Going just a little bit mad to celebrate Midsummer’s Day

Country Living with Francis Farragher

The more we try to apply the brakes on the passing of time, the more frenzied and fast-moving its passage seems to be. It really does seem like yesterday when we were in the middle of snowstorm Emma and while dreary Winter and Spring of 2017/2018 did have a slow feel to it, Mid-Summer’s Day seems to have crept up on us with the speed and stealth of a prowling cheetah on the lookout for food.

Our recent spell of good weather has also seemed to quicken the pace of time as those of us out the country with a bit a land to bother, rushed and race to get first cuts of hay or silage, as if a dry day would never appear again. Many of those on the silage trail have worked the dawn ‘til dusk shifts during the peak of the Summer days and this time of year that all adds up to a 17-hour shift, probably not to be recommended in the context of health and safety.

The peak of Mid-Summer in my neck-of-the-woods was St. John’s Day, the feast of St. John the Baptist, on June 24, when one of the traditional Abbeyknockmoy fairs would take place, inevitably involving a sheep run to the village with the best of the Spring lambs put on display for the visiting jobbers to throw their eyes over before making a bid that was always too low and that was always rejected. Eventually though if the market was anyways middling, a sale would be completed, a couple of drinks would follow in the local hostelry (minerals for the young ones like myself), and the main task of the day would have finished by dinnertime.

The sheep gathering always followed on from a late night on the 23rd when the traditional bonfires were lit after efforts were made to get our hands on throw-away tyres from the local garage. Environmental concerns of any sort quite simply weren’t on the agenda and there was nothing to beat tyres in terms of spiralling yellow-blue flames and plumes of black shooting up into the atmosphere.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.