Hiring Fairs and Market Places - County Armagh [part * of 8]

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extracted from the Appletree Press title Hiring Fairs and Market Places by May Blair.

COUNTY ARMAGH

Then I took it into my head that I wanted to see more of the world. I left Hughes’s and went to what they called the Big Fair Day in November. That was the time the workers all came home for a week. They had their money and everything was rosy. That was a great week altogether. There was dancing and fiddle playing and singing – my house tonight, yours tomorrow night, somebody else’s the next night. Word got round. It didn’t matter if you had nailed boots. It was only a cement floor. Nobody looked for any big feed or anything like that. You ate soda bread, butter and jam. Everybody did their party piece. All they were out for was the night’s fun. Then there was the flax pullin’ nights. My sister Maggie got word that there was a flax pullin’ night comin’ off near our place at home and the two of us set off and cycled the whole way up till Newtownhamilton – home to Camlyball in fact. You had to have a light on your bicycle but I had only a glimmer and comin’ up under the trees there along the Dundalk Road this policeman shone his light out, so we jumped off.
He says, ‘Where’s your lights?’* I was cheeky so I said, ‘Behind me liver!’
‘Well,’ he says, ‘there’s one sure thing, they’ll not be behind your liver when I’m done with you!’
And for God’s Sake he asked us our name and where we were going. We told him and he, by the way, wrote it down but there was never a word about it. That’s the only time ever I was in trouble. Anyway we came all the way home to Camlyball, saw my mother, and any of them that was goin’ to the dance was ready. We took our bicycles and there was a near-cut across the fields and we carried our bicycles till we got to the road. When we arrived at the house sure for goodness sake the dance was in full bloom. We danced all night and had supper an’ all and went straight from there back to Keady when the dance was over. It must have been about seven o’clock in the mornin’ when we got back. The church bells were ringin’. Maggie went to the place where she was workin’ and I went on by myself out into the country and got me good clothes off, never went to bed or anything.
I’ll never forget that day. There was a big churnin’ to be done and at that time it was a big high churn and a staff and plunge, and for goodness sake sure I was hardly fit to lift it up and down to get the job done. I worked all day and I’m tellin’ you I was glad to see bed that night after all that.
Of the other places that Annie hired two stand out in her memory. One was R.W. Bell’s of Hillsborough, where she spent several happy years and during which time she met Patrick (Paddy) Taggart (featured in the ‘Down’ chapter) whom she was later to marry. The other was a place at Newry where she got the fright of her life. To reach her room above the dairy she had to go up a stepladder and through a trapdoor. The window of the dairy was invariably kept open to keep the milk cool, which worried Annie as no one had got around to putting a wire guard on it. One night she woke with a start to the sound of dishes rattling below. She lay still, terrified, and eventually the noise stopped. The next morning, she discovered that a cat had come through the window in the night and helped itself to some milk. The noise was made by the movement of the dish as the cat licked it clean.
In the south of the county lay at least half a dozen places which had fairs or markets at some stage in their history. Crossmaglen was the largest, though it was described in 1830 as being ‘of late origin’. Nevertheless, it had at that time a weekly market for the sale of butter, eggs, fowl, grain, and grass seed; also good fairs which survived until the next century. Fair Day usually ended with fighting and the settlement of old scores, when many received beatings which they ‘never got over till released from their earthly sufferings.’ Crossmaglen had an extra large Market Square which contained a small market house and a weighbridge. Ballsmill, a few miles away, had just one fair in 1888, held on 26 May. It is likely that it had more at an earlier date.
Jonesborough had fairs which ceased about 1865. When they ceased in Jonesborough they improved in Forkhill and the number held each year increased from four to twelve. Fairs were also held in Cullyhanna, Ballybot and Camlough. They did not survive beyond the 1860s in Cullyhanna. Those in Ballybot increased from four to twelve in the nineteenth century but died out early in the twentieth. The most successful of the three were in Camlough, where they were held regularly on the third Monday of every month for nearly one hundred years. The October fair was known locally as the Foal Fair and the main feature was the sale of mares and foals. When a foal was sold it walked, accompanied by its mother, to the farm of its new owner. Mostly the mare returned immediately to her original owner to have another foal the next year, but just occasionally a farmer bought mare and foal, which stopped both from fretting.
In the centre of the county lay the towns of Richhill, Hamiltonsbawn and Markethill, all of which were once thriving towns in their own right but were eventually overshadowed by the larger towns nearby. Richhill was founded by the Richardson family in the seventeenth century, when it was reported to have the best market in the county for linen cloth. In the eighteenth century it was said that ‘the inhabitants of Armagh came to Richhill to purchase their wearing apparel and victualling’. By 1838 it was reduced to a small market dealing in yarn only and by 1888 that too had gone and the couple of hundred weavers left in the area were acquiring their yarn from other markets such as Portadown and Tandragee. The decline in the market was blamed on the Quaker community which boycotted the town after one of their members was killed in a riot there.
Hamiltonsbawn was founded by a John Hamilton in 1619. The same built a strong bawn and settled twenty-six British families at that time, but the bawn was destroyed by the troops of Phelim O’Neill in 1641 and the property eventually came into the possession of the Achesons, one of whom was raised to the peerage as Lord Gosford. Both Hamiltonsbawn and Richhill had fairs and markets. Richhill had never more than four fairs and Hamiltonsbawn had just two, held on 26 May and 26 November. According to G.H. Bassett in 1888 ‘good farming country surrounds Hamiltonsbawn, and to this fact is due the maintenance of old-established fairs twice a year, and hiring fairs, when nearly all the villages of the county situated near large towns have lost these much-prized helps to prosperity.’ They continued until the outbreak of World War II.
Hamiltonsbawn was also where the action took place in Tom O’Reilly’s poem, ‘The Hiring of Dan Magee’.

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