Valerie Cox
IT was a muddy sort of a day when I went to East Cork last year in search of the family of the late Thady Kelleher. His story had always been in my head, a fascinating, bold adventurer, a showman who held two world and four All-Ireland Ploughing Championships and a man who died too soon.
On the outskirts of his native Banteer there’s a memorial, a larger-than-lifesize statue of Thady with a plough and the words written by John Dillon: ‘From the fields of Duhallow, You bring back the waves of our yesterday, You feed the dreams of our tomorrow, Peaceful and strong is the ploughman’s way.’
I was on my way to meet Thady’s brother, Dennis, not realising that I was walking in on a gathering of ploughmen, a who’s who from the world of ploughing.
Around 25 people crowded into the Kelleher kitchen, where there were platters of sandwiches and home baking, teapots that kept pouring and stories about Jerry Horgan, Murty Fitzgerald, Dan J Mahony, John Joe Egan, Ted Keohane and Mossy Sheehy.
Dermot Flynn said he could remember the first ploughing match that Thady went to in 1958 back in Timoleague when they travelled in an old Prefect car, registration number ZT4905.
From Kanturk in north Cork, Thady won two World Championships and 40 county titles and continued ploughing until his death in 2004.
Sonny Egan, who had hopped across the Kerry border from Abbeydorney, explained to me that ploughing “is a religion. ’tis a tradition and most of all, I suppose, ’tis the enjoyment. To the ordinary man, sitting on a plough looks awful easy, no bother to him because it’s going right, but the man that’s behind it has to adjust it for every different scribe, for an open he also has to have the horses trained that they won’t be walking up on top of the scribes.”
These men have an incredible affinity with their horses.
JJ Delaney spoke of the sheer loneliness of the ploughman and the beauty.
“Ploughing on your own can be a boring old day,” he said. “For an acre ploughed you’d have 11 miles walked with the horses! But there are compen- sations — you see everything, it’s the nearest thing there is to God, the crows are following you, picking, and the seagulls flying very close. You see foxes and badgers and mink and even deer.”
“You’d talk away to the horses all the time, good, bad and indifferent’,” adds Dennis Kelleher. “When the man catches the ropes behind the handles, the horses would know if there was a different man there.”
Over the years ploughing with horses has declined but there are communities where the horse remains king and where they say the tradition is embedded in their spirit and will never die out.
Some of the ploughmen, like Charlie Keegan from Co Wicklow, moved from horses to tractors — he became the first Irishman to win the World Championships in 1964.
His grandson, Michael, wasn’t born then, but people have told him what a massive win it was. There was a bonfire of tyres up on the hill in Enniskerry that burned for two days.
“It was like Ireland winning the World Cup,” says Michael. “I think the only world title Ireland had then was Ronnie Delany in the Olympics!”
As I travelled around the country meeting the ploughing people, I was told several times that if I was going to write a book about ploughing, then I should try it myself.
That came to pass at the local match in Roundwood in Co Wicklow, a wet and windy day when even the horses looked like they’d fancy a hot cuppa and the shelter of an umbrella.
Even in the early morning the entrance to the field was a sea of mud and cars were pushed, shoved and coaxed through the gates and into a field overlooking Roundwood reservoir,
YOU SEE EVERTHING, IT’S THE NEAREST THING THERE IS TO GOD.