In the bog for the Galway Races

Growing up in north Galway, the week of the races was a seasonal marker in the agrarian calendar. At the end of summer and beginning of harvest, the racing festival brought a heightened urgency to my father’s plan for getting the last of the turf home before we went back to school.  

Our turf bank was low lying, surrounded by grazing land and forest, a clean shallow stream ran through it where cattle, sheep and horses drank, the narrow access boreen, always dust-filled, was wild with summer growth, dark in parts, shaded by tinkling canopies of beech, hazel, sycamore and mountain ash. The gorse, whitethorn, ivy and bramble, entwined with wild blackberry bushes, the golden furze furnished a smoky caramel aroma.    

Patches of bare bog were warm under bare feet, damp and yielding, I loved how the soft black dirt squelched up between my toes, white shirts and brown vests billowed when men straightened their backs, the women wore patterned pinafores, flowery blouses, straw hats and cotton headscarves.  

Lines of soft, wet turf were punctuated with patches of purple heather. It was there we heard the short, sharp squawk of the corncrake and the cuckoo’s twin-syllabled song.  

From May to July the rhododendron bloomed; its roots cool in bog drains, waxy green leaves prolifically sprouting vivid pink flowers, contrasting with the dull clumps of hard brown rushes and curled up ferns that grew near them. For me, those sights, smells and bog-bird sounds contributed to the bucolic attraction, providing welcome distractions from the reality of the back breaking work. 

Nowadays we cut turf near Attymon and even though the man himself grew up in the town, and spent all of his adult life in the corporate, technology world, he has embraced his turbary rights like a native bog man. 

Last year, we hosted two musician friends, Brad and Scott from Denver, Colorado. They stopped for a night on their way to the Galway races. Over the chink of welcoming drinks, I overheard himself giving the bog pep talk - a flourishing rhetoric, proselytising about footing turf and how it was a uniquely Irish tradition and a cultural experience not to be missed. 

The two professional men with the bluegrass picking fingers fell for the lure and next morning, instead of heading to Ballybrit, we all headed to the bog. The sun shone and our visitors delighted in the countryside, taking photographs along the way: brown and grey donkeys leaned obligingly over limestone walls, mares and foals stopped grazing to pose, the thatched cottages, a roofless tower house and derelict two storey farmhouses all looked resplendent in their lenses.   

My preference is to enjoy the solitude of the bog so I set about working my own patch, the opposite end to where himself was giving the orientation. He told our visitors it was best to keep the head down, the back bent, the legs straight and to maintain that position for as long as possible while at the footing. 

We had a tea break after two and a half hours. Neither of our guests could straighten up, but they said nothing, remaining gracious in their obvious misery.    

            ‘A hot shower, two nice steaks in Raftery’s and a few pints tonight and ye’ll be right as rain in the morning,’ the man himself said.  

They were still in agony two days later when I took them to Shannon – two fine and fit young men walking like invalids, instrument cases hanging limply from hunched, aching shoulders, bluegrass picking fingers barely able to pick open their own passports and I, silently sympathetic, (what could I say?), for them, having to endure folded-up, aching limbs on the six-hour flight to Chicago.  

I invited them to the Galway races this year, but they said they would prefer to come in winter, just to watch our home fires burning would be reward enough for the memorable day spent at the ‘peat harvesting,’ as they called it. 

My personality type is more suited to the bog environment which is why I'm there again this year for race week. I can’t even imagine how I would pick my painful way, like a turkey in stubbles, traipsing around Ballybrit in high heels and a gúna deaswith some class of fandangle on my head. No, give me the bog clobber, leave me be in the soft, springy, brown bog earth, at peace in the heathery solitude, near where the swaying white, candyfloss bog cotton grows, thinking of another long ago turf plot, writing while I work.