'Hiring Fairs and Market Places' by May Blair, published by Appletree Press

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

COUNTY FERMANAGH

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

Market Day in Enniskillen was (and still is) Thursday. Long ago the action took place around the market house, with the exception of yarn, butter, eggs and fowl which were sold at the west end of the town. These goods were bought by jobbers who exported the dairy produce through the ports of Newry, Derry and Sligo. Other goods sold included tools and utensils such as spades and riddles, linen, potatoes, beef, hides, meal, plants, salt, hats, flannel, flax, earthenware, fish, fruit and vegetables and the usual produce of the farm. Tolls once collected by the Enniskillen family were later leased to the town Corporation, who charged from a penny to threepence per animal standing on market days, that amount being doubled on fair days.
But all that was about to change. In 1950 James Johnston (known as Jimmy), an enterprising farmer from County Armagh, arrived in Enniskillen and saw enormous possibilities in developing the old Fair Green and the Gaol Square opposite. He purchased the lease on both – rights and all. Fermanagh College now stands on Gaol Square but on the Fair Green Jimmy built a cattle mart and put up pens at a time when cattle marts were practically unheard of outside Belfast. His son Stuart takes up the story:

In those early days the old fairs still ran alongside the marts. (Tempo fair, for instance, continued ’til 1959). There was a bit of dealer resistance in the first instance. They could see that they were going to lose out, but eventually dealers, instead of dealing in the fairs, started dealing in the marts.
In the old days all the buyers didn’t see all the cattle. By coming through the marts all the buyers saw them all. That was a good thing for the farmer. For a long time fairs still operated in the south and west of Ireland. Dealers bought a lot of cattle in the west of Ireland and sold them in our market in Enniskillen (late ’50s and ’60s and ’70s). In those days they came from all over Northern Ireland and even from Scotland and England to buy Fermanagh cattle – west of Ireland cattle too. A few came from Wales. We sold dropped calves, sheep and pigs too. I did the auctioneering myself. Pigs used to come in carts. We used to have maybe a hundred lots. We sold literally thousands of cattle through the old market in Enniskillen. After they were sold they went to various yards around Gaol Square: there was McLaughlin’s yard; Macken’s (where the Horseshoe Bar is now); Alice Shannon’s. She lived in Belmore Street. Her yard backed on to Frith’s Alley, so it was only a matter of walking them down the alley into her yard. She charged threepence from they went in ’til they came out to be loaded onto the train. For perhaps a hundred years they travelled by rail. They actually travelled better by rail. They weren’t going up hills and round corners and the driver jamming on the brakes as happens today. After they were gone the Fire Brigade came out to wash the streets.
Animals still weren’t identifiable at this stage. They were only identified with a scissor cut on the rump. Each dealer had his own mark. There was no real record of them. Selling by auction was purely an economic thing. It suited the farmer. Then later on health regulations came into place, TB testing and tagging of cattle. There is a record now of every animal in Northern Ireland. You know where it is or where it is supposed to be; when it is born and when it dies; movements to markets; everything is recorded. Nowadays of course it is on computer.

In 1994 the Ulster Farmers’ Mart, with Stuart Johnston at its head, moved out of town to the Tempo Road. The new premises are impressive – five sale rings and an exhibition ring for horses. It is today the largest mart in Northern Ireland and farmers come to it from all over the country, anything up to a thousand head of cattle going through the sale ring on a good day. Special and seasonal sales are held on Tuesday, sheep on Wednesday, cattle on Thursday. There are just four horse sales in the year. They are held in March, June, September and a pre-Christmas one held in November or December.
Nearby Tempo was Maguire territory too. According to Pynnar, Bryan Maguire (having pledged allegiance to the Crown) was one of the few Irish lords to hold on to his territory after the Plantation. In 1610 he had ‘2,000 acres called Tempodessell and 500 of which were his brother’s, lately deceased.’ The original grant by James I included permission to hold markets, and a Lammas Fair in August, but apparently these did not take off until the eighteenth century. Up until then the village had been called Milltown because of its corn and tuck mills. By the nineteenth century markets were being held regularly on the twenty-eighth day of the month and had assumed the proportions of fairs. The Tempo Maguires died out around this time, having lost their estates through debts and mortgages. It then passed into other hands and eventually to Sir Charles Langham in 1893.
Sir Charles took many photographs of the village, including some of the May Fair of 1900. But the old village green photographed by Sir Charles is no more. Buildings now occupy the Commons which once saw farmers dealing and arguing over the price of cattle, asses and goats. The backyards of hotels and pubs which once housed hundreds of animals on the evening of the fair are silent as the grave. No more do horses and donkeys go through their paces at the Diamond or farmers exhibit their pigs and goats on the main street. Gone too the Buttermarket and the acre of ground called the Greenyard, where John Higgins made a living by allowing dealers to put their animals on his grass until such times as they were ready to be walked to the nearest station. Local man John McKeagney explains:

Tempo was central to a great hinterland of small farmers, all with a few cattle. The farmer would maybe rear three or four calves and after about a year he’d bring them to Tempo fair and the dealers bought them up. Most of them were sold on the Commons which belonged to nobody. You could take them off there afterwards without paying anything. There was a pound near there too. If an animal went astray or somebody bought it and didn’t pay for it, it was put in there and you had to pay to get it out. At the other end of town there was what was known as the Greenyard. It was used for storing cattle after they were sold. There was a gateman there to look after them and he charged so much a head for every beast as it went out. That’s where the drovers came in. They took over then and drove them to one of the neighbouring railway stations – Fivemiletown, Ballinamallard, Brookeborough. There were ten within a ten-mile radius of Tempo. They galloped them for about three miles. After that they were tired and they were easy walked. They went for fattening to Counties Down, Antrim, Meath and the outskirts of Dublin.
A cattle ‘special’ used to run from Collooney in Sligo to the boat at Belfast docks. It left with only a few wagons, picking up full wagons at most stations on the way. By the time it reached Belfast there were forty wagons with upwards of six hundred cattle on board en route for Scotland and other places.
There was no hiring fair at Tempo but hiring did take place. I remember a man telling me he was minding a calf on the Doon Road while his mother went to buy something, when a man came up and said, ‘Will you come and work for me?’ [He was about twelve at the time.] He said, ‘You will have to ask my mother.’ Eventually his mother came back and the deal was done.
Then there were the eating houses. Adam Nixon’s mother told me she used to make soup and teas on Fair Day. She made enough money to last her ’til the next Fair Day. It was that good. Hundreds and hundreds of people were on that street and they all had to be fed.

The people and the cattle have long since gone. The gabled windows of the church, which once looked down on dealers sorting out their animals in readiness for their walk to the nearest railway station, now stare blankly at the sedate back gardens of terraced houses. Gone too are Arthur McKeagney the blacksmith and his kinsmen James and John, who built carts and jaunting cars at the Diamond, and Adam Nixon who turned his front rooms into an eating house on Fair Day. Neighbouring Clabby never aspired to be anything more than a few houses at a crossroads, one of which was a public house. However two fairs were held there annually throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Fairs were held also in Lisbellaw, Brookeborough, Maguiresbridge and Lisnaskea, again all formerly Maguire territory until that family’s involvement in the 1641 Rebellion, when they forfeited their land to Plantation families such as the Brookes. All these villages except Brookeborough had thrice-yearly fairs dating back to around that time (Brookeborough had four). Those held in Lisbellaw were the smallest of the four. They were established initially for the sale of black cattle, horses, pigs and yarn – also butter every alternate Saturday, but people generally preferred to market their produce in Enniskillen. Lisbellaw’s fairs died out during the nineteenth century, with the exception of the twice-yearly hiring fairs which continued into the 1930s. The hirelings stood in a row at the market house clutching brown paper parcels containing all their worldly possessions. They came mainly from Leitrim and Cavan, where families were large and poverty rife. Farmers walked up and down with sticks under their arms, sizing them up and wondering if they were strong and able. Parents watched from a distance, only coming forward when someone showed an interest in their offspring. The area around Lisbellaw was great country for turf, much of which was loaded on to cots for selling in Enniskillen market. Some travelled of course by ass and cart or ass and creel. The latter were accompanied by children who generally sold two loads per day, walking anything up to twenty miles in the process. For this they got sixpence, which included the price of the turf. Locally made bricks also travelled by cot, and fetched from seven-and-sixpence to thirteen shillings per thousand, depending on quality.

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