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‘The charm of Ireland, north as well as south, lies as much in the colourful speech and old-fashioned ways of her people as in the beauty of her green fields and blue hills, the silverglint of lake waters and the gold of the scented whins. The observant visitor cannot fail to be attracted by customs and turns of speech, by traditions and tools which are obsolescent if not archaic in England. He will occasionally see in use in field and farmyard implements which went out of fashion so long ago in most parts of Great Britain that one may truly speak of them as medieval. Thus the toothed sickle, the flail, the oneeared spade, the clod-breaking mallet and seed-rake, the upright churn and the three-legged pot can all be closely matched in illustrations of English medieval rural life (Fig. 1).
‘The boon-work which was an obligation owed by tenants to English landlords in the Middle Ages survives in the flax-pulling boons of Ulster, and the Anglo-Norman word for the lord’s part of an estate, the demesne, is universally applied to the parklands of Ireland. The Irish baronies or kingdoms, as they are sometimes called, are similarly relics of the Middle Ages. The prevalence of the Roman Catholic religion, to which 76 per cent of the population of Ireland adheres - the figure is 94 per cent for the Republic of Ireland - reinforces this sense of the past; and the English dialects spoken in many districts, even if shot through with Gaelic-derived turns of phrase, are strikingly Elizabethan. A strong medieval flavour attaches to the feast-day gatherings and patterns, to strawboys, wrenboys and the Christmas mummers. Medieval too is the diversity of folk-customs and of locally-made tools, which will be found to vary from one [1] district to another. The interest of these relics is enhanced when one discovers paralleles among simple societies in distant parts of the world.
‘These ancient diversities are being ironed out at an increasing rrate, and the opportunity of seeing and, what is more important, placing on record these age-old crafts and rites will soon pass. The wonder is that so many have persisted through the poliiacal and economic upheavals of the last 150 years. During that period, the steady decline of the Gaelic language resulted in the loss of a great deal of informatioin on local and regional life and of a vast store of oral literature, in which the lore of an ancient civilisation was enshrined. The scientist must regard this loss as a tragedy comparable to that suffered by the historian in the disastrous burning of the Dublin Four Courts in [2] 1922. Ireland is one of the last homes of the oral traditions of prehistoric and medieval Europe, which mirror the routines of rural life through the seasons, the conacts of peoples in war and commerce, and the heroic deeds of half-legendary leaders. Luckily all is not lost: the devoted labours of the Irish Folklore Commission have rescued from the Gaeltacht and catalogued with scientific skill countless stories of the kind which enriched the literature of the medieval world. In northern ireland also belated efforts are being made to gather the harvest of lore and legend.’ [… &c.]’ [3]
Further, notes that Irish writers deny the custom of “ploughing by the tail” (Irish Book Lover, 1943, p.9; here p.3.)
‘Those features of rural life which cannot be concealed or denied are regarded as due to the repressive hand of England, to penal laws, absetneeism and poverty imposed by rack-rents and unscrupulous land-agents. Certainly there have been great abuses, and they have left the Irish suspicious and sensitive. It is unfortunate, therefore, that authoritiative works recently published in England have needlessly exaggerated the tribal habits and pastoral nomadism of the ancient Irish.’ (ref. to Cambridge Econ. Hist. of Europe, ed. J. H. Clapham and E. Power] (p.3.)
‘The retention of many of the attributes of a peasant society is the key to the survival of the folk ways with which wer are concerned in the following chapters […; 10]; Pushed too far, however, the observance of such antiquated practices [viz., ‘sympathetic magic’] in the end defeated its purpose and threatened the extinction of traditional life. A clue to much of the paradox in Irish culture is to be found in the reaction which follows an adherence to custom carried beyond the breaking-point. Spade-labour for example has reluctantly given way to the plough, but once the plough is generally accepted the spade becomes a despised implement so that a vegetable garden is a rare thing, at best a tiny plot left to the care of the women.’ (pp.10-11.)
‘Perhaps the most striking example of reaction is to be found in the expressed desire of most country people to have an isolated dwelling-house. The clachan or hamlet, once the centre of communal life and tradition, is despised, a scymbolf of squabbling [11] and it is the wish of nearly everone to have a house where he cannot be overlooked.’ (pp.11-12.)
‘Suring this phase [5000-2500] the alder flourished and the high humidity brought the rapid growth of sphagnum moss on the bogs’ (p.14.)
‘Thus the distribution of mountain masses gives a clue to the nuclear regions of Irish civilisation, though it should be noticed that there are parts of the Central Lowland where thin dry gravel or limestone soils gave more kindly foothold.’ (p.14.)
‘The dark age Middle Kingodm of Meath, based on Tara and the Boyne Valley, looks backward to the glories of the Bronze Age and forward to the English Pale which was the first conquest and the final refuge of the Anglo-Irish planters. Its landscape and character are distinctive to this day. What the Middle Kingdom and the Plae both lacked was a natural frontier to the west conmparable to the Border hills of Scotland or to tht upland edge of the Welsh Marches.
The other four kingdoms, which have survived as the four provinces, broadly correspond to the four areas - north, west, south-west, and sout-east - which have upland massifs as their [16] nuclei. We may think of the four kingdoms as slowly crystallising throughout prehistoric times around areas of primary settlement among the hills. The political organisation of these areas had to await the coming of the Celtic conquerors, but fundamental in their differentiation are the divergences in megalithic practice. The penetration of megalithic culture to all parts of the island is one of the msot striking fact in the prehistory of Ireland. Again and again, in seeking for the origins of persistent customs we find ourselves led back to the megalithic builders and their monumental preoccupation with death and the afterworld. The domination of the megalithic cult was much more complete in the western isle than in Britain, where it took root mainly in the uplands facing the Irish Sea. (p.16-17.)
‘It remains to say something of the lowland heart of Ireland whre the four provinces meet along the line of the middle Shannon north and south of Lough Ree, which is geometrical centre both of the lowlands and of the whole island. Near-by Athlone, therefore, serves as the centre of Eire’s broadcasting system, but in no terrestrial sense is this bog-strewn central lowland a dominant cultural region. Its function has been largely negative, for it has served as a refuge area remote from the contacts of the coastal fringe and the urban forces which radiate [17] from it. The Gaelic conquest of the Irish Midlands was not completed until the sixth century AD and down to the Anglo-Norma invasions the distinction between free and tributary tribes remained. (T. F. O’Rahilly, Early Irish History and Mythology, 1946, p.204).
The counties bordering the middle Shannon - Leitrim, Roscommon, Longford and the western parts of Westmeath and Offaly - are probably as full of survivals as any in Ireland. This is the land of the loy and the steeveen and many an ancient custom. … it is hard to realise the isolation from which this area suffered before the introduction of improved welled vehicles and the coming of the canal and the railway.’ (p.17-18.)
‘The history of rural Ireland could be read out of doors, had we the skill, form the scrawlings made by men in the field boundaries of successive periods. In them the unlettered countryman wrote his runes on the land.’ (p.18’; mentions assistance of air-photography.)
‘Drumlins are little hills composed of glacial drift’ (p.19, capt. ill.); note emphasis on importance of examining ‘open-field system’ (p.21); infield outfield or rundale (p.23f.)
‘It was in fact from such decaying house-clusters that a great number of the emigrants to the United States set out across the seas in the second half of the last century’. (p.26.)
‘The charge of nomadism, using the words in its worst connotation, which English writers made against the Irish, finds some justification in the prevalence of a pastoral economy which was, in fact, more comparable to that of the Swiss peasants or the Norwegian milk-girls. Wherever transhumance is or has been practised, it is associated with difficult environments and marginal conditions, where it has provided opportunities for escape from authority and served as a means of preserving and transmitting ancient traditions. This is well illustrated in the example of the Carpathian sheperds of Roumania.’ (p.27.)
‘It is the townland which most closely toches the daily life and social relations of the countryman’ (p.28); mentions that there are 45 townlands of the name of ‘Ballybeg’ (p.28.)
‘Of all the administrative units [27] of different sizes and various origins into which rural Ireland is divided—townland, parish, barony, diocese, rural district and so on—it is the townland which most closely touches the daily life and social relations of the countryman. The townland is his postal address, for individual farms preserve their historic communal anonymity: they still belong to the townland though they have become separate units since the ‘town’ or cluster has broken up. The farms rarely carry any names other than those of their owner (Mulligan’s place, Thomson’s farm or merely O’Brien’s) and since there may be a dozen O’Briens in a particular townland various nicknames and patronymics are used to distinguish between them. Thus one farm may be Kilty O’Brien’s (from its left-handed owner), another Patsy Kate O’Brien’s (from the owner’s mother), and a third Yank O’Brien’s (a returned emigrant, this). Similarly, the public house takes its title not from the brewers who supply it or from heraldic beasts such as the Red Lion but from the Mooneys or the Murnaghans who own it. Shops in country towns, too, carry personal names, and the nucleus of their trade is built up among blood relations.
‘The townland names, involving so many land holdings, are legal titles, and their Gaelic names, however erroneously spelt on the Ordnance Survey maps, are fossilised in their current forms. Only an Act of Parliament can alter them. A glance at any six-inch Ordnance map will reveal the strange names that Gaelic imagination contrived and English scribes corrupted. Here are a few which I have come across in Ulster: Ballywillwill, Ballymunterhiggin, Aghayeevoge, Treantaghmucklagh. In all Ireland there are no less than 5,000 townlands beginning with ‘Bally’, forty-five of them named Ballybeg (little town). Some 2,000 townlands begin with Knock (a hill); there are sixty called Tully and there are eleven Edens. The degree of repetition shows that these names have come down from a time when life was organised on a local basis. There are between 60,000 and 70,000 townlands in Ireland, averaging 325 acres or 1/2 sq. mile, and the average townland population in the rural areas is perhaps fifty. In fact their size varies considerably, since they were pased ont he fertility of the land rather than its acreage […; &c.] (pp.28-29.)
[Writes of the relative scale of townlands]; ‘this diversity also reflects cultural differences both between regions and between various classes from the kings and chiefs down to the humblest of bondmen. The first Ordnance Survey (1830-42) suppressed many of the local names for subdivisions and applied the term townland universally. Though the townland appears to have been equated with an agricultural unit, the ploughland or sissrach, it is clear that in many parts of the country “the cow’s grass” was the effective unit of measurement.’ [quotes Caesar Otway on the extreme disorder of houses in settlements that seemed to have fallen ‘in a shower from the sky’ - Otway, Tour of Connaught, 1839, p.353; here p.29.)
[On accommodation shared with animals:] ‘Poverty and rack-renting undoubtedly contribute to the long survival of such conditions, but they ultimately derive from cultural forces of wide distribution and antiquity … it is thought unlucky for the cow not be to able to get a glimpse of the fire … faith in the power of fire to dispel evil spirits.’ (p.43.)
‘little inducement to build houses to last longer than the lease of say twenty-one years’ (p.43.)
‘[Sir William] Petty tells us that in the second half of the seventeenth century that “their fuel is turf in most places” [Political Anatomy, 1691, p.82], although Professor O’Brien, writing of the same century states that “until the woods began to sink to very small proportions, turf was not at all employed for heating.” [Economic History of Ireland in the Seventeenth Century, 1919, p.44] (p.182.)
‘[I]t is calculated that at least one fifth of the country is coated with bog, but a small proportion of this could be classed as reclaimed bog.’ (p.183.)
‘There is, however, a slow accretion of peat in many areas, though this consists mostly of sphag[n]um peat and the good-quality fen and forest peats of the deeper bogs are not being replaced. In fact these deeper layers tend to remain untapped either because the water cannot be drained away, or because layers of tree stumps defly the attacks of both spade and mechanical digger.
The main causative factor in bog-formation is waterlogged soil, which checks the decomposition of vegetable remains. It therefore depends to a considerable extent on climate and on the balance between precipitation and evaporation.’ (p.183.)
‘Walking over the upland bogs, I have stepped on the roofing slab of a great stone monumen which once stood seven feet clear of the ground: it had been completely engulfed in peat formed since its erection.’ (p.184.)
‘To the ecologist the bogs provide a unique field of research into the history of the occupation of the country by plants, animals and man. In the waterlogged depths of the peats everything is preserved, even the tiniest seeds and insects. Centuries of successive summers are chronicled in countless pollens of trees and grasses which the botanist can identify and thereby reconstruct the changes of vegetation from prehistoric times down to the recent past. When man appeared on the scene not only did he leave his pathways and possessions ii the bogs, but, as we have seen, he was an agent in their growth. His tools of stone and copper, bronze and iron, evolving in that order, are found lying at levels which can be correlated with the vegetation-history by analysing the pollens that cling to them. Thanks to the labours of Knud Jessen and Frank Mitchell we now have an approximate chronological sequence of landscapes and human cultures in Ireland going back several thousand years.’ (p.185.)
‘From time to time the worker in the bogs comes across objects lost or buried there as the bog was growing, and we saw above [195] how these are used by the pollen-specialists to build up a bog chronology.
‘Some, like the magnificent gold ornaments of the Bronze Age, were deposited in the bogs, or in lakes where the bogs later grew, for magical purposes. Other objects were sometimes hidden in the hope of being recovered, and still others were thrown into a bog hole when they were worn out. All have been almost perfectly preserved by the peat, whether made of metal or organic material such as wood, leather or clothing. None of the discoveries which occasionally astonish the turf-cutter and relieve the monotony of his labours is more mysterious than the ‘bog butter’ which is found in wooden vessels or baskets, occasionally in containers of cloth, bark or skin, in quantities ranging from a few pounds to as much as a hundredweight (Fig. 65.) [Figs.]
‘During the first half of last century, when the pressure of population and industrial needs led to immense inroads on the turf bogs, an astonishing number of finds was made. The “butter” was a perquisite of the finder, and there are records of its being taken to the fair to be sold as grease for wheel-cars, which, like the “singing carts” of Spain, were very noisy. In fact it resembles lard rather than butter and analysis shows that its composition has changed, but there can be no doubt that it was originally butter. There are many references to the practice of burying butter in bogs in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the explanations offered are also many. Petty thought it was done in order to make the butter rancid, since the Irish, he says, preferred strong butter. (Political anatomy, p.82). An eighteenth century writer states that some of the buried butter was
So strong, a dog with help of wind,
By scenting out, with ease might find.
(W. M., The Western Isle, Canto 2).
Others have claimed that it was buried to mature and purify it, and one writer has seen an explanation in the need to have butter available at Lent. It is reasonable to suppose that the surplus butter of summer would be stored in this way once the preservative properties of peat were known, but the practice is certainly pre-Christian in origin. None of the Irish finds has been securely dated—the majority of the wooden containers have an ageless “medieval” appearance - but a discovery in Skye was satisfactorily dated to the very beginning of the Christian era (it contained not only cowhairs but some strands from the head of a fair-haired dairymaid). I am inclined to think that a practice which came to be generally adopted for utilitarian reasons had its origin in magic, and that deposits were originally made in the hope of appeasing the powers of evil and inducing an abundant flow of milk from the pastures. The custom may well have originated during the crisis of the climatic deterioration in the last centuries of the pre-Christian era. Surviving folklore is full of the magic properties of butter, and in the west of Ireland it is known that lumps of butter were thrown into loughs and springs through which cattle were driven in order to restore them to health. It seems from the accounts of discoveries in the bogs that some of the butter containers had been thrown into a bog hole rather than buried. Later, no doubt, it became the practice to bury butter in order to preserve it, but if this whad always been so I cannot think that there would have been so many unclaimed deposits left to await the slane of the turf-cutter. It should be noticed that the custom of preserving butter in bogs or in moist earth is found also in Scandinavia, Iceland, India and Morocco. It is interesting that bog butter contains no salt, but the explanation may be that it was difficult to obtain and that its addition was not necessary when the butter was preserved by burying it. This is confirmed by the following quotation which shows also that the custom of preserving butter in a bog-hole was still remembered a generation ago in Limerick. Lady [sic] Carbery writes, “In their grandfather’s time, butter, flavoured with wild garlic and unsalted (salt cost too much to buy except in small quantities) used to be put in a bog-hole and left to ripen.” [M. Carbery, The Farm by Lough Gur, p.128; edn. not cited in Bibl. Appendix] (p.97-198) [End chap.]. |