Fond memories chart 80 years of farm heritage for John Laffan

Farming stories are passed from generation to generation, around the fire or out walking the fields.

A poignant conversation with her father inspired Dee Laffan to write her father’s fondest memories of growing up on a farm in the village of Castleiney, Co Tipperary and his 40-year career in the Department of Agriculture.

Here, John recounts memories from life on the farm when it was all manual labour, to the arrival of electricity in north Tipperary in 1956, which changed life in general, and on the farm.

The Wash Pond

“Castleiney earned itself the nickname ‘The Wash Pond’, because they used to wash sheep in the river that runs through the village. That river was on our land, it was two fields up from the house, with a stone wall that had been built on both sides of it.

“The water was brought in through that and it was blocked off with a piece of timber and some straw to make a swell overnight. That was used as the sheep dip the next day.

"You had a stick to get the sheep into the water to dip them and then the gate was opened and they ran out. It was important to keep the sheep clean because their wool would get very dirty or have insects in it.”

Milking

“When we were very young, we helped a little bit feeding calves, but that’s about it. My father’s herd were all milked by hand. No machines. We didn’t get electricity until 1956.

"When I would come home from secondary school, I would do my lessons with a flashlight. They would try and milk the cows in the daylight in winter, so before 6pm and in the morning around 8am.

“It takes roughly 10 to 12 minutes to milk a cow by hand, but it depends on how much milk the cow has and how good the milker is. I remember on Sunday evenings when my older brothers Billy and Tommy were gone to a match or somewhere, I would milk with my father.

“We’d milk the 16 cows between the two of us, eight cows each. When you think about it, that’s about an-hour-and-a-half in total to do all the cows between the two of us. It’s not too bad.

“You wouldn’t be chatting or anything, you’d have your head down, watching the cow while you’re doing it. You would talk to them though, trying to keep them steady so they wouldn’t kick you. But they would usually know you and were used to you. We’d feed them also so you can get in under them and milk them while they’re eating. That would keep them steady and quiet.”

Farm life

“In the thatched part of the house, the oldest part, two of the lads slept in a loft over the kitchen that you accessed by a ladder. I slept with my brothers in a room off the kitchen and there was another room which an aunt of ours slept in for many years.

"The youngest lads were in the newer part with my mother and father. That was added around 1933.

“In the evenings, in the summertime, we would go off playing football. The fact that we were in the centre of the village, there were young lads around who would come and play football in our fields. There were often 15 or 20 kids playing football until you got your call to come in at maybe seven or eight o’clock.

“Because we had no electricity, we only had what was called a ‘Tilley Lamp’ – a famous brand of lamp in Ireland that was used and burned kerosene to light. We went to bed early enough in those days before electricity.”

Let there be light

“In 1956, electricity reached north Tipperary and with it came changes to life on the farm and farming. The first thing we got on the farm was a milking machine. They were in existence, of course, before this but there weren’t many places with electricity to use them.

“Tractors came to the farm around the early 1960s and there were very few cars on the road at that time.”

Tuning in…

“I remember we had a radio, it was a really big box. It was in the old, thatched part of the house. A thatched house has really small windows but with really deep sills and that’s where the radio was.

"The kitchen table used to be against the wall below that window. When there were GAA matches on in Thurles, and Tipperary were playing, that window would be opened and there could be between 10 and 20 people sitting outside on the ground listening because they didn’t have a radio.”

Keeping pigs

“We always kept and slaughtered our own pigs for meat. There was a man who I only ever knew as ‘Porky Mahon’ who was a travelling slaughterman and butcher. He would come when you needed him to do the deed, and would put the meat into ‘a stand’.

“It was a big round stand made of wood that was where the pigs were salted and preserved. It would stay there for about six weeks until the brine would come up to the surface. You would take it out that at that stage and my mother had special pillowcases that she used to put two big pieces of pork inside and tie them up.

“The moisture would drip out of that bag while it hung in a shed. From here, they would be taken into the kitchen and hung up on a hook on the ceiling. There would be a whole row of pork pieces hanging there. You’d have to watch yourself while they were hanging for the first few days, so you didn’t get a drip on your head.

“After a few days, the meat would be gone dry and hard. You took it out of the bags and left it hanging there for longer. It would be nicely smoked by the smoke from the fire.

"When we cut it, it was too tough for a knife, so we often used a saw. My mother would put the pieces of meat, or bacon as it was, into pot of water to boil for a few hours before we’d eat them; this was to take the salt out of it.

“Initially, we would have some fresh pork when the animal was killed, but we mostly lived off of bacon then afterwards. We used to eat ‘griskins’ also, these were the steaks or chops of the preserved pork.

“My mother also made black pudding. She had these big dishes that she made it in. She poured the blood in and to this, she added breadcrumbs and some other ingredients. I can’t remember her exact recipe. When it was completed, that was added into the stand for about a week to harden.”

Fair Day

“There weren’t marts as such back then, but there was what was called a ‘Fair Day’ in Templemore. A lot of deals were done by spitting in your hand and shaking the hand of a buyer.

“The ones you didn’t sell, you had to drive home, and they’d be mad for a bit of grass from the ditch on the way back, so it would take a while to get home.

“If you had cattle that were fit for killing, they were transported on the railway to Roscrea to the meat factory and they would be killed there and processed.”

Working for the Department

“The system of testing on farms started in 1955. I got into the Department of Agriculture in 1960. At that time, they knew there weren’t that many cattle in Galway, Clare and into parts of Kerry.

“That’s why they put out checkpoints and that’s what I was doing in the beginning. To catch cattle coming across rivers or crossing into neighbours’ fields.

“From 1960 onwards, they started tagging cattle. When we went to Co Mayo in 1975, most of the cattle weren’t tagged so that was our job. I was stationed in Ballina and you would cover about a 20-mile radius.

“It was a different time and it was so interesting to see the progression of regulation in the department over my 40 years there.”