Fair Days In Ireland

Fairs played a vital role in the rural economy. Farm income depended on the seasonal sale of stock or crops and the fairs were where these transactions took place. Some fairs were just for cattle, or sheep or pigs, others were more general, and items sold included hay, turf and potatoes, as well as turkeys, geese, calves and bonhams.

Fairs were held in most towns and even in the cities. The top part of Eyre Square has been a market-place for probably five hundred years or more.

Each fair was held on a set day, and that day was marked on the farmers calendar, and the life of the farm revolved around having the stock ready for each fair. Fair days were held for centuries on the same day of the month, so tradition was of huge importance, and the fair days were oriented to the seasonal production of stock and crops, unlike today, where the mart is open most days of the week. While they all read the 'Farmers Almanac', they knew their fair day dates off by heart.

I remember the fair days in Loughrea in the early 1960's, before the mart was built. We got the day off school on fair days, so we loved the tradition, though not the inconvenience of the fairs. Personal safety aside, we got the day off because of the amount of liquid slurry that lined the streets and the footpaths and made walking around town on a fair day, a rather mucky, smelly business for a young 'townie'.

Pig, geese, turkey and calf fairs were smaller than the big sheep and cattle fairs and most of the animals were brought to town, confined by the creels of the cart, which was drawn by a horse or a donkey, though I remember several mules and ginettes pulling carts as well.

The sheep and cattle fairs were much bigger affairs. The animals began arriving for the big cattle fairs from around 9pm the night before, with canny farmers and their bleary-eyed sons staking out traditional pitches, where generations of each family had always sold their beasts. Such a territorial spot was important and also considered 'lucky' so it was always on their minds to get to town early and secure their 'sweet spot' for selling their cattle or sheep.

Sheep fairs were a sight to behold. Unlike cattle, sheep had to be penned, or they would simply disappear into the night. To achieve this, men brought wooden hurdles with them to town and tied them to the fronts of houses, shops, gateways, whatever they could find, and wherever they could, and made a three-sided pen into which they herded their sheep and lambs. I remember seeing the full length of main street on both sides, penned off in this manner, with perhaps a half mile in total of sheep pens up and down Main Street, strapped to the fronts of each and every business premises on the street. There were probably thousands of sheep in town for those fair days.

 My mother owned a ladies drapery shop, which had two big plate glass display windows, perhaps 3 metres wide on the front of the shop and an elegant, wide, glass doorway in the middle. The sheep pens were tied right up against the shop windows, filled to bursting with huge woolly bleating sheep with panic in their eyes and escape on their minds. Dad had special wrought iron grids made to protect the shop windows from being stove in by the press of the sheep in the pens.


After the fair, I would be given the task of hosing down the footpath and the walls of the shop, brushing away the yards of sheep-poo. Then I had to get the lanolin oil off the windows and have them gleaming for the morning. I don't think I'll ever forget the smells.

Cattle fairs were very different. Cattle can stand in groups for hours without wandering off, with a little minding, so no pens were needed. Hundreds of cattle would fill every street in town, and while to the stranger it must have looked chaotic, it was in actual fact, quite organised, with each farmer's cattle being watchfully guarded and herded so they weren't just in one huge herd. This 'minding' of the cattle was done by the boys and they had a difficult task of it, but they were used to minding cattle, unlike me, who was terrified they might bite!

Once the cattle were in place, the men went off the gauge the market, or meet the cattle jobbers, leaving their sons in charge of the cattle they'd just driven into town. For all of them it had already been a long, tiring night, walking the cattle as much as ten miles in the dark, possibly in the rain and certainly in the cold, running ahead to stop the cattle turning off the road, down bohareens, or into front gardens of road-side houses.

They may have been tired, but they were excited too, at the responsibility they now had for their farm's valuable stock, and at the notion of being in 'town' for the fair, with it's change of scenery from their rural pastures. The cattle too sensed the excitement, looing and mooing, scittishly threatening to break from the herd at any moment, prodded back into line by the boys, yelling and 'hullahing'.



The streets were a mad cacophony of animal and man sounds, echoing around the dim, foggy streets of the town. There always seemed to be mist, whether thats my dimming memory, or the combination of cold, damp steam rising from backs of the cattle, their soft, musty breath condensing in the cold night air, and the blue wisps of smoke from the coal and turf fires wafting down through the throng. The smells were incredibly vital, fresh, dungy, wet, musty, but to a very high volume, if smells can have a decibel level.

The boys wore their working clothes, many wore duffle coats, the 1950's hoodie, but their hands and faces, and their bare legs over the tops of their too-big wellingtons, were raw from the moist cold. The men were the same, though many of them were dressed for town, a serviceable suit or jacket, and a heavy overcoat, and of course they too wore wellingtons, or big boots. The jobbers, distinctively dressed, were dapper in their broad-brimmed hats, velvet-collared crombie coats and bright ox-blood slip-on boots.

By 2 or 3 am the fair was in full swing with buyers, jobbers and sellers all engaged in their deal-making. The big cattle-jobbers moved very efficiently through the fair, buying huge numbers of cattle, strippers, heifers, bullocks, bulls, all destined for further fattening in the midlands, or for abattoirs in Dublin. Many cattle, just like generations of our people, were destined for England. Those just-sold cattle were herded off by drovers and were held in track-side pens, for later loading onto dozens of cattle-cars that had been shunted into place the day before, for onward shipping, to catch the boat to Hollyhead and on to the English markets. Other cattle were loaded onto cattle lorries with high creels, and off they trundled to their destinations across Ireland.

By mid-day, palms had been spat upon and slapped,.deals had done and settled, money exchanged. The boys were given a tanner or a few bob for their services and they made a bee-line to the sweet shops. The men were not done yet. They met up with their wives who had come to town in the pony and trap at a more civilised hour. They settled a few bills around the town, the hardware shop, the grocery, the drapery and the insurance office. In later years they went to the bank, to pay off an overdraft or lodge some money to the farm account.
Almost universally, before they headed home, they went to the pub, usually a pub-grocery, where they bought some shop goods, biscuits and sausages, a side of bacon. The men stood at the bar, the boys waited in the 'lounge', while the wives went about town, buying some necessities for the house or for themselves, a dress, a coat, some wool for knitting, a luxury or two, perhaps. It was also a time to match-make and many's a farmer came to town with a few cattle and returned home with a wife!

Finally, after enjoying a few pints of stout, with their friends, or neighbors, they made their way home, in the pony and trap, home to the farm they'd left almost 24 hours previously. Back on the farm, the cycle of farm life started again, while over in the town, the big clean up was under way, and the smells only got worse before they got better!

Copywright - Brian Nolan, Galway Walks - Walking Tours of Galway  http://www.galwaywalks.com
12 October 2015.
With Thanks to Mount Talbot- A Journey Through the ages for the Ballygar Fair photos, dating from 1953, and the Lawrence Collection for some of the older b&w's.

The Way They Went - How the Irish 'got about' in 1850!

The Irish, while extremely fond of their horses, tended to walk everywhere, most of them not having the means nor the land to support a horse. Public Transport was inefficient, to say the least. The Railways had only just arrived in Ireland but were confined to short lines in Dublin. River boats and canals carried goods and passengers, though very, very slowly. The Mail Coach from Galway to Dublin took 2 to 3 days, stopping frequently to change horses and rest. 

Charles Bianconi changed all that. He was the Michael O'Leary of his day. Having arrived here in 1800 as a door-to-door salesman of Italian engravings, he soon saw the need for faster coach transport. His Bianconi Coach business had humble beginnings. in 1815 he started with just two coaches (called Bians), each carrying 8 passengers, sitting back to back, face out to the roadside, in 2 rows of 4 longitudinally on a hard bench, plying between Clonmel and Cahir. 

By 1850 he had revolutionised public transport around Ireland, managing some 100 vehicles, which traveled an astonishing 3,800 miles daily, calling at 120 towns, and 140 stations for changing horses. Each of these 'stations', many of which were hotels, inns or public houses, employed several grooms and a farrier, not to mention the catering and other people involved. With over 500 drivers on the payroll and 200 'Bians' in the fleet, they kept over 1,300 horses to pull the cars, that ate around 3,500 tons of hay a year, plus 35,000 barrels of oats. Bianconi also owned a coach-builders company in Clonmel where they made and repaired their own fleet of coaches, and also contracted to dozens of tradesmen and harness-makers, as well as establishing a network of over a thousand ticket-vendors all over the country. 

Blacks Hotel in Eyre Square Galway, Ireland was the Bianconi station in the city (now the Imperial Hotel). The Central Hotel In Loughrea, owned by J. Salmon was the Marconi depot there. A laden Bianconi Royal Mail Day Car or Coach covered about 8 miles per hour and passengers were charged one penny and a farthing per mile (about a 1/2 cent nowadays). 

The fare from Galway to Clifden was 7 shillings and six pence (about 30 cents today) and took 11 to 12 hours to cover the fifty-odd miles! And you sat outside, in all weather! Coaches to Dublin took 2 days, with passengers staying overnight in places like Athlone or Kilbeggan. 

 

They carried mail, passengers and trade-goods. Bianconi's coaches helped the revive the fishing industry by allowing fish caught today in Galway or Cork, to be sold in Dublin within 24 hours, by driving 24 hours straight with perishable cargo.

The mass migration of the Irish people ignited by The Great Famine brought huge increases in passengers, who used Bianconi's services to reach the ports from which they emigrated to England, Canada, America and Australia. The departing emigrants would have passed harrowing scenes of poverty, beggars, evicted families, demolished or uninhabitable homes and lean-to's on the sides of the roads, no doubt reinforcing their decision to leave their native land. 

The Railways finally put the Coaches out of business in the final years of the 19th century, though these new rail-lines, while they provided huge employment in their building, only helped spur and enable more emigration from Ireland..
Today you can still see some Bianconi Coaches in use as jaunting cars on Killarney. 

Charles 'Carlo' Bianconi, who brought cheap public transport to Ireland, died in 1875 and left his company to his employees. A truly modern, innovative and patriotic Irishman, though he was born 130 years ago in a little village called Tregolo, in northern Italy, in 1785.

Hope you enjoyed this post. If you'd like to hear more Galway stories, check out my website www.galwaywalks.com or my Facebook page www.facebook.com/galwaywalks or follow me on Twitter @galwaywalks 
Regards
Brian Nolan
Galway Walks 
Galwaywalks@gmail.com

A True Story

A True Story -
'No blacks, no Irish, no dogs.
I read the rooms to let near
Gloucester Road, brushed my hackles
Flat and continued my search. Then

It wasn't the jibe of race but
The spot between black and dog.
My blood burned and my thick
Tongue filled my gob, blocking the
Words of release, black Irish dog.

I found a room, a den between two
Floors, a curtain to draw behind
And a bed for the neutral light. I
Found love too, more than my ire deserved.
She poured ointment on my tongue. I
Lapped affection, licked kisses on her face.

The dogs were rehabilitated first. The
Blacks legalised on penny postcards on shop
Fronts. I trimmed my words for the Anglo-
Saxon ear. Nothing remains but a green
Passport. Recently on returning from Paris
A customs official, concerned about rabies,
Asked if I were bringing in a dog.'

I read this poem by Leitrim-born poet Joe Sheerin (1941 - ) around 1979, copied it, tucked it into a book (Maurice Walsh's Black Cock's Feather) and forgot about it until yesterday when it fell out on my lap, while I listened to a debate on Gays being allowed to donate blood. I thought it an unusual coincidence. (There are lots more quirky tales on my 'Walking Tours of Galway', if anyone's interested. 

Please 'Like' my pagehttps://www.facebook.com/Galwaywalks if you like these stories! Brian)

The Knife Sharpener

Every couple of years this man would come to Loughrea, County Galway and set up shop on the foot-path outside Molloy's Harp Bar on Main Street. He was an itinerant blade-grinder, or knife sharpener. Folks would get wind he was in town and quickly a queue would form, of people waiting to have their 'sharps' sharpened.

All manner of blades were whetted. Scissors, shears, scythes, chisels, sickles, lawn-mower blades, axes, carving knives, plane-blades, scrapers, even razors, he sharpened them all. Sparks would fly when he applied the blade to the spinning whetstone, turning the blade to whet both sides, changing the angle he held it at, almost flat for knives, fully right-angled for scissors. He moved in reverie with the blade, caressing the blade's fine edge to the stone, teasing it to a polished finish as he gently varied the speed of the stone by pedaling the foot-spindles faster or slower. He was an artist really, a craftsman for whom steel was his brush.

He would finish with a smile, rubbing the now gleaming blade with an oily rag to keep the rust off. I can't remember what he charged, something fairly nominal and affordable I imagine, for everyone needed their knives sharpened, rich and poor alike, and he didn't discriminate. He would finish up when the last blade was tested. Deftly he'd flip the cart onto it's one wheel, and using two handles which he had folded into the frame, he wheeled the grinding barrow off to his night's lodgings.

He towed the cart behind his bicycle and like the poet Antoine Raftery, he went from village to village, town to town, farm to farm, working his magic on the cutting edges of Irish life, continuing a tradition that probably went all the way back to medieval times. I wonder if he had a set route, or just took a notion, north today, tomorrow west with the sun? I took these two photographs in August 1973 and had 'lost' the images until this weekend when tidying out my mum's house.  

I was working in Sligo in 1979 when one day I took a drive to Drumcliff to see Yeat's grave. There I saw the little blue and white cart for the last time, tucked in behind a caravan, parked off the road. I stopped, but there was no one about. I often wondered what ever became of the little man with the sharpest wit in Ireland. I never saw him again. I didn't even know his name!

Sometimes I see a Heron in the Corrib river when on my Walking Tours

The word for Heron is 'Corr' in Gaelic. It is also the Irish word for Crane and is used interchangeably. In Celtic mythology, if a sacred place or taboo is disrespected, the effected Druid would adopt a 'corrghuíneacht' - or Heron stance, to put a curse on the transgressor. They reputedly stood on one leg, with one arm skyward, wrist at right-angles over their head, pointing at their enemy, transfixing them with one eye,  chanting or satirising him. Such a spell resulted in everything from blisters on the person's skin, blindness of the enemy, even their death! Irish Herons, not to be messed with. Timeless guardians of our heritage! 

Here in Galway, you can often see Cranes at Salthill, in the rock-pools opposite Leisureland, at Long Walk, near the aptly named B&B Heron's Rest, and often when on my 'walking tours', I see a Heron at the little weir below the Fisheries Tower or at the weir below Nuns Island. 

Keep a wary eye out for them...hah! 

Heron sculpture at Nuns Island, Galway.

The Winkle-Pickers Tale.

I started this blog as background piece for a journalism student/friend of mine in Galway University, researching for a radio feature she was doing on Periwinkles. I know, what of them, those little sea-snails? So one day, around the spring equinox, when the tide was at its lowest ebb, I walked to Salthill and watched some winkle pickers far out on the reef at Blackrock, Salthill, where winkles grow aplenty and they grow big, blue and tasty on the wave-swept rocks there. The picked winkles would be bagged and left at the high-tide mark in a rock-pool for a few days, before being picked up by a 'winkle wholesaler' and shipped off to France, presumably at a tidy profit to the seller, though probably not for the pickers.

I walked out there myself, to the end of the reef, carefully picking my way across the slippery seaweed and hidden rock pools, feeling very self-conscious in my fashionable walking gear and tried to get one older grumpy man to talk about his experiences picking and harvesting the blue pearls that are the Atlantic periwinkle. He was bundled up from the cold, his weather-beaten face and wrinkled, blue hands a testament to the hard life of a sea-shore harvester. He hardly stopped to look at me, let alone speak so I didn't get much information out of him. He was busy, stooped over, one hand in the water, one clutching an onion sack, brimming with hundreds of blue-black shells, anxious to get the most of the sea's bounty before the tide turned. He ignored me, grunted and waved me away. One look at his big blue hands convinced me that this conversation would wait! On my way back to shore, I cast my mind back to Kilkee, County Clare, just for a moment in time and remembered how I fell in love with these little beauties. 

Y'see my Dad was born in Kilkee way back in 1914, although by his own admission, he fled that windswept coastal village as soon as he could pay for a ticket on Percy French's famous West-Clare Railway. He found the 44 weeks of deserted Kilkee too depressing to bear. and the hectic bustle of the 8-week tourist season too busy to enjoy, so he left. He became a primary school teacher, initially in Dublin, then in Raheen near Killimor in East Galway, and finally he settled down, got married to my mum, raised a family of seven children and ultimately taught for 45 years in a three-room country school in Duniry, near Woodford, at the foot of the land-locked Slieve Aughty mountains, far from the spume of the waves, the cry of the seagulls and the smell of storm-stranded seaweed and bloated bladder-wrack. 

The draw of the sea is irresistible though and Dad was drawn back more often than he cared to admit. Thus in the sixties and seventies we spent every summer there, in a rented 'lodge', all nine of us, cramped like sardines yes, but the accommodation was not important, for we had different priorities then...like building sand-castles on Kilkee's golden horseshoe beach, tight-rope walking the endless strand-line wall, swimming 'au natural' at Newfoundout, the naturist swimming hole under Georges Head, idly fishing for cobblers and crabs, using barnacs for bait on a threaded twisted pin, barefooting the rocks 'back west' at the Pollack holes, de-spineing jet-black spiky sea-urchins to make ashtrays out them and sell to the tourists, playing pin-ball in Perks Amusements.

And yes, the 'piece de resistance', eating winkles with a straight pin, off with the little round lid, out with the whorley snail, down the hatch, toss the shell, reach for another, and on and on, no tv back then, just the beach and the winkles...simple pleasures, impossible to recreate nowadays as an adult. Kilkee and winkles were an inseparable fact of life for us...and as I grew older the taste for them never waned. As a boy-racer you could follow my car tracks from Kilkee to Loughrea by tracking the trail of empty winkle shells from Clare to Galway. The archaeologists of tomorrow will surely be confused at the proliferation of sea snails so far inland.

Winkles are not for the faint-hearted mind you...eating a periwinkle is an acquired taste, and you never, ever look at it before swallowing...or you will never eat one at all. Oysters and mussels are easy pickings by comparison. The winkle's nutritional value is probably tiny, the sodium content high, but the pleasure connection from eating these booger-like delicacies...priceless! 

What is odd is that to my knowledge, no one in my family ever picked a winkle and boiled it...it wasn't like the done thing...I don't even know how long to boil them...kind of a trade secret..is it 10 minutes, or as we believed as kids, 10 hours? I still don't know, but the one thing I do know is that no one sells periwinkles on the street here in Galway, you still gotta go to Kilkee or Lahinch to satisfy that craving...so that's an even bigger mystery. 

One day I was at a little hotel in Kinvara, on the south shore of Galway Bay, meeting some friends for a drink. I was wearing what were then fashionable, pointy-toe shoes, or winkle-pickers. My friends pointed out that the hotel itself was called Winkles, after the family that owned it. We had a good laugh. Seems one is never far from a periwinkle in Galway. Sadly, the hotel is gone now, a supermarket stands in its stead.Funny thing, I have never seen winkles on a restaurant menu, not even in Winkles Hotel.

A friend of mine, Bob Fane, wrote me from the States about the periwinkle, yes, the same Atlantic blues we ate here on the other side of the sea.

'Ah childhood, 'Boy Land', 'Never Never Land', once you cross its borders you may never return again. When I was a lad of 8 or 9 my father had a place in Connecticut on the then pristine Long Island Sound. We would dive off the rocks, root through the seaweed, find the periwinkles and, like yourself, would take out a safety pin from our bathing suit and eat then down, maybe 1/2 dozen, I never really chewed them, just let them slide down with the salty brine as the taste. We felt like Jon Hall from some exotic South Pacific movie. Then my brother told me they were nasty little buggers, full of excrement and other things too hellish to stomach, the source of hepatitis, yellow fever, polio, and bubonic plague. My peri-days were over.'   

Today, the periwinkle industry in Ireland is quietly thriving. It is an invisible industry, with the harvesting of this naturally occurring seafood mainly carried out by migrant workers way out on the foreshore, or on the small off-shore islands, far away from prying eyes. Many of the workers are illegals or at best, working off-the-books. Conservatively some 5,000 tonnes of periwinkles are exported from Ireland annually, and the business is worth some €15 million annually. The players in the market fly way under the radar and the industry is completely unregulated. Curiously it is almost impossible to buy cooked or raw winkles in Ireland. Almost all are exported.

My memories of winkles are very much the stuff of boyhood adventures and endless summers. I see from the Clare Champion that winkle sellers on Kilkee beach will now have to register with the county council, the health board and take out a traders licence, as well as providing €2 million in public liability insurance. The Periwinkle kept people alive during the Famine and has provided a simple living for the west Clare winkle sellers. These are not in 'big business'. Selling a couple dozen winkles for a Euro won't make one wealthy, but it is such a tradition, part of our culture.. Winkle sellers were a fixture in Kilkee, our 'supplier' of our fix. Aah for those innocent childhood days of carefree, endless play and afterwards, dangling your barefoot legs over the strand wall, needling a damp bag of periwinkles,watching the sun setting on Kilkee bay. A little bit of heaven. Perhaps it is gone now, another victim of draconian regulations gone mad in this little island off an island off Europe.