'Disaster struck.. and petrol seeped into our instant mash in the boot': Recalling Cork school's epic European tour 

‘WHAT! All twenty-three of ‘em ?’ And so, the seeds were sown in early 1975 in the Coláiste Chríost Rí school staff room in Capwell by teacher Seamus Lankford, a camping veteran, who spun the idea of embarking on a groundbreaking camping trip around Europe with twenty-three students and five accompanying teachers.

Fifty years on, I have fond memories at 17 of seeing the sites of seven European countries on a trip that took over five and a half weeks to complete. One of our travelling teachers, Kevin Cummins, compared the trip to when Hannibal crossed the Alps in 218 BC with a herd of elephants to 2,000 years later crossing the same Alps with a bunch of young bucks from Turner’s Cross! Both expeditions had their sights set on Rome, but, in our case, we had come to praise Caesar, not to bury him!’

The group set off in force on Tuesday, July 14, 1975, in two cars and the school mini-bus and headed for the ferry in Ringaskiddy. Apart from the human cargo, six large tents, cooking equipment and utensils, came the food provisions from Musgraves Cash & Carry to feed the contingent for over six weeks!

A stopover in the Presentation Brothers boarding school in Reading led to taking the hovercraft from Ramsgate to Calais, and we were up and running. On entering customs in France, an immigration official attempted to shepherd us through the gate marked ‘English Visitors’. One of the lads approached him with, ‘Sé do bheatha, a Mhuire, atá lán de grásta!’. The confused official allowed us through a gate of our choice, and from then on we decided to use Irish to officialdom if necessary.

Our first stop was in Beauvais before setting down for five nights in Paris, where we got to visit the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower.

A final stop in Auxonne in the south of France, in roasting hot weather, was followed by the most picturesque part of our journey through Montreux and the snow-capped mountain terrain of Interlaken in Switzerland. We took in an incredible seven cities in Italy, namely, Asti, Genoa, Pisa, Florence, Bologna, Verona and Venice.

One of the cars attempted to make it to Rome in the hopes of attending an audience with the Pope.

However, disaster struck when the car was rear ended in the outskirts of the city, needing to have the windscreen replaced. The only means of getting word back to the campsite was by public telephone, and who should pick up the phone but the man himself, Master Lankford.

The Gods were smiling on us, but there was a sting in the tail as petrol seeped into the instant mash in the boot of the car after the impact.

The return leg took us through Landeck and Lindau in Austria, Kehl in Germany, Ardennes in Luxembourg, Bruges and Brussels in Belgium before arriving back in Cork on Sunday, August 24.

Consider the trip was completed without mobile phone contact and at the princely sum of £100 per student, which at the time some families could not afford.

As Monty Python put it in their ‘Four Yorkshire Men’ sketch. ‘You tell the young people of today, and they would not believe you!'

This story originally appeared in the 2025 Holly Bough.