The Field Behind The Tractor

Yesterday was my first day of work at the replacement farm I found in Donegal. After my first one cancelled, I signed on with the goat farm in County Cork, but that left me with a lot of time to fill. Soon after, I received an invitation from a couple who keep a smallholding in County Donegal, the far northwest of the country, to fill the full time I needed. I apologized to the goat farm man for being wishy-washy and signed on with the northwesterners. I arrived on Saturday afternoon, after several long hours on a bus from Dublin. Brid (pronounced “breedge”) picked me up and just as quickly dropped me at the house, as she was on her way to Belfast for a hen night. She did take me up to the little apartment I’d be staying in and introduce me to Mair (Meyer/mire), an English wwoofer who had been here a week already. Brid hurried off and I was alone in the bright, quiet room I’d have all to myself for the next three weeks.

At 5:00, Mair took me around to feed the animals. We fed some French hens, being raised for their meat; some more colorful hens, being raised for their eggs; a variety of ducks and a few dappled South African Guinea hens; Polly the very pregnant pig; and Jethro the boar, in a distant enclosure across the field. Also resident but not always on the wwoofer task schedule are Rua, a lovely red sow and the five piglets she had the night before I arrived; four or five grown goats and their four or five offspring; three lambs; some tiny baby chicks in an incubator box; seven other pigs who live in a field down the road; one cat, who is always in the house; and five dogs, who are always everywhere.

At dinner, I met Brid’s partner Conor, a mumbly but energetic fellow who grew up in Belfast at the height of the Troubles. In the kitchen hangs an evocative photo of Conor and his brother as children, standing in the rubble before a burning building. It’s striking, like a bit of photojournalism, not something you imagine your host to point out as a personal photo. I thought he seemed a little mopey until the bells of the church nearby rang and one of the dogs outside started howling in sympathy. “Listen,” Conor said, pausing his fork in the air to silence the conversation, “Hear tha’?” and cracked a lovely little smile.

A couple of hours later, Brid’s father Tom, who lives in the flat adjacent to ours, knocked on the door and offered to take the two of us for a little spin around the area. He drove us up to Bloody Foreland, so named for the red color of the rocks at sundown, not due to some historic battle, and down again, past the few shops and the pub and over to wee Bunbeg Harbor (“Innit cute?” he said.) He told us all kinds of stories--stories about the area, stories about his travels to visit friends in America and stories about his travels with them when they visited Ireland. I wished I had a microphone to record every word.

The following day, Mair and I got a lift from Conor to the trailhead to climb Mt. Errigal, the highest peak in the county at a lofty 752 meters. It looked quite high from the kitchen window, but when it only took us twelve minutes to drive to the base, I realized it was much closer than I’d thought. There wasn’t really a trail at the beginning, just little bits of well-trodden grass here and there which may have been made by human feet or maybe by sheeps’ hooves. In any case, they didn’t make a clear, continuous path, so we were pretty much just finding our way up the hill to the point where it got rockier. The approach was all marshy bog, spongy grassland with long, muddy scars running all through it where the peat had been cut for fuel. Mair was wearing rubber boots (her only other option being sandals), so she wasn’t terribly concerned about where she stepped, whether her footing was solid or would sink her six inches. But I was wearing the hiking shoes I bought new for this trip and didn’t really want to sink to my calves in mud. I was slightly alarmed to come across a foot-sized hole, deeper than I could see; Mair told me a local had warned her to be careful because you might just step in the wrong place and fall through clear to your hip. After some twenty or thirty minutes of very cautious perambulation, the peat thinned and a definite trail was visible in a steep slope of scree--the tables had turned and I was the one with appropriate footwear.

It took us about an hour and a half to clamber the five kilometers from the car park to the top, pausing here and there for photos and water breaks. The view was nice enough, but a steady brown haze prevented us from seeing the ocean a few miles away. We had a little snack and started down again, back over the sliding rocks to the green-brown expanse of peat. I felt like a timid foreigner, watching the local kids run down the hill in leaping bounds, breezing past me. Mair reached the road long before I did and waited patiently as I navigated my way back through the bog, hesitating on the edge of every muddy cut like a dog dancing along a river’s edge trying to figure out how to get across without getting in. We had planned to hitchhike, but Brid showed up just as we were about to start walking and whisked us back to the house in her SUV.

My legs were a bit sore the next morning, but not as sore as I thought they might be. Perhaps that’s because I’ve been walking several miles most days, to get where I’m going or just for the sake of getting out and about. I stretched them while I ate a leisurely breakfast and checked my e-mail. Our first task of the day was to fill in the shallow ditch around the polytunnel and tidy up the yard while Conor tilled a new bit of field for planting. Then we went in for a bit of tea, like they do here, before spending most of the rest of the day planting potatoes in the newly-turned plot below the house. It’s simple enough work, taking the sprouted potatoes from the little shed where they’ve been living, stacked in neat rows in a piece of corrugated steel, and planting them six inches deep and a foot apart. By the time we finished that up, it was time to feed the animals again, though this time we also fed Rua and the pigs across the road--two full-grown sows and five about six months old--who are so eager you have to distract them with a bucket of feed thrown on the ground while you run the other bucket to the trough in the middle of their enclosure to escape being knocked over. I watched.

Around 10:00, Conor honked the horn below our window and we jumped in to head with him down to the pub where he plays the uilleann pipes in regular Monday night sessions. That night they had a guitar, a bouzouki, a fiddle, two bodhrans, a tin whistle, and Conor on the pipes.  It was lovely stuff, but I only took the one picture. There were a lot of people there taking photos or video and I could see the players weren’t terribly pleased, so I put my camera away.

Today was similar to Monday, finishing up the potatoes, hauling wheelbarrows of manure down to the freshly-turned and -raked field and planting cabbage and sprouts to supplement the pigs’ feed in the winter. We did have one bit of excitement at the end of the day, when Brid and Conor were away and the goats came clambering across the creek below the potato field, on the opposite side of the property from where they’re meant to be. We let them graze there for a while, but once they started over into the neighbor’s yard, we had to do something. Mair got a bucket with a little feed in it to lure them into the barn until our hosts returned. We had them nearly there when the van came rolling down the driveway and Conor hopped out, cussing and fuming about the bloody stupid goats, wrangling them back through the gate to their end of the field. Brid decided it was time to stop thinking about it and sell them for sure, all but the two milkable females.

By then it was feeding time and the day was done. In the two days I’ve been here, I’ve found that although this work is much more physically demanding then the bank tellering I was doing before I left, it’s also ten times as rewarding. I feel like I’m doing something good and natural and contributing to something honest, something healthy. I don’t even mind that I won’t be here to see the crop come in, to eat the harvest I’m planting. I spoke to Conor about this after lunch today. He really gets going when he’s talking about the land, about self-sufficiency. He works odd jobs around the area but would much rather work at home, on his land and with his animals. He looked out the window at Polly in her pen and the dogs running in the yard. “We’re not meant to be in office blocks and tha’, y’know. We’re meant to be growing our food and raising animals like, d’y’know? It’s what we’ve been doin’ fer ages, like. I hate having to go and work [elsewhere], I just want to be here, doing this with the land and reading, learning about this stuff, y’know?”  He gestured to the stack of books on the coffee table, books about smallholdings and chicken coops and herbs.

At the moment, I couldn't agree more.