School: Baile Feárnach
- Location:
- Ballyfarnagh, Co. Mayo
- Teacher: Seán Ó Laoghaire
Archival Reference
The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0099, Page 013
Image and data © National Folklore Collection, UCD.
See copyright details.
DownloadOpen data
Available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
- XML School: Baile Feárnach
- XML Page 013
- XML “Na Fataí”
Note: We will soon deprecate our XML Application Programming Interface and a new, comprehensive JSON API will be made available. Keep an eye on our website for further details.
On this page
- Potatoes are the most useful crop a farmer has in the year. A farmer with a large family has to grow a big crop as they depend on them for food. He gives potatoes to his stock also especially to pigs.
Father prepares the land in Spring for the sowing of potatoes. In this place ridges are usually used for this crop. There are two ways of making ridges. One is made four feet wide and those are what we call "flour slit ridges". The other ridge is three feet wide. It is called the "three slit ridge". Every line that is ploughed is called a "scribe". Then three or four of those scribes go to make a ridge. A few farmers around here make drills. They say it is easier work and they get better potatoes. The dykes are ploughed with an iron plough and the clay is shovelled on to the top of the ridges.
In olden times a lot of wooden ploughs were used in this place. My father says his father used bullocks to draw the plough. All the spades used here are manufactured in Galway city.
The seed for the potatoes is got from "slits". Most potatoes have "eyes" and it is from those the shoots come. The women of the house do most of the "slitting". The useless parts of the potatoes left over are called the "leauns".
When the time comes for sowing, the(continues on next page)
- Collector
- Annie K. Flynn
- Gender
- Female
- Address
- Cloonlavis Upper, Co. Mayo
