Last weekend I found myself headed toward County Louth and the conference of the Agricultural History Society of Ireland. I was encouraged to do this by the founder of the organization, Matthew Stout. I had never met Matt but our mutual friend David had been suggesting I contact Matt for two years and I thought it was about time I did. The conference sounded intriguing. I would learn perhaps more than I needed to know about early farming practice in Ireland, but the program looked low-key, with an afternoon field trip and all-inclusive meals and lodging. This would also give me the opportunity to stay at An Grianan, the complex run by what is left of the Irish Countrywomen’s Association, a long-standing organization that, like the Women’s Institute in England, was the place that farm women could practice their domestic skills on a more public and communal stage.
An Grianan is as quaint and lovely as I hoped. I am given a large corner room with a great bath (I half feared that the bathroom would not be en suite) in the old part of the house. The fact that the shower doesn’t work the first morning is a bit dispiriting, but the housekeeper simply lets me into the empty room next door, a nearly unthinkable scenario in the US. Since the two rooms are on a corridor by themselves I can go back and forth in my robe. We are fed like Irish gods the entire weekend, with huge slabs of either meat, fish and chicken, vegetables drenched in cheese sauce, and two kinds of potatoes for each meal save breakfast, which is porridge and toast. There are always white and brown breads at the tables, and the metal teapots are replaced half a dozen times throughout the meals. The desserts are smothered in whipped cream, even the cupcakes. Luckily it is easier to refuse dessert, or leave most of it on the plate, than it is do that for the main meal; sometimes here I have been tempted to tip some food into my napkin when no one is looking and dispose of the mess later, thus saving myself the embarrassment of not being able to clean my plate of all this food in the Irish fashion.
To my delight I discover that the conference, which comprises only about 40 people, includes several farmers. I had expected the usual academic crowd (Matt and his wife are archaeologists) but found myself sitting next to two sisters at breakfast the first day, retired farmers who always come to this annual conference ‘because they’re interested’. The conference papers center around the farm of a man named Foster. Everyone but me is utterly familiar with this Foster, so he is never even given a first name. (It was John.) He was a large property owner in the eighteenth century who pioneered many innovations, including the establishment of a private plant nursery for the farm and the regular planting of a variety of trees in the hedgerows. On Saturday afternoon we would travel to the remains of his farm, part of which is now a Cistercian Abbey, with much of the farmyard in decay.
Over the two days of the proceedings the farmers would remind the scholars about the practical implications of what they were saying. This was most apparent with regard to the issue of ditches. Now, a ditch in Ireland is not the same, or not only the same, as a ditch in the US. Where I grew up there were plenty of ditches, including the shallow one that ran in front of our house in Saxonburg for a number of years and which I seem to remember sometimes carried raw sewage, although this hardly seems credible to me now. At any rate, the ditch was a channel dug into the land, pure and simple. In Ireland a ditch can be both a channel and a hedge (or less often a wall), that is, anything that divides property or acts as a boundary. In the course of the discussion the farmer asked the cogent question as only someone who has actually dug a ditch might do: Where does the dirt you remove end up? In other words, if you dig a ditch you pile the dirt up next to the ditch. The resultant mound will over time, in this fertile environment, sprout plants, which eventually form a wall. So the discussion goes.
The trip home on Sunday included a stop at Mellifont Abbey, a ruin in County Meath that has a superb example of a lavabo, the monastery’s communal shower room. Matt and Geraldine have done some digging at this monastery, so know a good deal about it. Geraldine is greeted by the staff at the abbey like the royalty she is in OPW (Ireland’s Office of Public Works) circles, where she is employed. The Stouts had gone to the Abbey to show it to two other guests at the conference, the incomparable Loebers. Rolf and Magda are a Dutch couple who run one of the largest psychological experiments ever done in the US out of the University of Pittsburgh. In their spare time they have become experts on most things Irish, simply out of love for the place. Magda has reputedly read every work of Irish fiction ever written (or at least written in the nineteenth century) and has compiled a definitive bibliography. Rolf is currently working with the government on an encyclopedic history of Irish archaeology. This, mind you, is what they do on vacation. I am tagging along with these four charismatic people because I cannily offered to drive the Loebers’ luggage, which didn’t fit in the Stouts’ car; luckily their car was also dusty from the dig they are currently involved in, so Magda opted to ride with me in my relatively cleaner rental car (they are flying back to the States in the morning and she needs to keep her wardrobe clean). I am in heaven, hearing about lavabos from some of the most expert people in the country. Finally, though, I had to surrender the luggage at the train station in Drogheda, and, after promises to stay in touch, head back to Edenderry.
An hour after I arrived at my gatehouse, I was back on the road, this time to Deirdre O’Sullivan’s farm. It was the night before the solstice, and Deirdre had invited 40 or so people for a cleansing and meditative evening to welcome the longest day. Having heard about the history of farm and pastureland all weekend, it was refreshing to simply experience it without explanation. We lay in the wheat fields, took our shoes off and walked along the plowed furrows, nipped leaves from newly planted beets, celery, cauliflower and greens to taste, and finally stopped in a small copse of beech trees. As we lay on the ground under the trees a woman named Helen led us on a meditation. Afterward we ate elderflower pancakes; the entire flower and stem were dipped into pancake batter and cooked over an open fire. There were candle lanterns everywhere; as we walked out of the woods just after midnight the sky was so bright that we didn’t need the lanterns in the open fields and even the ditches held some residual magic.
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