Two fine examples of long lost Castleisland Pitch and Putt Club history resurfaced in the past week in a car boot sale in Tralee.
I got a call from Florence O’Sullivan from Currans earlier this week and he said he had bought two silver cups at the regular Sunday morning sale at Mounthawk on the outskirts of Tralee.
On closer inspection he discovered that one is the Billy Knight Memorial Cup and the other is a Pitch and Putt Union of Ireland (PPUI) team competition cup.
Mr. O’Sullivan’s immediate reaction was to have the cups reunited with their club of origin and, after our phone chat, I got onto club chairman John Fitzgerald and a meeting was set up and the cups returned.
Displayed in a Pub
It is believed that the cups had been won in Castleisland Pitch and Putt Club competitions by an individual and a team from the Tralee area and they had been on display in a public house there for most of the past 40 years. The pub closed and the cups became part of the house clearance.
The Billy Knight Memorial Cup is inscribed with the names of Bernard Tangney, Laurence Twomey, Domo Lyne, Danny Broderick and more.
There are some other perpetual cups and plaques belonging to the club out there which have never been handed back when the year was up.
Now the practice of presenting or ‘giving out’ their historically important and sentimentally valuable trophies has been discontinued by the club for that very reason.
Old Bord of Works Site
The pitch and putt club has been an important part of the town’s sporting life since it was founded and opened on the old Bord of Works site and offices on Sunday May 8th 1966.
The course was built on land which belonged to the W.H. O’Connor family and which had been used as a base for the Board of Works during its huge dredging operation on the nearby River Maine and its tributaries from the source outside Castleisland to the sea in Castlemaine Bay in the late 1950s and into the early 1960s.
Florence’s Decisive Action
The clubhouse, which was sold recently,was once the office for the dredging project and, as explosives were very much part of the tools of the trade, a watchman’s hut was also constructed – and it remains there today at the entrance to the course.
Just four years after it opened in 1966 the club and course, with its complement of mature and well established trees, hosted the Irish Strokeplay Championship in 1970.
After a prolonged spell in a pub anywhere it’s a bit of a miracle that anything finds its way home. These cups fell into the right hands when the Currans man saw them.
The club is now looking at the circumstances of the recovery of the cups and the members are very grateful to Florence O’Sullivan for his decisive and thoughtful action at that car boot sale.
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