A country festival

Dawn comes very early this far north; the sun is up well before 5am. Yesterday it shone through my bedroom curtains with the promise of a heavenly day, and for once the promise was actually delivered. With no walk on tap and no desire to spend a big part of the day driving, I decided to have a lazy Sunday morning with the papers and the laundry, which I could finally hang out to dry with no concern for the rain, then head out to a local festival. The first challenge was finding it. This is not a festival with a website and driving directions. The one road sign I had seen advertised it as being in Carbury, which around here could mean anything. So I started by driving to Nodlaig's, source of all local information; she suggested I head in the direction of Derrinturn, about about 5 miles from her house, and declined to accompany me.

Of course she was right. As soon as I got near Derrinturn there were arrows pointing the way to the All-Ireland Turf Competition and Festival. As I drove deeper into the country I began to wonder about the All-Ireland aspect of the festival. For one thing, if much of Ireland descended on these narrow, pockmarked lanes there would be a serious traffic problem. Finally I got to the the steepest canal bridge I have yet encountered, a terrifying up-and-over ride that, although quite short, meant that it was not possible to see if there was a car coming in the opposite direction. Once safely on the other side, I turned down another thin strip of lane and finally across someone's driveway and straight onto the edge of the peat bog, where I paid a worker the €5 entry cost and parked the car.

In front of me I could see a giant bouncy castle, a midway trailer selling popcorn, and, far in front of where I stood on the edge of the bog, people moving across the brown turf with wooden barrows. This was clearly the most local of festivals, with everyone greeting each other by name, asking after the kids as if they hadn't seen each other at mass in the morning, and yelling over the din of the loudspeaker, which was in the hands of the usual glib and very chatty older man who is always given the job of emcee. When I arrived he was asking people to ante up for mouse bingo, a game which I discovered to my horror is played by releasing a live mouse on a table with numbers on it and paying off the bettor who holds the number where the mouse lands. I'm not sure where the bingo part comes in.

But the main attraction was the bog itself. Nearly 20 teams of turf cutters worked in the heat, cutting turf by hand with a variety of shovels and specialized two-sided rectangular-shaped spades. Each team had three people on it: the cutter, the thrower, and the barrow runner. The goal was principally to cut as much turf as time permitted, but the teams also had to wheel the cut turf bricks to a spot opposite where they were cutting, then spread them carefully so that they could begin to dry. Judging would be based on how much turf was cut, how clean the bricks were, how well spread-out the piles were, and how neat both the piles and the cutaway were left. The best teams would cut all the way down to the water, about 10 or 12 feet from the bog's surface before their time was up.

Cutting turf is hard work. The peat is dense and heavy with moisture, as if you had a plot of highly compacted earth that had to be cleared of any plants, then made into neat bricks that you had only one chance to shape. The cutter was therefore the skilled position on the team, and while the other two positions might trade off, the cutter worked all the way through the competition. The barrow runners seemed like they had the easiest job, since they got to sit while they waited for the thrower to fill the small wooden barrows, with their wooden wheels and no sides. But the barrow runner needed the rest: a full cart, with maybe 15 or 20 of these turf blocks on it, would be incredibly heavy, and the wooden wheels do not glide easily over the muddy surface of the bog.

Despite the grueling work, the teams were for the most part not made up of burly young men. In fact, it was men in their fifties, sixties and even seventies who formed most of the teams. There were a couple of all-women teams, there was a woman well into her seventies who was a cutter for another team, and there were two or three teams of kids learning the ropes from their parents or scout instructors. The cutter on one of the women's teams had on shorts and a tee shirt; when she leaned over to dig, the tattoo on her waist was visible. It was the word fiach, meaning a duty to someone or something.

The Irish have a duty to the turf. It has, along with the potato, provided livelihood for many generations of Irish laborers and farmers. A bog on your property meant an income source as the turf was cut, dried and sold. Many people still heat with turf. In the chilly evenings of April and even May the pungent smell of burning turf lays across the air, like the smell of coal so familiar to me from my childhood but with an earthiness that coal is missing. As someone said yesterday, if the turf were allowed to stay another million years or so it would become coal. 

Nodlaig heats exclusively with turf, which her neighbor delivers to her doorstep now that Charlie is dead. Until he got too fragile to do it, Charlie used to love to foot the turf, or take the partially dried bricks and stack them so that air could circulate. These days the turf is cut by small tractors and shaped into neat logs that are baked dry. Many of the bogs have been decimated by automated techniques. The Bog of Allen, at the extreme edge of which the festival took place, was once an enormous mountain of a bog that extended for close to 400 square miles but is now a shadow of its former noble self. The festival was begun as one very small way to save and pass on the traditional way of harvesting the turf, a touch of the old craft in a pause from mechanical production.

The bogs are also treacherous. People and things disappear in the bog, sinking down fast without leaving a trace of their existence. This has meant that the bogs have preserved historical evidence remarkably well in their completely unoxygenated depths, but they also can hide all manner of nefarious deeds. Falling into a bog is a serious event.

When the teams took their tea break (tea being a euphemism for beer, since bog cutting was as beer-soaked as all activity is in Ireland) I wandered around the festival grounds, which ran to about an acre all told.  I watched the dog shows, four separate categories of dogs--small, medium, large, and mutt--as Sparky, Gypsy, Elizabeth and Rover were walked around the sitting-room-sized ring by their owners. I bought a half-portion of colcannon (potato, onion and cabbage), the only food other than the popcorn and some soft ice cream and candy for sale at the festival. The women prepared the colcannon in huge pots and served it in deep blue plastic bins like the ones the supermarkets pack produce in. I looked at the local jams, but since I had just been given a jar of homemade raspberry preserves I didn't buy any. As I left I noticed, just beyond the edge of the car park, a small area of natural bog. The bog cotton was in full bloom and the field held both the promise of summer and the guarantee of warmth next fall, with none of the bog's treachery visible in the peaceful scene.