Five generations, one forge.

The forge began not with Davey John but with his father, James Graham, born in 1873, a blacksmith down in Carrick, across the water from the Red House on Mulroy. James was one of three blacksmith brothers who worked the forge there together. At some point he bought the place at Devlinmore and moved up, leaving his brothers to the Carrick forge, and set up on his own.

He married a Margaret Graham, both Grahams, though no relation, which is the kind of thing that still raises a smile in this family. In the early days, before everything had moved up the road, the fire at Devlinmore was lit with coals carried over by the bucketful from Daniel’s. There were no firelighters then. You started a fire with what you carried.

James and Margaret had one child: Davey John, DJ to everyone who knew him. He was born in a thatched house at Devlinmore, took over his father’s forge, and made it the busiest place for miles.

He was the first welder in the area. He taught himself from a manual, night after night, until he could do what no one else around could, and people remembered the quality of it long after. “When he welded a thing,” his daughter Rae says, “it wouldn’t give.”

He was mad for anything new. If he couldn’t buy the tool he needed, he made it. He shod horses: there’d be a line of them up the street, waiting their turn, that you could see from the cottage window. He hooped cart wheels, heating the iron rings on an open fire between the buildings and dropping them red-hot into a pool of water to shrink them tight. Fishermen rowed across Mulroy in open boats, their gear stowed aboard, to have anchors made and boat-work done, and they’d be about the place the whole day. Men came from across the Fanad peninsula with gates to be made, trailers to be mended, tractor cabs, anything at all that needed welding or fixing.

And a good many men in this part of Donegal served their time in that workshop. They still talk about it.

The technology streak ran deep. When the electricity first reached this corner of Donegal, Davey John was one of the men who helped wire the houses around Devlinmore. His own house had power before most: he ran a generator, so while others waited, the forge had light. He had the first telephone in Devlinmore, and was among the first to have a television. He loved his music, too, though by all accounts he couldn’t hold a tune, which never once stopped him trying. The old radio still hangs on the workshop wall.

Davey John married Ruby in January 1943, and she ran the cottage, the cottage you can stay in now. She was known across the area for it. The men who came as children, holding their fathers’ hands while a plough or a gate was seen to, still remember Ruby coming out with biscuits and a cup of tea, for the men and the children both. The fishermen who spent the day at the forge, the apprentices, whoever was about: she fed them.

The hens were her own, kept out in the street (Rhode Island Reds), so the cake was baked from her own eggs. She made her own butter. She kept the books and the job cards and sent out the bills, and she kept Davey John right. As Rae puts it: Mommy kept him right.

And there were the emerald sweets. Granny would offer you one of the little green emerald sweets, and the moment you took it she’d press a second on you. One, she’d say, to keep the other company.

Davey John and Ruby had three daughters. Margaret, the eldest, married Roy and moved to Limavady. Rae, the middle daughter, grew up here with Irish spoken all around her and left for Dublin to train as a teacher (at a school that taught through the language) before taking her first posting at the far end of the country, in Limerick, where she met John. The youngest, Betty, made her life in England and lives in Grimsby still.

It was Rae who kept Davey John’s Forge alive, and Rae who handed it on. Her three boys, Shane, Garrett and Adam, spent two weeks of every summer up here with DJ and Ruby, back when the drive from Limerick took the best part of a day in an old green Triumph Dolomite. Rae still visits. Her favourite place in the world is the deck of the cabin that now carries her name, where she sits and watches the whole place going on below her.

Davey John worked into his nineties. He kept a vegetable garden all his life, and the last plot he dug was up on the rise behind the cottage. That ground is where the cabins stand today: it was one long slope then, and the retaining wall we built to hold the terrace is what gives the cabins their level. So when you stay in Rae’s Cabin or Margaret’s Cabin, you’re on Davey John’s old garden ground.

The forge itself, the cottage, the old outbuildings: bringing them back has been the work of recent years, much of it begun when the world went quiet and there was finally time to do it. We’ve tried to restore rather than replace, to keep what was here. The steel of the workshop roof is all Davey John’s own work, and the men who know say it’s as good as the day it went on. We’re restoring the forge now as a place to gather, which, when you think about what it always was, is exactly what it was always for.

And it carries on. The youngest of the family are back up here in the summers now, the way their parents were as children: the same yard to cross, the same water below, the same long light over the bay. They find their feet just as quickly, on the ground Davey John gardened and his father first worked.