Cutting the Peat
Walsh, Michael
TRAVELING in an Irish train the other day, I journeyed for close on an hour through a region of brown—miles and miles of brown bog lighted a little here and there by a streak of yellow furze. Far...
...When his load is complete he wheels it away and another barrow-man takes his place...
...With coat and vest laid aside, and divested of the trappings of the feet, one trips along over the spongy warmth of the peat carpet...
...Who knows what priceless relic of a vanished age may be unearthed at any moment...
...The "slane" is the kind of spade which cuts out the sod of peat in an oblong shape...
...A day on an Irish bog working at the peat, though a hard and unrelenting one, is not without its compensations...
...Who knows what wonders the hidden peat may yet reveal—chambers of gold rivaling those of Egypt of the Pharaohs...
...There are vast areas of the country, particularly in the southeast, where a sod of "turf" is unknown...
...Numberless folk in Ireland, too, believe that peat is the only fuel that is common to every Irish farmhouse...
...Peat is the decayed moss and vegetation of centuries...
...As for the scent of your tobacco blending with that of the meadowsweet...
...Far and near I saw the white sleeves of the turf-cutters and barrow-men, who were laboring at the arduous task of raising the peat...
...Then to bask at full length in the cool heather—could the millionaire on the Riviera sands ask for more...
...One by one the slanesman flings up the sods, which are caught by the barrow-man, who builds them on his vehicle...
...Though coal-mining is one of England's chief industries, there are thousands of people living in the pastoral portions of Britain who have never seen a pithead...
...Some of the first exhibits that greet the visitor as he mounts the main stairway of the British Museum in London are the quaint ornaments and weapons discovered in Irish bogs...
...Dining under such primitive conditions as sitting on the shaft of an upturned barrow and screened off from the sun by a furze bush, a slice of bacon is far more savory to the palate than if it is served in a city grill-room...
...So helping at the turf-cutting in Ireland has something of the glamour of speculation about it...
...Dinner hour on the bog is a welcome respite...
...The truism that one-half of the world does not know how the other half lives is applicable in a lesser degree to countries...
...Some of them were so far off on the waste of brown that they looked little more than huge birds—something like what the French explorer saw^ when he first sighted Easter Island...
...The second man has his barrow full by the time the first man returns...
...Nearly tYtry year strange finds are made in Irish bogs—archaic ornaments or other treasures of our remote ancestors...
...There is the element of exploration, too, about turfcutting...
...Digging down twelve or fourteen feet to its basic layer you are working amongst leaves that were green when the world was young...
...The turfcutter or "slanesman," from long practice attains a wonderful skill in the handling of his implement...
...The freedom of open spaces, the seas of singing heather and, sometimes, the mad warbling of larks, contribute toward a feeling of buoyancy unexperienced elsewhere...
...I have known an Irish farmhouse where a sod of peat is cherished as a curiosity and treasured as much as if it were a strange shell brought home from the South Seas...
...And so on until the whole pit of peat is raised and scattered wide to the weather...
...Nowhere else have I eaten so hearty a meal...
...This is not so...
Vol. 6 • July 1927 • No. 12
