School: Cill Átha (roll number 9298)

Location:
Killagh More, Co. Galway
Teacher:
Mrs Pender
Browse
The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0045, Page 0132

Archival Reference

The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0045, Page 0132

Image and data © National Folklore Collection, UCD.

See copyright details.

Download

Open data

Available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

  1. XML School: Cill Átha
  2. XML Page 0132
  3. XML “Churning”

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

  1. (continued from previous page)
    the butter. My mother and sisters do the churning. We have a large wooden dish for making up the butter in. First the dish and patters are washed with boiling water and soap to prevent the butter from sticking to them. The butter is taken out of the churn and put into the dish. It is washed with cold water several times to wash the butter-milk out of it. Then is is pressed between the patters to remove the buttermilk and water. When its free from both buttermilk and water it is salted and put into a large bowl.
    The buttermilk is used for making bread. We also give some of it to the pigs through their food. Long ago when the people churned on May Day they would put a "caoráin gad" round the churn to prevent the good people from bringing the butter. They would also put a pinch of salt and they would put a coal under it to prevent their neighbours from bringing the butter. They would not give new milk to their neighbours on May Day for fear that the neighbours would bring the butter.
    Transcribed by a member of our volunteer transcription project.
    Topics
    1. activities
      1. economic activities
        1. agriculture (~2,659)
          1. butter and churns (~3,280)
    Language
    English
    Collector
    Mary Clarke
    Gender
    Male
    Age
    14