To the An Sionnach Rua

On Sunday May 15th we hopped on the train in Dublin and headed west. We changed trains a couple of times, and on the final train into Ballina we found a small hole in the curtain to the engineer's compartment. We could peek through the hole and see where we were going!

How often do you ever get to look out the front of a train??

The beautiful sunny weather continued! We were amazed by the clear blue skies and blessed our lucky fortune. Let's hope it continues, eh?

Once we arrived in Ballina we picked some groceries and headed south to Bunnifinglas. Remember to bike on the left side of the road!!

And we saw peat! Loads and loads of peat! It was all laid out in neat rows that were obviously machine made, but where did it come from? We'll surely find out...

After only about seven miles we made our destination:

The An Sionnach Rua (Gaelic for The Red Fox)!

It's a wee pub and accommodation, and is home until about the end of June! 

The welcoming committee:

And here's Gerry...

Pouring us our welcoming pints of Guinness! Gerry is very friendly, and always quick with a smile and laugh. He's had the pub for about eleven years, and pretty much runs it by himself most of the time. 

And here's our second round - Smithwicks:

Except Melinda was too fast for the camera!!

Some nights in the pub are busier than others, and Sunday night is Family Night. We noticed the wide-eyed lad, and laughed as his eyes got wider when Gerry brought him over a Coke! The kid was agog with anticipation, and gleefully grabbed his beverage and shuffled it off to the table with his folks. 

And, of course, there's a peat fire in the fireplace!

We've come to really enjoy the scent of a peat fire. While biking through Scotland we smelled a lot of peat smoke, as people there also use dried peat for heating their homes. When we smelled it here in Ireland we instantly felt cozy, comfortable and at home. It has an earthy-smoky scent, and if you haven't ever experienced it we highly recommend it. You can get a good idea of how it smells if you take a sniff of Laophraoig Scottish whisky. It's a very smoky whisky, and they smoke it with peat!

Well, one of the reasons that we came to this wee corner of Ireland is to do another "help exchange," where we trade our volunteer efforts for accommodation. We are helping Gerry with many tasks- mainly cleaning/sorting out the overly cluttered shed, tidying up the pub, and turning and stacking turf.  

On our very first day here he took us to the bog!

Here are the long rows of peat - in Ireland they call it turf - laid out in the sun to dry. Working the turf isn't terribly hard, but it is time consuming. 

Here's the process: 

- An excavator digs out the turf from the bog, digging down 15 or 20 feet, however far down the excavator can reach. The turf is dumped in a "hopper" trailer pulled by a tractor. 

- The tractor driver pulls the hopper to the prescribed location (individuals own or rent a patch of bog). The driver opens the hopper and drives along while the turf is extruded out the back of the hopper through ten chutes. 

- Someone walks along and scores the turf laterally into log-lengths. As it dries the score lines crack and the turf pieces - now called sods - separate. 

- After a week or two of drying, the sods are rolled over on their sides and allowed to dry another week or so. Turning is best done with a rake...

- The next step is to "make up" the sods into stacks of fourteen pieces. Ten pieces are stacked cross-wise five high, and four more leaned into the stack. This method allows for very good airflow, and if the weather is good the sods are left for six or seven weeks to dry and season. The making-up is the hardest part of the process - it requires a lot of bending down!

- After the sods are fully dried they're loaded on a trailer and delivered. A typical household will burn about six hopper-loads of turf.

 It takes quite a few trips to the bog to manage ones turf. Bob figures it takes about the same amount of time to manage six hoppers of turf as it did for him to cut 2-1/2 cords of firewood every winter. Cutting firewood was much more strenuous, but the heat output is a bit better than turf. 

Here's Melinda arriving at the bog for a few hours of therapeutic turf-turning...

Notice she's wearing wellies! It's about a three mile bike to the local bog, and for the sake of preventing bog-foot she rides in wellies! 

Since we arrived we've been to the bog quite a few times. Gerry has a bog, and we turned and made up his six hoppers of turf. Another fellow, called Podraic Mac, makes a living selling turf and we helped him to work a few of his eighty-five hoppers! Sean is another regular at the pub, and we helped him on his bogs, too. It's customary for folks to help others on their bogs - one day we were eight-strong making up turf on Mac's bog, and it goes fast with so many hands. The making up is the hard part, because of all the bending over, but it's good work and it's great to be outside in the good weather, and if there are others out there if feels like a community. 

Typically when someone comes into the pub someone will ask "Have you been to the bog today?" And that starts a conversation about the weather, how well the turf is drying, which parts of the bog are drying better than others, and so on. A while later another regular comes through the door, and they're greeted with "Have you been to the bog today?" and the cycle starts again. It's heart-warming to see such a community, and the pub is sort of the centre of it. 

We noticed that if we help someone in the bog they express their appreciation in the pub. So... We help Mac and Mac treats us to a pint. We help Sean and Sean treats us to a pint. Pretty good system!

Turns out that this year the weather has been very good for the turf, and people are "bringing home the turf" in June - whereas in a more normal year the turf isn't brought in until August, September, or even October! 

We love the bog! Folks think we're a bit daft for that... :-)

We'll fill you on more of our adventures in Ireland in the next few blog pages.