On the Turf: Schooner Days MCLXXI (1171)

by C. H. J. Snider

Irish Interlude—6

Ara-na-Naomh, Eire, 1954

THIS turf trade to Aran of the Saints, which keeps the little blacksailed Connemara hookers alive, is much like a trade which vanished, from Toronto 30 years ago, after a run of over two centuries.

One of the first things Governor Simcoe did when he founded our city in 1793 was to build the "York stone boat" Accounts for the nails and oakum and other materials used for her appear in Robertson's Landmarks of Toronto.

This began a long line of small craft which supplied wood fuel for the metropolis up to about 1880, as well as all the stone, sand and gravel required for the hundreds of miles of roads, sidewalks and pavements, the foundations and walls of buildings, and the cribs, wharves and breakwaters of a great port and a great city, up into the present century.

We called these supplying vessels "stonehookers"—partly because they hooked the stone from the lake bed by long-handled rakes. They were little schooners, many of them scow-built centreboarders; entirely different from the real round-built deep keel hookers of the west coast of Ireland.

STONE, STONE, STONE

Stone is so plentiful in Aran you can't give it away. With their innumerable stone fences for the tiny fields, the three islands look from afar like three petrified honeycombs. There seems to be nothing but stone here. A stony beach, a stone pier, stone beacons and bollards, stony roads, fences of stone, fortresses of mortarless stone, larger than Fort Henry at Kingston or the Toronto Armouries, and older than the Flood. Houses are stone, too, often to the rooftree—though some are thatched, with stone overlaid on the straw to keep the thatch from blowing away. Dirt, plain garden dirt, is priceless.

Yet fuchsias flourish in Aran. Not merely as potted plants, but as bushes and shrubs which turn into trees 20 feet high if not pruned and cut back. Palmettos flourish, too, and golden gorse and butter yellow broom; and calla lilies, great beds of them, hedges of them; and grass; and potatoes; and, in sheltered gullies, a few pines and sycamores. All these must have soil, though soil is so precious you could sell it by the ounce.

MAKING LAND

See that islander toiling up the steep with a backload of kelp? He has already dried the stems and stalks, like withered limbs, and tied them in bundles, to send to France to make nylons. The kelp on his back is the slippery rubbery fronds and tubercles, full of plancton and sea slime and iodine. More kelp is in the portside pannier of the patient donkey he pushes ahead of him.The starboard pannier is full of sand, also from the seashore.

Ass and man halt at a breast-high stone wall. Over the top goes the man's backload, the contents of the starboard pannier, the full of the port one. All this is to be spread thin over the little square the man's grand-sire cleared on the hillside.

He cleared it by piling a million loose stones in the breast-high walls, with big holes left to let the gales blow through instead of blowing the walls down. These take the place of the blooming English hedges of the English countryside, or the wire fencing of Canada.

There was a meaning and scampering of sheep when the man dumped the kelp and the sand over the fence. He climbs over himself and finds six ewes and seven lambs—one pair of lucky twins—huddled in the farthest corner of this 1/4-acre "field." They have nibbled it clean, poor things, and done their best to fertilize it.

He opens a gap in the far wall, and whistles. The sheep know their master's note, and scamper through the gap into the next 1/4-acre, where new grass has been growing for them. This explains the myriad tiny stonewalled pastures.

FAMINE MEMORIES

Grandson closes the gap and spreads the mixture of sand and seaweed over the area grandfather cleared of stone and turned into garden soil by infinite patience of man and beast.

God knows, and will remember, how many backloads and baskets of wet weed and gleaming sand went into the making of the little plot. Perhaps it was a hundred years ago, when thousands of hungry Irish had to choose between dying with grass in their mouths or emigrating to America, the years of the great potato famine.

Grandson has that in mind as he prepares the soil for the 1954 crop, You may notice that his potato hills are arranged in continuous narrow banks, with foot-deep furrows or trenches separating them. This is to drain the hills and keep the seed from rotting in the ground if the season proves wet. That was the scourge which brought about the great potato famine of the Hunger Years.

THE HOOKERS

This is a long traverse from the Connemara turf trade. But Aran being so stony there is not enough natural fuel in the three islands to boil three kettles at the same time. Wood is so scarce that twigs and stems are hoarded in field walls for ingathering. There are no bogs, and therefore no peat, Ireland's national fuel.

Eire is developing her peat re-sources scientifically now. Bog-bailiffs adjudicate on whether a peat bog is fit for further cropping, and to what extent, and the state sends out power driven machinery for cutting and strips the proper areas by electricity, somewhat like coal mining. There is, of course much individual turf cutting as well. The bog is the Irish farmers bushlot. The stripped areas are developed for grazing.

Turf for market is now trucked long distances to little ports and shipped to where it is needed most. Aran cooks every meal on imported turf, supplemented by fuel oil, parffine, and the scraps and branches of trees and vegetation. That is where the Connemara hooker comes in handy as a carrier for short, runs. When she gets a couple of bullocks or a few pigs or sheep as return freight she does well.