Part 2 - LIVING OFF LAND AND RIVER
"Bantams have a brighter, clearer call than the ordinary dung-hill cock."
Where waters
dank and floating reed and wild mint fills the air.
As I said,
when my mother's people, the Nallys, were evicted from Creggan in 1733, they
had to move down to Clonbonny Lower beside the Shannon. Clonbonny Lower is the
southern end of the townland of Clonbonny just opposite the Long Island. The
road in here ends in the bog about 200 yards from Newton which is on the road
to Curraghbui on the other side of the Boar river. To the south in the distance
is Bloomhill.
Here the people
had holdings of just a few Irish acres all of which were subject to flooding.
I was often asked how they survived with large families on so little land. Well
we always had it that where one man couldn't produce enough working on his own,
a family could survive by cutting a range of turf banks and sowing a "lock"
of potatoes.
In my young
days 63 people lived in six different houses in Clonbonny Lower. There were
two Farrell houses side by side. Paddy Farrell and his sisters Mag Farrell and
Mrs Geoghegan lived in one and Eddie Farrell and his family lived in the other.
Eddie Farrell made a name for himself later on as he owned "41s", that well
known pub in Mardyke Street, Athlone. Then there were four Nally households
at the end of the road, and among them were my mother's people. Another Nally
family lived in a house which was actually built since the high flood of 1954.
In any event all the houses in Clonbonny Lower are abandoned and there's not
a sinner in it now. As I said the remains of some of the houses can still be
seen, for example Fintan Nally's old house is still there but it's now used
for stables. Other houses such as the Farrell houses were bulldozed out of it.
So Clonbonny Lower is no more, but there is life in Clonbonny yet as there are
15 houses in the northern part of Clonbonny, or Clonbonny Upper, as I suppose
you could call it.
Winter was
the worst time when the floods started to creep into the houses. It's a strange
feeling as the floods move in on you - there's no noise or commotion like you
get with a fire or a storm of wind. When the waters came to within about 20
yards of the house, the people noticed dampness under the fire and all round
the hearth. Then they built new fireplaces by putting a sheet of tin over a
few stones. Usually the water kept coming; you'd hardly notice until it came
under the door and started lapping across the kitchen floor. If there was a
south wind, which was against the flow of the stream, the water piled up quicker
and crossed the kitchen and made for the bedrooms. When the bedrooms were flooded
the people used rubber boots to wade to their beds. They then had to sleep over
the water; they said they were so cold during the night that they couldn't warm
themselves. After a few days like this they had to abandon their houses. If
there was an old barn with a chimney, back up a bit from the dwelling house,
they went out there and bunked together as best they could.
When the stables
flooded, railway sleepers were put on the ground so that animals could stand
out of the water. Sometimes the flooding receded or remained stationary for
a few days, but if it rose again the stables were abandoned and cattle had to
be moved to other fields or up onto the high bog. You must remember that farms
in Clonbonny Lower were made of cut-away bog and that the original high bog
is not too far away. Of course, when the animals were up on the red bog they
had to be foddered and watered from surrounding drains.
As the roads
were covered the people had to take through the fields or the bogs to get into
town. The people hardly protested when the floodwater rose year after year.
I think they felt downtrodden and powerless like second-class citizens. They
just sat in their houses while the floodwaters kept on creeping up on them.
The people didn't seem to expect anything better; they just took it lying down
and the first mass protest I remember didn't occur until after the floods of
1954.
In my young
days the floods weren't as serious as they are today and I heard my grandfather
say, and he got it from his own people, that there was no flooding along the
Shannon in the olden days apart from flash floods which manured the callows.
The grass was lush and it stood fully two and a half feet high and it was full
of Timothy rye grass, or as the old people called it, rat-tail. When the scythe
men were at work there was so much weight on the heel of their blades that they
could only take narrow strokes of three or three and half feet instead of the
usual six foot stroke. The reason the land is so fertile is because when the
Shannon was first formed it took the track of the bog; over the centuries more
and more silt was deposited and this formed the fertile grassy land at the edge
of the bog.
In my opinion
the reason the flooding got so bad goes back to the 1840s and the formation
of the Shannon Navigation Company by those old landlords down along the Shannon.
Eventually two large obstacles blocked the flow of the river and things changed
for the worst. My grandfather said that putting the wall across the river at
Meelick was bound to cause flooding as it was an obstruction to the flow of
the river. The ESB got control of the Shannon and the Ardnacrusha power station
which was built in 1927; this was a further obstacle to the flow of the river
and the flooding got out of hand altogether. The situation was all the more
confused because the Board of Works were in control at the Athlone weir and
the ESB commanded operations at Meelick weir. Now the callows are flooded for
six months of the year and the grass is only sedge and meadow sweet.
When I was
growing up country people like us were nearly self-sufficient. We had our own
milk and butter and we made stirabout from the corn we threshed. Hens supplied
us with chickens and eggs and we had our own cabbage, turnips, parsnips and
potatoes. We usually had three or four clutches of pigs and we turned out a
pig in three or four months. We killed one pig in the harvest coming into the
winter and we killed another one in the spring before the weather got too hot.
The pigs were salted down and hung out of the rafters. We didn't keep sheep
as they didn't thrive on the callows.
To prepare
domestic fowl such as a cock, a chicken or a duck the women first of all bent
their heads back under their thumbs; then they pulled a few feathers from the
top of the head and cut into it with a sharp knife. When they were preparing
geese for sale at Christmas they always caught their blood in jam pots. We used
to fry it out hard on the pan and eat it with bread and butter; and it was really
lovely.
We stunned
pigs with a sledgehammer, cut a vein in their throats and caught the blood in
big basins. The next day the guts were collected and washed until there wasn't
a speck on them; then they were turned inside out and filled with a mixture
of onions, oatmeal and giblets to make a mass of big black puddings. We kept
all the fat and rendered it into lard and any giblets which were left over were
fried.
The only machinery
we had was the mowing machine. Every fellow around here had a horse, and sometimes
two would join together and buy a machine; however a lot of mowing was done
with a scythe, especially in small gardens or where a horse might sink. Working
the scythe was tough but there were some great scythe men, some very tasty men.
In the old days corn was also cut with a scythe, as there were no reapers or
binders. The corn was then winnowed out on sheets on a windy day, bagged and
finally brought to the mill to produce oaten meal.
Being almost
self-sufficient we had little need for money. However, there were always little
surpluses which could be sold. I remember the women standing by the castle in
Athlone with their baskets of butter and eggs. The money they got went to buy
a grain of tea, sugar, salt or pepper or, once in the week, a bit of fresh meat.
A loaf was hardly ever bought except when there was a wake or the stations or
something like that. Surpluses of chickens, pigs and corn and eating-spuds went
to buy clothing and shoes and other things such as tools. The few cattle we
reared went to pay the rent. One other thing we bought was the one hundredweight
bag of flour which was always left beside the fire.
Apart from
farming we trapped and fished in season so that we had any amount of fish and
wildfowl.
The work I
loved best was ploughing. I used to start with two horses and go all day plodding
along nice and gently. My mind was at a complete rest, just thinking simple
thoughts as the horses turned in at the headland and came back up the field
again. When I was ploughing a big field the seagulls and crows used to wait
for me in the morning and follow me all day picking up grubs and worms. In the
evening I used to look back over my work and see a field all-dark from the scrapes
or furrows I had turned over; I really felt proud of what I did. When I got
home I didn't realise I was tired until I sat down and then a deep contentment
came over me.
At first we
used the old swing plough, or as we called it the single mould-board plough
which had no wheels. It was a work of skill to keep the furrows a consistent
width and depth. There was an auld man in our country, Mike Henson, not Mike
Henson the "musicman" I mention later, but another Mike. When he was teaching
his son to plough he used to advise him "to carry a level hand and go even ahead".
"A level hand" was needed as you weren't supposed to vary the depth of your
scrape and an "even ahead" meant that the ploughman had to keep straight ahead
so as not to vary the width of the scrape.
There were
some fierce tasty men in my time. Nowadays no fellow has any taste for anything
but in those days they were fierce tasty. If a thing wasn't done right it was
knocked down and done again. I remember the old people opening drills in the
high bog and sowing potatoes in the heather on the moors. They started in the
middle with a shovel and opened the drill and if "ere" a little bend came in
it this meant they would be a few spuds short so they made sure to keep the
drills perfectly straight. They used to step out the ground before tilling or
ploughing with a horse; most of the men wore number nine boots which are supposed
to measure a foot - seven yards meant nine drills of 28 inches each.
After the mould-board
plough the wheel plough came in. It was usually set to give, say, a six inches
deep furrow. The wheel governed the width and didn't allow your furrow to get
any wider than the six to nine inches you required..
When my people moved up from Lower Clonbonny to the thatched cottage I live in today my Granny said she saw a field of blue-blossomed flax growing on Allen's land right out in front of the house. It seems the dark moorland was ideally suited for flax growing. When flax growing finished the seed potatoes industry took over and virgin bog or red bog was suitable for this purpose.
Banagher marked our southern boundary.
The people went up into the pools and heather of the high bog and made "lazy beds" to grow potatoes. These were made by cutting two drains and using the sods to cover the potatoes. There were ridges (long narrow raised strips) in which four-feet-wide furrows (long narrow trenches) were made for sowing the potatoes. The furrows provided drainage in the same way as the drains and shores. Shores were made deeper each year, but they couldn't be made too deep in case they caved in.
To grow decent
crops the people made black moor soil by continuous tilling and by carrying
up cleeves of dung, or should I say manure, on their backs - this was fierce
hard work. Luckily the turf gets blacker as you dig lower because of the lime
which was washed into it over the centuries from the surrounding hills. When
the dry weather came the sod on top began to creep and crack and expose the
potatoes so they also carted up cleeves of marl from the brink and spread
it on the cracks. Marl is the white clay you see along the river bank which
is usually full of tiny snail shells. I don't think they knew what they were
doing but in fact they were adding lime to the bog, as marl has a very high
lime content and the red bog is an acid soil with no lime whatsoever.
Athlone in
those days was noted the world over for growing seed potatoes and there were
three stores at the Southern Station: O'Meara's, Dunning's, and Grenham's.
Then suddenly the eelworm attacked and wiped out that industry. Afterwards
you could only grow a crop of spuds once in four years and even then you had
to change your seed and get healthy stock from Donegal. It's strange that
the potato industry kept going for years in Donegal and I think it's still
important business up there.
When the
potato failed people started growing other crops such as carrots, raspberries,
blackcurrents and celery. Batchelors, the jam makers in Dublin, were the main
buyers. However, the prices on offer where poor - they'd send an auld lorry
down and maybe they'd give you four pence for a pound of raspberries.
In my young
days we were all equal or I suppose you could say we were all poor and there
was no such thing as being independent or living without help. So we worked
the meitheal, that is when threshing or turf cutting was going on we
got men to help and they'd give back the days worked in return. There was
an unwritten law, especially at reek making, that a man from every house in
the townsland had to give a hand; even if there wasn't the work of three men
in making up the reek. There was usually a quarter barrel of porter on hand
and there'd be fellows running in and out to it all day. Apart from the porter
there were spuds, bacon and cabbage for the workers - such a feed as was dished
up!
Threshing
involved beating or rubbing stalks of ripe corn to separate the grain from
the husks. Flails with wooden handles and free-swinging metal or wooden bars
were used for this purpose. Home-made flails were also used and these were
made by keeping two sally rods in a pot of boiling water until they could
be bent up in a hook - these formed the buailteán or the piece which
did the beating. The staff was made from a good branch of a tree and the buailteán
was bound to the staff with eel skin and wax or hemp. Eel skin unlike leather
is nearly everlasting so the people got the biggest eel skin they could find
and dried it out.
The gad (sally)
which made up the buailteán was a few inches longer than the staff
because you had to cover three or four sheaves of corn and it was worked on
a circular basis. I used a flail when I was about 10 years old. I since saw
a man demonstrating the use of the flail on the television and he used a flail
with a short buailteán and beat it up and down instead of the correct
circular movement - the poor fellow knew as much about swinging a flail as
he did about flying.
Anyway threshing
was great long ago with every class of roguery and trickery going on.
There was
always a fellow over the bag, his job was to keep bags stacked up and filled.
He was surely a "go boy" because he was picking the easiest job. He was usually
up to some form of "divilment", for example he might slip a few rocks into
a bag. Then of course some poor lunatic had the job of carrying the bag with
the rocks in it.
Then there
was always a crowd of "gossoons" and a few terriers standing around the stacks
of corn armed with "branching rods" and every time a mouse or a rat come out
of the corn they murdered it. If they used single sticks they were sure to
miss but they used branching rods and that way they never missed. Another
trick was to put a rat in the pockets of all the coats which were left hanging
around. No one really got vexed about these sorts of pranks but many a fellow
got a fright when he put his hand in his pocket to take out a cigarette.
We used to
bring bags of oats to Larkin's Mill where it was ground into oaten meal. Threshing
went through various stages, at first just the flail was used, then there
was horse threshing, steam threshing and finally the tractor was used.
In the time
I'm speaking about there were very few mowing machines. As I said before a
lot of work was done by scythe men and they mowed all along the callows and
in on the Long Island. The Long Island is in the middle of the Shannon between
Clonbonny and Clonown and is owned by about 20 or 30 different people. There
was a lot of work in bringing home the hay from the Long Island. A day or
so after the scythe men did their work the swards were shaken out and turned
a few times with a hand rake or a pitchfork; then they were gathered up into
rows about eight feet wide. After that, two men started rolling the rows from
each side and making it into big "cutcheens". Then they got cutcheen poles,
which were like light scaffolding poles, and pushed them under the cutcheens
before lifting them across the island to the brink. They repeated this operation
several times and eventually made the cutcheens into big cocks. Finally the
two cots were bought to the brink and when a few planks had been placed over
them the cocks were loaded.
Then this
"double cot" moved off across the Shannon propelled by a man at the stern
who worked a spiked pole and a man at the bow who worked an oar. It was a
makeshift sort of vessel and the slightest breeze blew it all over the Shannon.
When it reached the land the "set" of hay was pitched out onto a high spot
on the bank and it was made up into cocks again.
We usually
set an eel line twice a week and these consisted of 50 or 60 hooks. Before
setting a nightline we had to dig for worms or, on a wet night, we collected
them up on the tillage. A bucket of worms lasted for a week or two. We used
to buy a half-pound of cotton line and eel hooks from Finnerty's in the Market
Square; I think there's a religious order there now. The line was like a hank
of rolled wool and we used to boil it in a pot of tea because the tannin made
it last longer. Then we cut off lengths of a foot or a foot and a half called
droppers and knotted them onto the line at about six foot from each other.
We then put
a hook on each dropper and laid the line out on a flat tray-like box and stuck
the hooks round the edges. Before setting out to fish we stuck a pole in the
shore and tied the eel line to it. Then we loaded the tray and the bucket
of worms and we started baiting the hooks one by one and throwing them overboard
as we went. If the line was slack we tied a stone or some other weight to
it every 50 yards or so. We had to go at daylight, about 4 o'clock of a summer's
morning as eels hate daylight and try to break away when daylight comes. As
it is very hard to remove an eel hook we used to just cut the end of the droppers
and let the eels hop around the boat.
I set eel
lines from Ballygowlan to the Calf Island or Curraghnaboll; the Calf island
was always a good place. In those days no one would touch someone else's eel
line - not like nowadays when they're stealing one another's lines.
There were
no eel licences in the old days even under the British. When the ESB took
over control of the Shannon eel licences were introduced. Then the Ganlys,
the Quigleys and the other fishing families up on Lough Ree paid for licences
for a few years until the ESB bought out their fishing rights.
When they
were building the power station in Ardnacrusha they dammed the river just
above the station and forced the water down through two canals. The headrace
brought the water into the station and the tailrace brought it back into the
Shannon. Then they installed huge cages, which could be lifted on pulleys,
and they just left a small pass for the fish. Most of the salmon coming up
to spawn and the small eels, the elvers, from the Sargasso Sea were caught.
Now I did hear they had some sort of a straw rope wrapped round a pipe which
allowed some of the elvers to crawl over the dam and up the river.
For the last
number of years the ESB has been stocking the Shannon with eels and salmon
fry. This is lunacy because when those young fry go out to the sea and come
back it will be the same story all over again; they'll be all caught in the
traps at Ardnacrusha and they won't be let up to spawn.
Apart from
eel fishing seven families in nearby Golden Island had salmon draw licences,
these included three Macken families, two Dunning families, the Claffeys and
the McNamaras. The Mackens have a shop in Mardyke Street to this day. The
ESB bought the fishing rights of all these families and from that day on they
were forbidden to use their nets to draw for salmon.
Talking of
the Golden Island, people sometimes wonder how it got its name as it consists
of a cluster of houses along the Shannon about a mile from Athlone and it's
not an island by any means. These people supplied the town with milk and vegetables
and as a result they were never short of a shilling like most of the other
people who lived along the river. Any time they went to town they had a few
bob to collect from turf, vegetables and milk.