Jimmy Jack Ferry and Ann Mc Fadden
had a family of twelve children on a small farm of land outside
the village of Falcarragh, in Donegal, Ireland.
The house in which my father and
his brother's and sisters were born is on a small hill. To its
north is a stream that flows from just outside Falcarragh, under
a bridge, then by our house, and alongside the path that leads
to the lower fields. Beyond the fields, there are the sand dunes,
the strand, then the North Atlantic Ocean.
|
Map of NW Donegal.
For a sense of scale - it is five miles from Inishbeg
to Tory Island. the almost enclosed body of water is Ballyness
Bay. |
House
The house is two storeys, though
the second story is not full height. In the house are eight
rooms, three on the 2nd storey, used now as storage spaces -
but bedrooms full of children when my dad was a boy. Walking
in the front door of the house, which is on the south facing
side, one comes in to the Kitchen, the largest room of the house.
It has a fireplace at left, a steep stairway on the east side,
to the north is a small room with sink and press, the scullery.
To the left of the Kitchen, behind the fireplace, is a bedroom,
which has recently been converted to a bathroom with shower.
It had been the 'master' bedroom before, mostly because it was
behind the fireplace and kept its heat, during the night.
|
Bridget, Hughie's widow, with Breege,
in the Kitchen of the house at Forth. Bridget continued
to do most of her cooking in the fireplace, though Breege
used the bottled gas range by preference. The black pot
at the lower left of hearth still makes the best tea.
When John Duffy was living here, in the 60's, he narrowed
the firebox, to make the fireplace draft stronger,though
it is still not perfect.
After her prayers, and before she went
to bed each nights, Aunt Bridget would bank some pieces
of turf in the ashes below the hob. In the morning they
would still be glowing and she would raise the fire up
from those embers..
|
To the right of the Kitchen is
a room that was called the Dining Room. It could also have been
a parlor, as it had a fireplace with a fancier mantle than the
one in the Kitchen.In this room are kept the most important
shrines, and the pictures that family sent home over the years.
Beside this room is a small bedroom
|
| Laura Lee on left with Aunt Bridget.
In 1993, Laura Lee was studying at Trinity College, Dublin
and would come down to farm to visit Aunt Bridget and Breege.
The room they are in is the dining room - only used on such
special occasions. The door on the left leads to a small
bedroom. This fireplace is on the east facing wall of the
house. |
The house is built of stone, walls
almost two feet thick. It is plastered inside and out. The outside
was replastered when I lived there in 1970 - they used a portland
cement mixture, and then some specialist came along for the
final application - "pebble dashing" - which was applied
on the facade to give it a nice look. The roof was renewed in
the late sixties with what Uncle Hughie called 'English' slate
- a more finely cut slate than the stone from nearby slate quarry.
This imported stone replaced a rough slate roof, made with local
stone, in which the slate was laid in a bed of cement and held
in place with a nail.
|
| Jimmy Kelly and Jimmy Ferry, 2003,
standing in Clover Field. The house is above them, beyond
McGinley's field. The chicken house is to right, and the
byre, in the sun glare, to left. Visible at the rear of
the house is the scullery door. |
I don't know when the house was built. In
the 1880's there was a local war between the landlord, Sir
Wybrant Olphert, and his tenants. He had many people in Drumnatinney
evicted, and had their houses tumbled down. This event received
worldwide publicity, people from far and wide, came to Falcarragh
to decry the cruelty. But I never heard any stories about
this from my father, uncles or aunts, even though it happened
when their parents, Jimmyjack and Ann, were grownups, and
just before the births of their first children. Maybe the
house was built before, and survived the evictions/razings,
maybe it was built after the land war.
Uncle Hughie told me the house was fixed up
in 1912, when the McGinleys, whose home shared the west wall,
moved down the road to a new house, and the McGinley house
was taken down. The west gable of the our house was finished,
the exterior was plastered, windows and roof replaced and
maybe the little vestibule was added to the front.
|
JPF looking out
second floor window, 2003. |
The floors are flagstone on the
first floor, wood over joists on the second floor. The windows
in the house have been replaced a few times - in 1970, I watched
the Falcarragh carpenter measure, then a month later after he
built new ones in his shop, replace the windows facing south
in Kitchen and Dining Room.
In the late ninety-sixties, public
piped water was brought into the house (to a sink in the scullery).
Up until that time, we drew water from two springs - one about
100 yards down the lane from the house emerging below the parc
na clover, and another up at the dividing wall between the clover
field and the seanparc. Uncle Hughie preferred the higher source
for drinking water, as the lower one was used by the cattle
- I would walk them from the byre to their pasture in the lower
fields, and they'd stop to get a drink, and foul the water at
the lower spring.
In 1972, electric service was brought
in to the farmhouse. In 1970, when I lived on the farm, we used
kerosene lamps for lighting. Bridget always kept a small lamp
alight as shrine for the Sacred Heart of Jesus. She had a couple
of larger lamps, one with a double wick which was good for reading.
Hughie had a hurricane lamp for use outside, or if we needed
to check on the animals in the byre. He also had a transistor
radio then, and we would listen to BBC and the RTE for news.
For toiletting, I really don't know what Aunt Bridget and Uncle
Hughie did. Since piped water was then coming into house, I
tried to convince Hughie to put in a toilet. He thought that
was barbaric - "Why would anyone want to do that inside,
do ye think were like the animals." I built an outhouse
for myself out behind the chicken house that had a bucket below
a seat made from two boards. There were chamberpots for nightime.
Breege finally modernized the house with hot/cold water, toilet
and shower during the 1990's.
The house was dry, and near the
fire, it was warm. It still is that way, though I would have
liked to have seen it when it was full of children and young
people - maybe after my Aunt Annie was born in 1910, and before
the older ones, Mary and Jack, had left home.
Structures
There are two outbuildings near
the house.
The byre is a long low building
with three sections. To the east, which is top in the photo,
is the section used as byre - cow shelter. It is a room with
a door four-foot high- even some of the cows have to duck to
get in. It is about 12 by 18 feet, with half-stalls for five,
(six in a pinch) cows. Running down the center of the concrete
floor is a drain, about six inches deep by 12 inches wide. Iron
rings on the walls have a tether to keep the cattle's head close
to the wall, and their working end generally pointed at this
drain. My chore each morning after milking was done, and I had
taken the cows down to pasture, was to clean out the byre -
with a shovel, toss the manure out an eastern window onto the
midden. Once a month or so when the midden pile had grown too
high for me to get any more out that little window, I'd cart
the manure from the midden down to the fields to spread as fertilizer
The middle section of the building is the stable. It was here
that the horse would have been kept. During my time Uncle Hughie
had no horse, but there were dogs, and they slept on hay in
the stable. Next along was a double opening door, and this was
the 'shed', in which tools were stored, and a small tractor
that worked once in awhile.
Behind the house is a building,
rather tall for its size, it has a full-height door. Dimensions
are about 8 by 10. During my time, it was the chicken coop.
Aunt Bridget tended them, two or three dozen. - she kept them
for eggs. During the day, they would wander all over. In the
evening, she would call them, enticing them with potatoes and
cornmeal, to gather them all back into the coop and onto their
roosts. For Sunday dinners, she would pick one that wasn't laying
eggs any more, and slaughter it in the barn. Monday mornings,
I'd have some feathers mixed in with the manure I'd shovel out.
She would boil the old hen for a few hours, then we'd chew on
it awhile for exercise at dinner.
Adjacent to the chicken coop is
the 'kitchen garden' leading to the banks of the Falcarragh
stream just out of the picture to the left. Uncle Hughie told
me that when his brother, Jack, came home from the Great War
(WW I), he threw away all the medals that he had been given
in recognition of his efforts "for the Crown" He threw
them out the back door and into the garden. Though I searched
carefully, I never found them, and I suspect that Hughie told
me the tale to motivate my efforts weeding the cabbages that
Bridget was growing that summer in the kitchen garden.
Fields
The
aerial view of the house shows the short wall that Aunt Bridget
had built in front of it in the 1990s. She was bedeviled by
some neighbor farmers that had to use the right of way between
the house and byre in order to get to their own fields which
were down the lane. In times past a farmer walking by with a
couple of milk cows would have been an occasion to pass the
time. Nowadays with large Massey-Ferguson tractors and herds
of 25 cattle, with all the dirt and noise just 5 feet from her
front door, the right of way space has become a contentious
issue without solution. I believe that Aunt Bridget commisioned
this aerial photograph to use in her suit to have the right-of-way
revoked.
On the bottom right of the photo
is the driveway Danny Charlie McGinley built from the road up
to his house. Neil McGinley had given him the space from his
field, which starts in lower right of photo. The Doherty's byre
- now garage - can be seen at bottom left, the edge of their
house beyond that.
This picture would have been taken
in the evening of a late spring day, as the shadows of the buildings
are falling to the northeast, so the sun would have been over
Errigal in the southwest. It is possible to make out the track
of a tractor cutting from the gate leading from lane into clover
field. It swings across clover field to far side. It would be
the way a tractor might go to get to the Seanparc, which is
out of the photo to the right. It would have been someone in
a hurry, for the custom is to keep tractors to the edges when
not tilling, so the grass in the field is not pressed down.
McGinley's field is darker and spotted - I think the darkness
indicates deeper grass - no cows eating it. The spotty lighter
colored vegetation (taller, because it is casting a shadow)
is probably thistles, or ben weeds- some are growing in the
clover field also.
If you look closely in the left
end of McGinley's field (in the larger aerial view above) you
can see a "fairy ring" - a circle of grass where there
are no (well, just a couple) weeds growing. Uncle Hughie told
me such a ring was where the 'wee people' danced at night, and
I wasn't to go there or look there after nightfall. Another
explanation for the fairy rings - I discovered after becoming
more or less expert at cow flop - was 'overfertilized' circles.
Sometimes, a farmer will tether a calf to a rope in a field.
The movement of the calf is limited to a circle swept by the
radius of the tether he's on. Over a couple weeks the calf eats
all the grass in that circle, and the circle inherits the manure.
The next year and maybe for a couple years, the chemistry of
the soil in the circle is different enough from surroundings
that it effects the plants growing within it - and you get a
noticeable circle. Triumphantly, I told Hughie the 'real' explanation,
but he said he would be more impressed if I were to find out
"why it is that the wee people pick those places alone
for their ceildh."
Out of view at top of photo are
most of the fields that belong to the farm - the meadow fiield
on the north side of lane. Then at the end of the lane, the
three lower fields - one is named the Parc na Luhar - Hughie
told me that the translation is 'the field that gives joy to
the beholder'.
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Uncle Dan at left and Uncle Hughie
harvesting oats in the clover field in early 1960s. The
dog behind them was either "Beaut", "Fly"
or "Spot", the only names any of the Ferry dogs
had.
The cattle are grazing in the Seanparc. Muckish mountain
is six miles to the south. The barbed wire fence was added
to the moss covered stone field walls to keep the cows from
getting into the tilled fields. Photo taken by JJF. |
Then, the Parc n'iestra (spelling?),
which is 'middle field'. I don't remember the name for the farthest
field. Beyond is the 'Srana Garden' and the Ray River. There
is one other small field, tt is just possible to see the tip
of the 'Wee Garden' at top of clover field; the Seanparc is
off to the right of the clover field, out of view.
I'm uncertain of my memory about
the total size of the fields - I know Uncle Hughie told me "12"
but I'm not sure if he said 'acres' or 'hectares'. Hectares
are a much larger unit. The best fields are the searnparc, the
wee garden and the clover, but the other fields are good as
long as the drains are kept clear. The drains are ditches along
the borders of the fields that take off excess water, which
then flows into the Ray River. If the drains are not maintained,
the lower fields especially, remain sodden, and rushes and sedges
thrive and grass does not. Cattle pasturing then have less to
eat, and are subject to some infection of their hooves for all
the wet.
Turf and Grazing
Along
with the fields, our family had grazing rights on Muckish Mountain.
Jimmyjack would keep sheep on the south flank of the mountain
in the winter. Those grazing rights were held in common with
other neighbors in the environs of Forth, Newtown and Drumnatinney.
Sometime during Uncle Hughie's time, that common ground was
sold. The government made a forest planting of evergreen trees
there.Hughie liked to tend cattle, but never cared much for
sheep.
We do have the commons of turbary
(rights to take enough turf for
family needs) in Ardsbeg - a bog over beyond Gortahork. After
Hughie died, Aunt Bridget and Breege would pay a man to cut
turf there, season it, and haul it to the farm. Of late, it
is more economical for Breege to just buy a load of turf from
commercial retailers. But she still retains the use rights of
the bog.
Place
There are many ways to name this
place: Forth is the name of the townland in
which it is sutuated, but also it can be claimed to be in the
townland of Drumnatinney. In papers I have
that Uncle Jimmy filled out, he identifies his birthplace as
'Fourth, Ballyconnell, Falcarragh'. Uncle Jack's
papers usually say, 'Ballyconnell, Falcarragh'.
In one of his papers, it says he is from Crossroads
(this is an older name for what is now the village of Falcarragh.)
My Dad referred to it as Forth, and always
addressed letter that way. The local histories say it is not
an old-time name, they think it may even be an English word
- this group of houses were furthest 'forth' of Ballyconnell
toward the ocean.
On archeological maps, the location
on which the house sits, is identified as the site of ancient
enclosure - a ringfort, or fortified group of dwellings surrounded
by a defensive fence or wall. But the Irish word for that kind
of place is 'raith', so the name Forth
does not come from those times. There are so few families at
Forth now, that only the local people who are
older or hold a sense of history call it 'Forth'.
More people are aware of the townland of Drumnatinney
and so call the neighborhood. Some of the Drumnatinneans think
that we are in the next townland over, and say we're in Newtown.
In Irish the name for home and
the name for town is Baile - pronounce it 'bally'.
Half the villages in Ireland, if they aren't named after a Church,
"Cille" as in Kilkenny, Kilmacrennan, Kilpatrick,
Kildare, then they are named Ballysomething.
I'm not sure but I think the english word 'townland' got attached
to any cluster of houses and families in the country - everybody
would have called where they lived their home - 'an bhaile',
and that would have included their house, their neighbors, their
neighbor's houses, and their fields. An older Irish designation
for the particular place and people that were yours, may have
been 'clachan'. Whatever, the designations
have a certain fluidity about them - places as well as their
names are as much a matter to whom you belong as to where you
are.
To send mail to my cousin Breege
who presently lives in the house, mail it either to Breege Ferry,
Forth, Falcarragh, County Donegal, Ireland - or Breege Ferry,
Drumnatinney, Falcarragh, County Donegal, Ireland.... Both addresses
will work. Don't do, as I did, and she corrected to me, send
it to Breege, Forth, Drumnatinney, Falcarragh - the place can
be in both townlands, but not at the same time.
Drumnatinney ('the
back of the fire') is an old name. It has been used for this
locale since pre-Christian times, and figures in local mythological
events in the stories of Balor of the Evil Eye, McAneeley, Lughnasa
and 'the cow that never ran out of milk'. But that was long
before my Dad's time.
Ballyconnell is
the name of the estate to which this land belonged - for 300
years, the lords of the estate were the Olphert family. The
whole region of Donegal (fort of the foreigners) was the land
of the Connell's - Tirconnell as the time of Christianity approached.
So, Ballyconnell would be an olden name.I have
heard these environs spoken about as Raymunterdoney.
This is an ecclesial name:. it had been in the parish of Raymunterdoney
(the Church of Ireland's designation).Some old documents - the
British Census of 1851, Griffith's tax valuations from the 19th
century- place us in the Barony of Kilmacrennan.
Among
Gaetacht, it is part of the parish of Cloghaneely, Tulllaghabegely
and Oilean Toraigh. I like this name for it
best. Go stand at the highest spot in
the field called Seanparc.
In this field, the season I lived with Uncle Hughie, we harvested
oats. He would sit down for a pipeful and a rest, and with crooked
finger point, "Thon, Joey, just past the Ray church, the
field with the corn lodged from last night's wi nd..."
a story would unfold. From this vantage in the Seanparc, everything
that it is possible to see, even to the islands out to sea,
is Cloghaneely, and all the rest of the world
is out of sight. McAneeley's Stone - that's the translation
of Cloghaneeley - the bloodied hard stuff out of which the people
from here were made.
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