In those days there wasn’t any mode of travel as is today. A horse was used, and the bicycle was the main way of travellin’. If you managed to get to the stage where you were able to buy a new Raleigh bicycle at £5 you were looked upon as exceptional.
      Tommy Ovens, Brookeborough

I was livin’ in Belleek in those days. Derrygonnelly would have been seven Irish miles away; seven long miles. [an ‘Irish mile’ was roughly 1 ¼ statute miles] Life was hard and practically everything you ate with the exception of tea and sugar was produced on the farm. You had your own pig which you put in the salt and you grew turnip and cabbage. If you were so inclined there was plenty of game; and trout, bream, salmon and perch in the Erne. My father was a keen fisherman and fond of having a shot. But then again you waited at certain times of the year ’til the cattle were sold to get your shoes. And if the cattle didn’t sell you waited ’til the next fair. It was quite common for children to go to school bare-footed even sometimes in the month of March. When I was ready to leave Drumbad Public Elementary School my teacher recommended me to Charlie Parke to serve my time to the grocery trade. In those days shopkeepers were farmers as well. That meant there were byres to be cleaned out. You had to do your share of that. If it was a good day and the creamery was over and things were quiet on a summer day the village practically closed down. Anybody that was able-bodied went to help with the hay. We had no machinery in those times. You had a machine for cutting the hay but after that it was all forks and rakes.
            Fair days in Derrygonnelly were great occasions; but the hiring fair was the highlight of the year – the two hiring fairs. Money was scarce and labour the other way round. They came from the mountain areas with probably a small farm and two or three cows; and you had in those days a large family.
            Hiring day affected me in that on that day there were no meals cooked in the kitchen although where I worked was known as one of the best food houses in Derrygonnelly. None of the shop boys sat down to eat a meal (on hiring day). You slipped into the kitchen. The kettle or teapot was sitting on the range. There was plenty of homemade bread, butter, jam. There was no time to make dinner or sit down for a meal. You could slip into the kitchen for five minutes or so and go back in an hour if you felt hungry again. I lived in; no payment of course, I was what was known as servin’ my time. But you got your keep and you were comfortably bedded and well fed. That lasted three years. Even when you had your time served it was very difficult to get a job. You were quite willing to stop on another year whether you got wages or not.
            Fair Day meant extra business. We opened the shop at eight o’clock. Cattle (mostly Shorthorns) would have been already coming in along the street. People were movin’ about. Some of them had been up very early and walked the cattle to the fair. Dealers sometimes met them outside the town and tried to buy them before they reached the Fair Green. Mostly though, dealing went on all morning with them slapping hands, dividing, arguing about the luck-penny, spitting and finally slapping hands again before a deal was finalised. The animals would then be driven into someone’s yard. Some would have been sold for dairying, some for breeding or fattening. Others would go for mince or sausages. Quite a number would be headed for Enniskillen station on the first stage of their journey to Scotland.
            If it was the spring of the year you put certain stuff out in front of the shop – netting wire, shafts, hay rakes, pitch forks. You wheeled out two or three or four different types of seed corn on a hand truck; grass seed too. You rolled down the tops of the bags so that people could have a look; scythes, scythe blades and scythe stones too. Then in winter it was lamps, brushes, buckets – whatever was a-usin’.
            Then at a certain time of year farmers brought in their eggs to the shop. The woman of the house packed them in a basket. Now these eggs – it was a barter business. No money changed hands. You counted the eggs and the woman got her groceries. If she got ten shillings worth of groceries and she had ten shillings worth of eggs that was the deal completed. If you owed her a shilling or two you gave it to her and vice versa. We had one man came in with a donkey and brought twenty dozen eggs with him. He came from Rossmore in the direction of Boho. He and his wife packed ten dozen in each creel and they were packed in hay. Two people had to lift these on and off at the one time. They were hung on what I understand was a madrig. A madrig was [a saddle] made of straw and on top of that there was a piece of wood that fitted on top of the donkey’s back. They strapped that on. On each side there was a wooden peg about an inch or an inch and a half in diameter. (The same type was used for taking the turf out of the bogs.) When we had the eggs counted we packed them in straw in a three hundred- or six hundred case and sent them to Enniskillen by horse and cart about twice a week. They went to egg packers who shipped them across the water to wherever the market was at that particular time.

Extracted from the Appletree Press title Hiring Fairs and Market Places by May Blair.
Forthcoming extracts regarding County Fermanagh:
Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 |