IT started with picnic baskets – plastic bags filled with Tupperware in all probability – and a long, slow walk to Lough Neagh down Castor Bay Road.

In those days – I’m talking about the 1960s – summers were long and warm. It must have rained, but I’ve edited that out of my childhood memory.

We were one family with two names, the Collinses outnumbered by my O’Connor cousins.

The hero of the hour was Uncle Brendan, who would ferry us down to Castor Bay, one by one, on the back of his motorbike – in those carefree days there were no helmets – and it was fun: racing down the road, wind in our hair, clutching on to Brendan as if our life depended on it, which it did.

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We’d spend the day playing games, splashing in the shallows, and hunting sticklebacks.

We knew the lough’s foundation story – the battle between Fionn Mac Cumhaill and a Scottish giant, and the lough emerging from the hole left by the clod of earth Fionn threw at him.

But we knew nothing of the earls of Shaftesbury who owned the sand we paddled on, or the bloodthirsty Arthur Chichester, who seized the lough in the 17th century by........

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