Páraic Póil hand-harvests his hay in the fields he made, by hand, out of rough and stony Aran Island land, writes Lorna Siggins
Páraic Póil bakes the best brown bread and fries the finest fresh mackerel between the Burren and Boston. That's not the fresh air talking, although we've absorbed a fair bit of it on the passage in to the Aran island of Inis Oírr. Having served us up copious grub just minutes after our unfamiliar faces appeared at his window, he pours us out mugs of thick, black, freshly brewed tea.
And he asks few questions, as we eat and chat and one of his sons engages in a friendly wrestle with a pal on the livingroom floor. After days of rain, the weather forecast is vaguely promising. Póil hopes he may get some of the last of a season's very late cut of hay.
Normally, it would have been done by June - if at all, for the mild climate on Árainn supports grass growth almost all year round, and cattle don't have to be wintered indoors. Where hay is required, it is often imported from the midlands now.
However, Póil is a man with meadow to cut, and sustenance is very important for the task ahead. He puts down his mug, steps up to clear the dishes, and we pile into his blue Ford tractor. More accurately, his daughters Bébhinn (11) and Saoirse (six) clamber into the cab with their dad and their young friend, Eileen. We take standing room only in the bucket at the back.
We're with his sons, Micheál (14) and Réamoinn (12), their pal, Fiachra, and the scythe. "Ah, the speal!" the boys exclaim excitedly. Eyeing the sharp reaping blade with a little less enthusiasm, we've just grabbed a tight grip on the vehicle when we are elevated, suspended and find ourselves moving briskly down the hill.
There would be a short stop en route to the land at the Rian, Póil had explained beforehand. His friend, Gerry, would be coming along. Gerry, a Tyrone man, says he came to Inis Oírr for peace and found passion. After passion, he says he has found peace. When he and his wife separated, he was determined not to quit the island totally for fear of losing contact with his two children. Póil, a soulmate in every sense, offered him the use of a one-roomed cottage he had built on his land.
We're "ag dul suas arís" at a 75-degree angle, and I am trying to calculate whether the front wheels and engine will counter the weight of us all at the rear. It's only when we reach the Rian that I notice we had a dog for company also. "A lady in Connemara advertised him on the local radio," Póil says. "He's called Roger. A man of the same name died recently on the island, and I felt we needed another Roger for the summer." We climb over the gate into a series of eight fields, which Gerry proudly declares to be the best pasture on the island. Looking over the narrow lane, we can see why. "I used a crowbar and a lump hammer and it took me seven to eight years," Póil says simply. Anyone who knows the Aran island landscape knows what that entails - unearthing boulder after boulder and tackling virtual menhirs of limestone to create cultivable land out of rough and stony ground.
One only has to look at the walls for further evidence of this. High limestone windbreaks, they are, and Póil explains how turning the slabs upright to create what he calls a "claidh shingle" makes for better shelter. He built neat steps in each wall, and filled the crevices with small stones.
"I covered the land with sand, the sand with topsoil, planted grass seed, and waited. It was a lot of work, but it is very satisfying. And we had no JCB and no rock breakers then." He took 80 baskets of seaweed from the shore to cultivate potatoes, he says. "Eighty baskets," he repeats. Thinking about it later, a passage from Tim Robinson's Stones of Aran springs to mind. Recounting how the islanders created land by covering rock with sand and seaweed over generations, and how seaweed ash or "kelp" was a lucrative cash crop for several centuries, Robinson noticed that the shorelines of Inis Oírr's south coast bore names testifying to the hardship. Weed gathering at low tide was never easy. "Aran's back was bent to the rule of the moon, for lifetime after lifetime," Robinson wrote.
Póil takes his scythe and starts working the grass, looking out on the island's lighthouse and an indigo sea extending to the Cliffs of Moher. We pad across, knee-deep in meadow, as he explains how he found stones and shells in one of the fields which suggested that there had been inhabitants thousands of years before.
"I planted trees and put a wall around them, to mark the spot," he says. As Roger sniffs and scratches and roots for rats along the wall, his master sharpens the speal on all sides.
He moves in a series of circles, he explains, switching between Irish and English for the right words. With two neat strokes for each cut, there is only the sound of the wind and lowing cattle in the distance, and the swish of the blade in the grass.
This is good clean pasture - few thistles, and an abundance of bluebells, several types of dandelion, cow parsley, dog daisies, sea pinks and bloody crane's bill. Póil sharpens the blade again, before showing me how to employ the speal. "Because it's late and the weather has been so bad, the wind and the rain have flattened it, and it makes it harder to cut," he says.
In his grandfather's time, the speal was made of wood with a straight handle, and one had to bend down low and strain one's back. "It's much easier now with the curved steel handle," he says. "Really?" we wonder, feeling every stroke on the shoulders. "Move with the wind," he advises, and this seems to work.
I've tried a scythe before, and know how disarmingly easy it looks. "If you were here in this field on your own, you wouldn't be long struggling," he laughs, and quotes the proverb "namhaid í an cheird gan í a fhoglaim", or "a trade is the enemy until it is learned".
Poil learned young, as one of nine children, born to Micheál and May Pói, who also farmed on Inis Oírr. "There were 10 of us," he says, "but one brother died before I was born." He left school after primary, learning life skills with his hands - building, farming, rearing a family with his wife, Anita, and opening an organic restaurant half a mile from the harbour, named An Mhaighdhean Mara.
He grows most of the vegetables for the restaurant. For a time, the couple offered seaweed baths in their home. "You feel so terrific after it, and visitors loved it," he says. "Then the price of fuel went up and it meant we would have had to charge €20. We didn't think people would want to pay that."
Gerry and several of the children are watching us from the cottage roof. Póil turns the cut grass over with his blade to create swarths, which he will leave to dry and season for 24 hours before turning and shaking again.
"Three more good days and we can make hay cocks, and we'll have it saved," he says. "That's where the children will help."
He loves using the scythe, relishes manual work and the silence that it brings. The pause to sharpen the blade again, the spit of the hands, is interrupted by a skylark. "There wouldn't be too many saving hay like this, when it isn't needed, but there's plenty of scythes around as a speal is always handy for nettles," he says.
He remembers snow and frost only once on Inis Oírr, when he was a small boy. The mild climate makes for healthier, cleaner animals and finer meat, he believes. "I used to kill my cattle until the regulations came in that stopped us doing that," he says.
"Now I send them to Galway and the meat comes back. I'd kill four or five a year for the restaurant and for customers on Inis Meain and Inis Mór. You should come back and taste one of my steaks."
It has been a rough enough summer for farming, and a rougher season for an island very dependent on tourism. Inis Oírr is served daily by ferry from Rossaveal, Co Galway, and by air from Indreabhan, but the shortest sea link is with Doolin, Co Clare. "Many days the boats didn't leave Doolin at all."
He was fortunate in that he hosted a team of sculptors engaged in a two-week symposium with Áras Éanna, Inis Oírr's arts centre, in July. Entitled Umha-Aois, it involved experimenting with Bronze Age casting techniques. A replica of a Bronze Age horn housed in the National Museum of Ireland was cast during the second week.
It will take a full day to cut this field, and we have a ferry to catch. There's something missing, and we're not sure at first what it is: no horseflies! No midge bites! Maybe there's some value to the fresh weather after all.
"You can see Kerry on a clear day," Gerry says, as he shows us the house that Póil built - complete with heating, running water and a sofa that doubles as a bath. "And on a really quiet night," he whispers, "you can even hear the dogs barking in Boston . . ."
Series concluded
