Sowing the fields

The farm year began as the crisp winter days began to grow and warm, when Mark McGaugh remembered taking the horses from the stables to the local blacksmith – whose father and grandfather were the village smiths before him – to shoe the horses before putting them in front of the plough. “The aroma still lingers of the moment when the smithy first tested the red-hot steel to the horses’ hooves to ascertain if it was a correct fitting,” he said. “Those steel shoes were essential for the animals to get a grip in the earth as they trudged along turning the deep heavy soil onto its side.”

The plough needed to be painted, sharpened and oiled, and set at the right depth for the crop. “To the amateur onlooker the process of ploughing appeared to be simple, but there had to be some technical preparation beforehand, as the headland area needed to be measured out in order to give the turning space to the horses at the end of each furrow,” McGaugh said. “The positioning of the two wheels of the plough determined the depth of the furrrow, and the depth was influenced by the crops; sugar beet or potatoes both required deeper soil, while turnips could thrive on a comparatively shallow drill.” (Around the Farm Gate, 97)

When the plough and horse were ready and relatives had come by to help, he said, “the pristine lea field would be scored with the precision of a surgical knife. As the curlews [birds] soared in ever increasing numbers on the exposed subsoil, the very heavens seemed to cry and lament. The solitary figure of the farmer against the enormity of the cumulus sky presented an awesome spectacle. Presently the unspoiled green field would be transformed into a canvas of burnt umber.” (Around the Farm Gate, 135)

When Marrie Walsh’s family readied to sow their wheat and barley, her job as a child was to fill the bags her family would wear around their waist, reaching in and flinging seeds all around them to “where the fresh soil was waiting to receive and nurture it,” she said. Such actions were once so familiar that when new technology appeared, people explained them with farming metaphors. When radio was invented, the signals spread in all directions from a tower like seeds scattered by Walsh’s father, so people described it using the same word; they were “broadcast.”

“It was a joyful sight; a biblical scene,” she said.“Man sowing the seed, throwing hope into the air, hopiing that when it fell that the God-given Earth and combination of the elements would yield a good harvest in due course.” (Irish Country Childhood, 122)

 

In stillness and storm

 A childhood running barefoot through fields and climbing trees meant that my elderly neighbours had a respect for the natural world, rather than seeing it as something to be stripped bare for money, or as the Edenic exhibit of so many environmentalists. “Growing up surrounded by trees coloured our lives,” she said. “My father was a planter of trees and gave nature free rein ... [he] instilled a deep respect for trees in us, telling us that it takes a tree many, many years to grow, but a fool can cut it down in five minutes. He also believed that a person who planted a tree was far less likely to chop one down.”

When a tree needed to be cut, Marrie Walsh remembered, “we would tell the tree the reason for cutting it down. Then we would run around to the other trees and tell them not to cry. My father and brothers would
mark the first cut with the hatchet, then rub soap on the cross-cut blade and start sawing. We would watch from a distance to see which way the tree would fall.” When her father  fastened the horse to the tree and set off dragging it home for wood, she said, “some of us perched in the branches, swaying hither and thither as we tried to balance ... by this time we would have collected several children from houses along the way, all wanting a ride on our tree.”

Like all children until yesterday, they spent their formative years in the world and not seeing it out a window or through a screen. Just as Angela or Patty Bolger watched the birds’ nests, so Tony Carr fished the rivers, Taylor and her siblings watched the swallows come every spring to nest in the barns, and Rose Smith and her friends dammed the streams to create temporary swimming pools.

Walsh remembered watching with fascination as the summer sun dried the bog and exposed the skeletons of ancient trees buried in its depths, “like sentries with their jagged stumps bleached white and ghostly, as if trying to reveal the glory that was once theirs before they were indiscriminately burned down. Their roots resembled long, bony fingers reaching out to touch and console each other in remembrance of their majestic past. In the moonlight they looked like shrouded spectres rising from the bog, trying to convey their former greatness, when they covered the land and held in their arms the birds of the air and harboured the many wild animals which roamed without hindrance through the Ireland of old.”

City children might seem far removed from Nature, but in Ireland, at least, even inner cities had parks, woods, gardens and cow pastures, and every school and hospital used to be surrounded by gardens . Ellen Miller, who grew up in Dublin in an area now covered with motorways and high-rise buildings, remembered it was then only a short walk to fields where they gathered cowslips.  

In Belfast, “… many streams still oozed from the floor of the forest ... where we spent many summers climbing trees, making woodland dens and decking them with the bluebells, violets, primroses, forget-me-nots and sweet-smelling delicately pink wild roses that grew in abundance in the early summer,” Marianne Elliott recalled. “It made for a magical dell-like landscape ... ponds full of tadpoles and wild irises; rivulets to be bridged with driftwood and stones, marking out imaginary territories.”

Woods allow children places to create their own dens, tree-houses and forts, where they collect their own treasures and form secret societies. We’re all Stone  Age tribes under the surface, and something in us needs to live that way for a while as children. The most meagre “vacant” real estate can for children become a secret and dangerous place full of old gods and buried treasure, of canyons to be leapt across, a place to smell a campfire, feel a ladybird on one’s arm, feel the freezing water of a winter creek and a breeze ripple the green barley. Time can stand still for a child, and the primal moments we feel in stillness and storm are what stay with us when our bodies are old and everything else has faded.