. This cert records the profession of her maternal grandfather as a Tinsmith.
 
Very many trades are dwindling in numbers or disappearing completely. Tinsmith is definitely in that category. Automation and machinery has had its impact, so too has plastic.

Tweet from @UniteAt

We busked around the market towns
And picked fruit down in Kent
And we could tinker lamps and pots
And knives wherever we went
And I said that we might settle down
Get a few acres dug
Fire burning in the hearth
And babies on the rug
She said "Oh man, you foolish man
It surely sounds like hell
You might be lord of half the world
You'll not own me as well"

Beeswing - Richard Thompson

The tweet reminded me of my journey west in early July. Just over Two-Mile Bridge on the Macroom side at Coolcower, the civil engineering works were well advanced for the construction of the Macroom- bypass.
 
But just as one cannot make an omelette without cracking eggs, serious muck-shifting cannot be done without some disturbance.
 
I stopped early that morning to record that another reference to Tinsmith had been cast aside to the memory banks.
 
Many, but not all, memorials (and grottos) have been relocated and repositioned after roadworks. Only time will tell if the memorial to Tinsmith Danny Hourigan is to be reinstated.

UPDATE 2022.03.08

Last Saturday, March 4th, saw me on the road to Baile Mhuirne. It was my first time travelling on the Macroom by-pass, the bit that is open at least.

​Was good to see that the memorial to Danny Hourigan has been reinstated