At 88 he still shoes horses two days a week outside Urlingford and says the back is the first thing to go

The road bends past hedgerows, and on a quiet stretch outside Urlingford, a small plume of smoke curls from a low tin-roofed shed. Inside, iron rings, a horse shifts weight, and an old man steadies a hoof with hands that remember every decade they’ve lived. He works just two days each week now, and when asked how the years feel on him, he says with a laugh, “The back is the first thing to go.”

He is nearly ninety, but time has mostly signed his body with creases and caution, not surrender. The forge is tidy, the anvil bright at the edges, the tools set down where muscle memory expects them. The rhythm is unhurried, patient as a tide returning to shore.

A Trade Hammered Into Memory

He learned at fourteen, warming nails in a stove and sweeping grit from his father’s boots. “Back then,” he says, “you learned by looking, and by keeping your mouth shut.” Farms wanted strong horses, cart wheels needed fixing, and every mile of road meant more work.

Then tractors came, and the trade felt the ground shift. He stopped making wheels, started shoeing for leisure riders, hunters, and the odd plough horse that still pulled through bog and stone. “You go with the times,” he says, “or the times go on without you.”

Why He Still Does It

He shrugs at talk of retiring, at calendars that end with golf or gardens. “The day you stop moving,” he says, “the joints set like cement.”

• The pull of simple rhythm, heat and hoof and a clean swing of the hammer.
• The faces that come back each season, riders and farmers who bring stories and news.
• The quiet trust of an animal that lets you lift its weight, then sets it down sound.

Payment comes in envelopes and in tea, in the slow honor of being called when something matters. He doesn’t count the hours so much as the steps between farmyards, the lanes he’s walked in every shade of weather.

The Ritual of Fire and Iron

He trims the hoof with nippers, levels it with a rasp that sings like a saw. He sizes the shoe, warms it to a faint cherry, and lays it to the hoof with a hiss like a kettle on boil. The smoke rises quick and then is gone, a scent he says he can pick from any wind in Ireland.

Some days it’s cold shoeing, when the weather is too wild or the horse too fresh. Other days, hot, because the fit is truer and the nail line sits exactly where the hoof says it should. He taps, tests, and listens, because the hoof talks in echo, and the metal in a different tongue.

The horse dozes, then flicks an ear, and he strokes a soft neck out of habit that looks like prayer. “They balance us,” he says, “when we think we know it all.”

Backs, Brains, and Balance

He works off a stand now, not the old stoop that punished every vertebra. “The back is the first thing to go,” he repeats, and slips on a belt he trusts like an old friend. Between horses he stretches, small motions that look like a dance remembered in bones.

The doctor talks calcium and care, and he nods, then adds his own kind of medicine: steady breath, no rushed lifts, and never one more horse than the body can carry. “Pain teaches,” he says, “but a wise man learns sooner.”

Weather, Time, and the Road

In winter he watches the sky for breaks, because cold iron makes a liar of your grip. In summer the midges find the only soft spot left on your neck. He keeps Tuesdays and Fridays for the work, with a day in between to let the back forget what it just did.

The rest of the week belongs to small repairs, grandkids, and a garden that insists on faith. “Beans never grow the same way twice,” he says, “and neither do horses.”

The People Around the Anvil

Faces pass through the yard like chapters: a teenager with a nervous cob, a hunter built like a barrel, a mare who worries the bit until he sighs and pats her star. Folks bring him sandwiches and tangles of news, and he answers with stories that wear their truth like mud.

A young farrier from Thurles comes on Saturdays, hands sharp, eyes shy. “She’s better than I was at her age,” he says, and the anvil seems to stand a little taller. He shows her how to hear the nail’s first small protest, how to stop before iron becomes stubborn.

What the Work Leaves Behind

When the shoes ring true and the hoof sets square, something in the yard feels level. The horse walks off light, a rider waves, and the shed slips back into its quiet breathing. He wipes the anvil’s face with a rag that’s more hole than cloth, and sets the hammer where it always sleeps.

He will be here again next week, earlier than he needs, because the day starts better when iron meets light. “You keep moving,” he says, “and the world keeps time with you.” Then he smiles at the old ache in his spine, thankful to feel where the work has been, and where it will still go.