I cannot walk by the front lawn at Trinity College Dublin these days without being reminded of my father. There where, beneath the unmoved gaze of Burke and Goldsmith, the grass grows wild as the traffic passes by, indifferent, and students approve this fodder for bees and as glorious eco-diversity.
My father would despair at the waste. All that grass and not a cow in sight. He had a devotion to good grass, so much so he rented land all over our part of north Roscommon for his cattle. We, his five strong sons, had the job of herding them through miles and miles of winding roads in that part of the county, from rented field to rented field.
Child labour, of course, when it was popular and profitable, if somewhat underappreciated by our father. He was also a county councillor and at a meeting of Roscommon County Council, then discussing the introduction of dog licences – which he opposed – he announced, urbi et orbi, that he “had five sons and a sheepdog and the sheepdog is worth the five sons put together”. Slander, of course, but no dog licence was introduced.
This regular movement of our cattle across the north county gave them a taste for travel and so, they would regularly take the initiative themselves and could be found anywhere. They usually were. Once upon a time, a neighbour, returning from a trip to Dublin, told my father he had met them thumbing in Maynooth. It wasn’t true. Our cattle did not thumb.
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Then he rented land bought by the council as an extension to our graveyard and erected an electric fence to prevent the cattle from visiting the silent dead. The cattle, inevitably, ignored the fence and were soon wandering among the graves.
As my father cleared them out, an outraged woman, tending to the grave of a relative, lambasted him. He was a disgrace and should be ashamed of himself, she said. He retorted that she was the only one complaining. One of the five sons was with him and pleaded, earnestly, for the ground to open. It would, in time.
Both now rest there where our cattle roamed among the dead, untroubled by wilding at Trinity College or anywhere else.
Wilding, from Old English wilde, for “the natural state, uncultivated, untamed, undomesticated, uncontrolled”.
