In the preparation of this booklet I found it interesting to read the various articles by past pupils. They have made many references to the life style which they grew up with, and it hard to believe that so many changes have taken place in our country, influenced by the massive changes in the world of the 21st Century.

Take for example the requirement of pupils to bring turf to the school for heating. Do any of the children of the current school going generation know what turf is, where it came from, and the labour involved in bringing it to fuel status. Many are the happy days I spent with my mother and father in the bog, cutting, spreading, turning, footing, reckling, and bringing it home in the horse and cart.

The joy in preparing sweet cans of tea, (the sweet can having been secured from one of the shops in Balla when they had sold all the can sweets), big hunks of lovely homemade bread, country butter, home cured bacon, cooked and sliced cold, and some delicious rhubarb/apple pie cake (this was different to tart, in that the hunks of rhubarb/apple were mixed into the dough, sugar was added and it was baked just like an ordinary cake in the oven which was placed on a tripod, with coals of fire under it and also on the lid). Oh the joy of smelling that delicious cake and eating it.

Haymaking - no such thing nowadays. It’s all silage, in pits, or in round or square bales, or if the weather permits, you might be lucky enough to save hay which would be put into round or square bales.

Do you remember folks when we had to go out with the rakes and hayforks and shake all the swarths out, and pick out the docks or any other weeds, turn it, (I won’t say how many times, because the weather dictated this), put it into lapcocks, sometimes breastcocks, and finally into field cocks, and last but by no means least into one big haystack in the haggard, or into a hayshed if you were lucky enough to have one?

Tillage crops - Where have they all gone? No one locally grows potatoes, carrots, turnips or cabbage.

We are all so busy in a world that has every modern convenience, supposed to give us extra time to ourselves,

But alas we have been conned folks, because, now everything in the world contrives to leave us with less time to spend with our friends, less time to talk and pass on to our children all the wonderful things we did in our generation, and whilst I am not a stick-in- the-mud, and I love the broad spectrum of information that is available to us at the press of a switch either by Television or Computer, I still think that we are slowly losing our identity, and that we should hold on to certain parts and ways of doing things, which we had long ago.

Our entry into the EEC brought a lot of wealth to the country, but by giving us this wealth, we in turn had to pay a high price.

We all rush out to the shops and buy them, I’m guilty as everyone else. Do we know where they come from? What weed killers or sprays were used? At least in our days we had to get out and do the weeding ourselves, or they could be removed by scuffling which was a type of plough with a small blade on the left and right side, which when pulled by a horse would lift up the weeds and loosen the clay.Placeholder image The ‘mouling’ plough was then used to shape up the drills to support the new soft stalks. Spraying against blight was another overnight, and then melting washing soda with boiling water and pouring this into the barrel, which turned the mixture into the most glorious colour blue. This was then sprayed onto the potato stalks and gave total protection against blight, but it had to be repeated every three weeks until the end of the growing period. Now it is done by tractor sprayers and prepared powder and of course it’s only on large commercial farms that this happens.

Increased productivity in every aspect of farming from stock numbers to quantity produced per acre in all crops, has increased the amount of pollutants, now being spread on the land i.e., slurry and fertilizers. Laws and regulations have been laid down in order to receive grants, from the EEC, but some of them cannot be implemented by the smaller farmers because the cost is so prohibitive, and farmers are now even being paid a pension to leave farming, thereby leaving small fragmented farms, to be sold, special job. Placeholder imageIt involved filling the 45-gallon tank with water and soaking a special amount of bluestone (relevant to the acreage to be sprayed), and these are all amalgamated into one big farm and we lose forever the old and treasured methods of farming, and indeed we also lose out on nature, i.e., birds and wildlife. I am not against progress, and we do have to move forward at all times, but we never had so much pollution of lakes and waterways. Would any of us now chance to drink from the lovely spring wells from which so many buckets of sparkling water were drawn by each and every one of us in our young days! Probably not, because some Health Inspector would tell us it was a health hazard.

Forgive me folks if I sound negative, honestly I am not, but I hate to see species of wildlife disappearing due to the way we are treating the environment. I feel very sad that our lovely summer visitor the corncrake can no longer be heard in this part of the country, and indeed in very few places in Ireland.

I have wonderful memories of my young days, I worked hard but loved every minute of it. I got a great appreciation of nature and wildlife, and I hope that I will have the health (and Martina says all my ‘faculties’) and pleasure of passing on this knowledge to future generations.

By Julie Loftus, Rushill
Reunion Booklet 2002