My Trip To Scotland

                         

by Pat Murphy

I set out from my home on Friday at 12 o'clock.  As I live 7 miles southside of Dublin our capital city it took me a 4 hours drive to reach my friends in the North of Ireland whom I will be travelling with on the ferry.  Well I arrived at 4 o'clock in my friends town of Ballycastle where I will I spend the next 9 hours before we joined the rest of our friends for the trip to Scotland.  We had a nice meal with the McKiernan family, Pat Snr and Pat Jnr have the best stud of Jacobins in the British Isles, Reds Yellows and Whites, We spent a pleasant few hours looking over their stock, especially the team picked out for the Scottish Show. 

Now, it was time for a few drinks down at the local Pub and a discussion on the chances of winning some prizes with this team of I 0 Jacobins, that took up a few more happy hours.  Well finally the mini bus arrived to collect the three of us and join up with nine other pigeon fanciers from this region.  We then drove to Larne to catch the ferry for Scotland it was about 2 am on the Saturday of the show.  The trip on the ferry was nice and we had a good rest. We left the ferry and started our long journey across Scotland.  This part of our trip turned out to be very eventful as the gear selection decided not to be very selective and we were soon down to 2 gears, second and reverse.  We finally arrived at the hall at 7am, having to push the bus the last 600m.  The show got underway early as it was only a one day event - 130 Jacobins were entered.  The classes were the usual Red, Yellow, White, Blacks and A.O.C's. The quality of the Jacobins was excellent especially the first 3 - 5 pigeons in their class.  One would expect this as most of the top showmen were represented from England, Scotland and Ireland. 

My friends the McKiernan Family won 6 classes including Best Jacobin with a lovely yellow young cock. We had a few more winners in other varieties of pigeon classes so it was a I was asked to do some judging.  I judged A.O.V. always a difficult class.  So we come to the end of the show I enjoyed the show and the company of all my travelling companions, especially my friends the McKiernans.  As we were staying overnight in Scotland and while we were waiting for our new bus to arrive, we helped to clean up the show hall, said our goodbyes and headed for our hotel.