The Tyshe River will be crossed four times by the Tom Kelly 8K runners on this Sunday in Ardfert. Read the story of the Tyshe River and its tributory stories here to warm up for the run!
For Tom and Tyshe
Thoughts on the Tom Kelly 8K 2026
“Lost rivers
Plead under our feet
Astray in themselves
Sharing our anonymity”
said Brendan Kennelly in his poem “The Learning”.
On Sunday, January 11th, at around 9.32am, a bunch of runners will hare down Tyshe Hill and cross the Tyshe River for the first time. Most didn’t notice that they will be crossing Tyshe Bridge. It has modesty written all around it.
They will cross the Tyshe River another three times in the opposite direction to the river’s run as the Tom Kelly 8K matures in its own individual way. By the time they reach the 5K mark, the runners will have de-Tyshed themselves and will be in another dimension. All of them were unaware that they will have crossed the river four times. Because the waters they crossed are the waters of Abhainn na Taibhse. The Ghost River.
One of the best kept secrets in Ardfert is the Tyshe River.
Gaeilge rarely lies. There is more truth in the Irish language than there is in heaven. It is so old that it goes straight to the soul of things around us. It is a much more weaponised language than English. It is before us, it is with us and it is after us. It is above us and below us. Whether we come from the Ukraine, from Africa or from Banna-side, to know Irish is to truly know our environment and its origins.
Four times across a ghost river is more than anyone can do in any other run. Another unique reason to do the Tom Kelly 8K. Cross it after 300m and enter another territory. Move within its kingdom and merge with its ghostly embrace. Leave it at 5K and run into your own reality with new pep in your step.
The First Time
There were three us of running in Banna on an evening in January 1988. Danny Sinnott, Tom Kelly and myself. It is safe to say that we didn’t have an Olympic medal between the three of us. One of us had won the married men’s sprint run at an open sports in Finuge the previous summer. Another had a few local medals and a third had a miraculous medal given him by his mother on his Communion Day.
We had big hopes for 1988 as it would be the first full year of St Brendan’s AC and decided to get our retaliation in early. We would be fresh veteran athletes and a whole year of activity was opening up before us. It was the hope that would destroy some of us.
The evening was breathing razor-blades and a hoor of a sharp wind was winging its way from Kerry Head and Ballyheigue from the north west. I could feel the insides of my lungs being assaulted by a salty air with the personality of horse -nails. I began to cough. A deep cough that must have been crafted at the gates of hell. My father had often spoken of “a Lios Laughtin Cough” that a neighbour had been known for in Lisselton. That neighbour had a penchant for Woodbines, which were known locally as “coffin nails”. Lios Laughtin near Ballylongford was one of the bigger local grave yards and all Woodbines pointed in its direction.
All smoking was bad but Woodbines quickened your exit from this life if you were addicted to them. And people were addicted to them because they were cheap to buy in that sparse era. Apparently you could buy them individually or in fives. You could then proceed to destroy your lungs with their poison and hasten your journey across the Styx to Hades by quenching them half way through and saving the butts for later. If there was a later. Then you could re-ignite the ugly butt and undergo double jeopardy and cough the rest of your life away down to Lios Laughtin or Gale or Lisselton or Kilconly.
A Fit of Coughing!
Anyway, on that bitter evening in Banna in 1988 as we ran north, I got a fit of coughing. I had never smoked but had moved in smoky atmospheres in those days. Like the school staffroom which resembled a fog bank at some lunchtimes, or in the shops or everywhere in fact where people moved. The worst of it that evening that I ran under the premise that a good run would clear the lungs. I had pushed Tom and Danny in the early stages on the softening sand as we headed north towards the Black Rock. They took it personally and when the cough hit my thirty five year-old lungs with its metaphorical cough-sledge, both Danny and Tom headed off towards the Black Rock. Legs of lead stuck me to the ground and I gasped for air. Bent over. Banjaxed.
Being two gentlemen, and rogues when necessary, they got concerned and returned to my panting body. “Keep going till me cross the Tyshe River” Tom Kelly said “and we’ll have the wind at our backs then”.
It was the first time I had heard of the Tyshe River. The Ghost River. And Tom was right. Tom was always right…that was the first thing he told me when I first met him! We ran on and turned toface home at the lock-gate where a river becomes a part of the sea. They saw me home with the north wind at our backs but I didn’t run again for a month. And discovered the unwanted effects of anti-biotics for the first time in my life.
From Abbeydorney to Sea
The Tyshe River, Ghost River, rises in the parish of Abbeydorney in the townland of Rathkenny. It constantly is re-born between Abbeydorney Village and Tubrid Cross near Harty’s Bend. Springs out of the ground like a watery volcano, shy and unassuming. Nobody hears or sees its continuous birth. Has been doing its birthing possibly since the last ice age some 10,000 years ago. Every new droplet then starts its journey westward. The droplets don’t have to figure out what to do once overground and born. They probably say “Oh, we haven’t been here before!” as they join millions of other droplets in a quiet march pre-destined by mother nature. The secret life of streams.
Imagine their joy as they ripple and roll down to the Abbeydorney-Tubrid Road and cross it quietly and unbothered. They may even have genetic memories of their ancestors passing under the railway line that was operating here until the 1980s. Then little dykes and streams join them as they enter Ardfert Parish north of The Forge Cross where the TK8K runners will cross it for the 4th and final time just before the 5K mark. One of these streams passes by Wether’s Well carrying with it its mystery and magic to the Tyshe. Madge Davis composed recitations as she crossed the Tyshe at that point on evenings that were as quiet and ghostly as the Tyshe itself. Maybe its secret rhythms may have stirred something in her creative mind.
Then Abhainn na Taibhse gains in strength as it passes through the lands of Carrolls and Driscolls – the rich land of Ardfert – and crosses the road secretly towards Ardfert Quarry around the 4K mark. This is where the runners crossed the Tyshe for the third time and where regular parkrunners suffer a minor crisis as they realize they are only halfway through their race. Think of the moving waters of the Tyshe. They may inspire you. “Commemorate me where there is water” Patrick Kavanagh said. (The last time I heard that quoted was in a bathroom at Listowel Races by a punter who had to queue long and painfully for a wee!)
Then the ghostly little Tyshe does an oxbow and comes back under the Round Road between Ardfert Quarry and Ardfert Graveyard, and here the TK8K runners will have crossed it for the second time. Too adrenalined-up at this stage to look sideways but water can have geopathic effect on the brain at this psychologically boosting point.
My Uncle Mike
My uncle, Mike Kissane from Lahesrough on the side of Cnoc an Fhómhair overlooking Ballybunion, was a diviner and could sense underground springs deep in the earth. He was my favourite uncle…a builder, a carpenter, a clock-fixer, a story-teller, a dreamer of dreams, a singer (in a quiet kind of way), a non-drinker, a lover of his native land, a philosopher and a diviner. Probably a quiet rogue too in the best of ways.
He visited our house every Sunday evening and would sit down and tell stories beside our Jubilee Range. He sometimes brought a penny bar for me to chew the cud on. Those same penny bars were partly responsible for destroying my teeth.
My father and I would accompany him up the hill afterwards and sit with him near Henchy’s Ditch if the evening was dry. Seven hundred feet above sea level. He would point down the Hill and show me the rivers that drained North Kerry. The mighty Shannon to the north west that flooded the Atlantic. He told me if the Shannon wasn’t flowing into the sea near Ballybunion, that we could walk to New York! “Where your great grandfather is buried” he would add.
Before I could ask if my great grandfather had walked to New York, he would point out the Cashen to the south west “where the fishermen are always rowing their currachs” he would add. Then there was the Brick to the south near Lixnaw where my Aunt Jane lived (she was great for quietly placing a half-crown in my palm on her welcome visits). Aunt Jane was the first teacher in the Kissane family and graduated to teach in St Paul’s Schools in London. Mainly because she couldn’t sing and couldn’t therefore get full-time employment in Ireland, my Uncle Mike said.
I can sing like my Aunt Jane, but only in private on in my van on long journeys.
Then his index finger would move south eastwards to highlight the Gale River “which flows beside the graveyard where your grandparents sleep” Uncle Mike nodded. And then he pointed out Listowel through which the Feale flows “where your father and I bought our first horse” he added and “it was there that the dentist pulled your father’s wrong tooth the week after the Races”.
“Why did the dentist do that!” I eagerly asked.
“Because he probably enjoyed the Races too much!” he answered with a wink and completed his river-talk by pointing out the other side of the Shannon to the north east heading past Tarbert.
“The Shannon has travelled over 200 miles by the time we see it from here” he would say. He said it rose in Co Cavan “as a small little watery spring and grew and grew to become the longest river in Ireland, indeed in all these islands!” He added that it meant “the wise river” and was named after Sionnan, the grand daughter of Manannán Mac Lir, the god of the sea.
I often looked sideways at him as he was in full flight on the top of our Hill on those gate-of-heaven Sunday evenings in July and wondered “how one small head could carry all he knew” as Goldsmith said of the village schoolmaster.
I loved that river talk and it followed me to sleep and into my dreams.
Long after he had waved goodbye and faded into the western pathway over Moran’s Glen on his way home to Nora and his family in Lahesrough, my head would be flowing in streams in different directions. I would dream of my great grandfather walking to New York, currachs on the Cashen, half-crowns in my palm, my father’s lost good tooth, my Aunt Jane trying to sing “The Harp the once Through Tara’s Halls” causing Tom Moore to close his ears and the watery journey of the Shannon through the centre of Ireland, through our history and mythology.
Nights weren’t long enough to dream.
Back to the Tyshe
And as the Tyshe River, the Ghost River, flows the opposite way to the Tom Kelly 8K runners, their first crossing will be be at Tyshe Bridge, just those 300m from the start. By now the ghostly river had flown past Ardfert Friary and the site of the Crosby Family (where the main building was burned down in 1922) and past Ardfert Sportsfield. The Sportsfield where Tom Kelly spent his summer evenings encouraging generations of hurlers. Spent St Brendan’s AC open sports days and Ardfert Kilmoyley Community Games evenings there too. How many times did he drive back up over Tyshe Bridge after watching hurling matches and declare that Ardfert would do it that year. Or sometime soon.
At that spot where Tyshe Bridge stands, the local carpenters and blacksmiths used to iron the cart wheels for generations of Ardfertians. The wooden spoked wheels would be brought there, the iron band forged and heated, and the waters of the Tyshe would be poured over them until iron rim and wooden wheel were wedded in ghostly harmony. A man called O’Brien from Kilmoyley was one who worked here. But imagine the buzz here before the Famine when there was a village on this site and when nine smiths and ten carpenters were operating.
A thriving village around the Tyshe, the waters of which nourished their industry. Until a landlord called “Billy the Leveller” flattened the village and spread death, destruction, poverty, misery and emigration among the inhabitants.
Brendan Kennelly had a poem for the likes of Billy too…
“And I know his kind
Would kill river and field
If green and brown
Stood between them and money”.
The River Tyshe saw this and later witnessed the extinction of The Leveller and his likes with its calm and ghostly presence.
In the end, a river ran through him.
To the Sea
Now Abhainn na Taibhse winds its lapping way past the Cathedral, where the TK8K will be started by Kellie O’Regan, Tom Kelly’s grandfather on Sunday, on down past the site of the old creamery, where an area called “the bleach” was frequented by women to dry and bleach clothes in the suns of other days. Then the secret river turns towards Ballyheigue and then left into the Cúl Trá where St Brendan’s AC masters love to run. The Kerry senior cross country championships were run here in the Cúl Trá in 1971 beside the Tyshe and Jerry Kiernan won it. Our lost hero Kiernan possibly believed even then that he would one day run in the Olympics. If the Tyshe gave him those first inklings of glory, then it can claim credit. First beliefs are significant. They often dictate whole life-patterns.
When Kerry Athletics granted the 2025 masters’ cross country championships to St Brendan’s AC to be run in the Cúl Trá beside the Tyshe last October, those who knew deeper things could feel the river smiling.
Then Abahinn na Taibhse enters the Atlantic Ocean after the lock gate on the north side of Banna near the Black Rock.
Only for running out of land, the Tyshe River would be a mighty running river like the Shannon, but it’s petite-ness is its power, and one concludes that it is happy they way it is. Forever petit. Forever ghostly.
For Tom and Tyshe
So we hope that all the Tom Kelly 8K participants will run for Tom and Tyshe again on Sunday and for many more TK8K weekends. Both have played their undisputed parts in the story of Ardfert.
May both Tom and Tyshe run on forever.
