W2F-017 Market Place-0.txt
Born in a Market Place
Bryan MacMahon
I was four years of age when, taken by the hand, I was led down to our newly built house in Market Street. As the name of the street implies, our back gate now opened onto the marketplace itself; standing on the "keepstone" on which the two parts of the backgate were anchored I peeped out through a bolthole perhaps six inches square and found myself gazing into a new and magical world - the world of the market.

To make it more personal, my grandfather, old Pat MacMahon, was weighmaster and was thus in charge of the place. He must have been a tenacious old man, for, refusing to have soldiers of the empire billeted upon his home, he was deprived of his licence as a publican and was later fortunate enough to be appointed to the post he then held.

The marketplace branded me for life. It was thronged with country-folk almost every day of the week. When it wasn't a calf market, it was a pig market or a butter market: on Fridays it was the country produce market - perhaps the most exciting day of all.

The cattle fairs were held in the adjoining streets- directly under my bedroom window as well as in the broad Square. On the occasion of the Old or Big Fairs they spilled into the other streets of the town. There were times when I awoke at daybreak to hear the sound of hooves under my window and to realize that a horse fair was in progress. Donkeys, mules and jennets were also bought and sold on these occasions: these provided a plebeian counterpoint to the three-quarter bred horses destined for the hunting field. The amoniac smell of horse droppings and cowdung lingers in the recesses of my nose to this day.

So I became acquainted with all aspects of country life as seen through the glass of the market. The place had marvellous ancillary goods and produce for sale at its gates and archways. Scollops or thatching withies, eelfry, cockles sold by the fluted pint glass, salmon, beef sold by the yard and hung on a steelyard or "stiller" to be weighed, periwinkles and seagrass.

There were innocent looking churns which looked as if they contained "home" or sour milk for pot-oven baking, but when the cover was removed - this when the whole area was cautiously surveyed - the vessels were seen to be three quarters full of sea trout or, as we called them, "white" trout known in Irish as <&Irish> "liath&/ain"

or grey trout. The net used for killing these fish was called the <&Irish> "Cauteen"

and it had a finer mesh than the net used for salmon - indeed it was sometimes slipped inside the main net for the purpose of holding the smaller fish.

As the Friday produce market drew near I was often deputed to purchase the vegetables for the week or month as the case may be. Buying these in bulk was buying at cost and always proved to work out far cheaper than the price obtaining in the shops. My main commission was to buy a sack of potatoes. I was warned to purchase only those that were balls of flour when boiled - and certainly not those which turned out like bars of soap. An error in this regard was reckoned a calamity. I was seven or eight years of age at the time. I thought of a cunning plan to ensure success on every occasion.

I faced the crowded market. The potato sacks with their owners were ranked against the pillars of the Market sheds. I strolled along the file of vendors, my attention focused on the men from the seashore - this because potatoes from the sandy soil with seaweed as its manure were reputed to be far better for eating than those produced on cutaway bog. As I went I picked up spent matches from the ground.

Back at the first pillar I asked the man if I could have a sample spud. The sack was open and a boiled floury potato offered as example of the finished product. Taking a sample from deep in the sack I marked it as No.1 by sticking a single match into it. Second pillar, the sample was marked by two matches and so on down the line until No.10 which looked weird with ten matches sunk deep into its flesh. This concluded my sampling. I slipped in home then and boiled my store of spuds. Ah, No. 6 was a beauty! I went back to the market and bought No.6 sack.

Not bad for a cute Kerry lad of seven!

I must mention the shawls worn by the farmwives and others: as I recall it the mingling of these coloured garments strengthened the impression that, when one was in the market, one was also in a near-Eastern bazaar.

The wives of the "strong" farmers wore capacious biscuit-coloured woollen shawls each with a delightful hem of tassels and ornamental thread-work in various colours. The quality of the garment - its opulence at times - offered a clue as to how many milch cows were on the husband's farm. Acreage offered a misguided measure, for a farm was then adjudged by such sayings as "He has the grass of sixty cows" or "She took in a fortune of £ 2,000 to that place"." There was also an implicit distinction made between arable and bogland; this distinction was clarified when the grazing of a cow was mentioned. "Turbary" or the right to cut turf on certain defined areas of bogland was also an added bonus relied upon at times of sale, purchase or the making of matches.
As boys we treated those glorious shawls with scant if not impious attention. Stationing ourselves in church directly behind a pair of similarly attired matrons we tied the tassels of adjoining shawls together with "black" or firm knots. When the women parted company at the end of Mass and made to move off in different directions in the church aisle their tugging pulled the shawls off each others'heads, so that the cursory attire beneath was in each case exposed to a mercilous public gaze.
There were other shawls in the marketplace. Fishwomen from Tralee who sold cockles from wicker baskets, wrapping them in clutches of newsprint, wore dark chocolate coloured shawls while our own women from the thatched cottages of the town wore plain black shawls. Swopped over backyard walls to attend the earliest Sunday masses the shawls allowed housewives to attend service anonymously and without the trouble of dressing up. A single eye seen in the upper triangle of the shawl often gave a keen observer a clue as the identity of the woman behind this Irish yashmak.

But for me the most attractive shawl of all was the green and black paisley shawl worn by the women from the other side of the Ferry, that is south of the River Feale and west to the Shannon mouth. "Mahera" we called that area. The old saying "Marry a Mahera woman and you marry Mahera" gave some indication of its clannishness. For me this shawl conveyed an impression mingled of faction fighting, (The Cooleens versus the Mulvihills), hurling - (Ballyduff had already won Kerry's one and only All-Ireland Senior Hurling title) lovely loam, a Round Tower, and the net fisherman of the Cashen estuary with their unusual boats called "ganelows" - probably a corruption of gondola.

All this vanished world, as evoked by the green and black shawl, I experience again on visiting a folk and general museum perched high above the Cashen fishing village, a place familiar to the thousands of visitors to Ballybunion during the summer season.

The marketplace was then shot through with the idealism of freedom; balladsingers, each with his swatch of rebel songs, moved through the throngs. (Later, I wrote many of those ballads for my friend the printer.) The muttering about grabbed farms and rural boycotts were background music to the shouting of castclothes men with their marvellous rhetoric and the land-hungry cry of "The land for the people and the road for the bullock." The accessories for the carts were versatile - the creel or rail for bonnavs, turf or turnips, the seat-and-guards for travelling to town or even to Mass, the low box for carrying sand or gravel while the bare cart itself was capable of being loaded with stable manure or a piled array of sacks of various kinds. The vehicles were locally called Scotchcarts as opposed to the "tumbler from up the country" or even the "slide" used in the Dingle area for bringing down turf saved on the mountain flank.

The colour of the carts was a brilliant orange red with the shaft ends tipped with black: each one had the name of its owner and his townland print-painted in black at the point where the right shaft met the body of the vehicle. I came to know of every townland and of almost every family within thirty miles of my town as a result of perusing these inscriptions. I even made a collection of the townland names, querying the former owner as to where it was situated and more importantly still, the meaning of the Irish version of the name.

The butter market was something I was deeply involved in. As my father's health waned he gave up his law office post and took to buying butter for export, working hand in hand with his brother who was a creamery manager. The butter borer used for testing the country butter took my attention. I learned to insert it in the butter pile, spin it full circle, extract it, smell the butter, bite a chunk of it, roll it round in the mouth as if testing wine, uplift one's judicious eyes to the heavens, spit it out at a certain place in the yard and finally offer a grudged grunt of approval of its merits.

If my grandfather reigned over this colourful kingdom I was often his viceroy. This was when the market was quiet and my grandsire and one of his cronies stole off for a pint. I was then left in charge of the place. I directed horseloads onto the weighbridge, weighed them, issued a ticket and later deducted the tare or weight of the unladen vehicle. I progressed so far in my avocation that I could look at a sack of potatoes and tell almost to the pound how much it weighed. I was then about nine or ten years of age.

There was always a double line of horse rails of turf just inside the market gate - a point which was a fruitful source of interest to me. Sometimes I 'd find a dead hare hanging from the willow fork which kept the creel in place. The hare was for sale, of course, but I 'd ask for, and was given, the tail. It was easy to bargain with the turfsellers on a rainy day as our yard was on the market and the seller sold the turf at a reduced price so as to enable him to go home quickly. I came to know at a glance from which of the many bogs of North Kerry any particular creel of turf came and thus could size up its heating qualities at a glance.

There was one particular turfman who got the better of me in repartee. When I countered his asking a certain price for his load by saying "I could buy a few hundred-weights of good English coal for that" he said quietly, "Do you know what Dean Swift said about that?" "I don't remember," I said. "He advised the Irish people to burn everything English except their coal." After that I always called the man Dean Swift and never after bargained with him about the price of his turf.
