Country Living with Francis Farragher

For most of us who grew up on family farms back through the decades, it could seem to be a very mixed bag. There were always ‘jobs’ to be done like looking at the cattle located a few miles away on a fine summer’s evening when a game of football would seem a lot more attractive.

There were the tougher jobs like thinnowing beet or turnips; footing turf for a day; or that task I hated with a vengeance – picking stones from the meadow fields. I could never quite figure out as a young lad why stones had to be picked almost every year – it was as if they grew out of the soil!

For all that, the quality of life was quite good for most of us out the country, even during the more straitened times of the 1960s, when in fairness, there was always healthy food on the table but very little by way of the clang of silver in your pocket.

In general, it was a time when farms were less intensive but in the ‘pre-dole days’, it still remains something of a mystery to me how families managed to rear and educate quite large ‘clutches’ of children.

There was of a course a whole culture of self-sufficiency on most farms with the hens supplying the eggs that provided food for the table and the ‘gugs’ also went a long way to paying for the groceries when the ‘travelling shop’ called once a week. We used to call him the ‘eggler’ – in my childhood days, a man called Christy Mannion from Barnaderg whose Wednesday visit to our house was almost akin to a Santa Claus arrival every week.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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