Galways lady thatcher

AS a five-year-old, Marika Leen wanted to grow up to be a tightrope walker in a circus. She never envisaged becoming Co Galway’s only lady thatcher, a job in which she walks across the often precarious, narrow ridges of thatched houses — they seem as scary as a tightrope to traverse.
As she put the finishing touches to an artistic looking, carefully carved out comb of straw, while silhouetted against the sky and balancing without a bother on the roof a house owned by the Lynch family, Bodane Mills, Tuam, this lithe lady spoke of her love for her “high up” job.
It is what she has been doing since she arrived here from Holland as a teenager of 15 and learned the trade of thatching from three bachelor brothers that she came to live with in Kilnadeema near Loughrea.

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