“AND tell me, is the Turf House still standing?”
Well, I was taken aback by the question. It was back in the summer of 2016 when Paddy Murphy was 96 years old. Though my father was seven years older than Paddy, they were both Bartlemy farmers and great friends in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s.
Paddy could recall verse and chapter of most everything that happened in the parish from when he started school in 1924. Though he had lived for a while with his sister in Curraglass, and later with another sister in Cork city, Paddy never, ever lost touch with his ‘roots’.
He was a great man for ‘tracing’ relations and I found him invaluable as a source of local information, stories, lore and legend. His eyesight was poor, but that never stopped him working on the farm, playing music, cycling and even driving a car for a spell.
We had a school reunion here 20 years ago to mark the centenary of when the ‘old’ school was opened in 1904. Back then, Paddy’s sister Eily O Donnell was the oldest living past pupil - she had started her education in 1914.
From the year before that reunion until he died in December, 2017, I met Paddy many times and he filled many notebook pages for me as he recalled close on a century of life.
Talking about the war years and the ‘Emergency’ from 1939 until 1945 we were when he brought up about the scarcities experienced during those tough years. Food was rationed as were all types of fuel, including petrol and coal.
Like so many at the time, all that was in our farmhouse were two open fireplaces, one in the ‘room’ where my father, his parents and sister, my Auntie Jo, spent most of their time inside the house - the second fireplace was below in the seldom-used sitting room. We never called it ‘the parlour’ like so many others did. It was where the good furniture and good china were on display.
Used at Christmas, for the ‘Station’ Mass, and when visitors from near and far came, the fire was only lit in this room a few times a year. For the living room, timber was the main fuel.
All the ditches near the haggard -around the Boiler House, Orchard and Little Iron Gate fields - had been planted with ash trees way back - maybe a century before. These fine strong trees provided shelter around the haggard and house for humans and animals.
Every autumn, a tree or two would be sawn down with the cross-cut saw and the blocks of ash were only brilliant to burn, aided by a little coal.
Before my parents married in 1952, when a solid fuel fired cooker was installed, all the cooking was done on the open fire with crane, pots, bastable and big black kettle.
Well, I told Paddy Murphy that yes, indeed, the Turf House was still standing - though it was ‘the second coming’!
He told me coal was next nigh impossible to get during the war and many people turned to burning turf to’ stretch’ the timber.
He recalled that around 1944 or maybe 1945, my father ‘got an account’ of good turf for sale somewhere back near the Cork/Kerry/Limerick border - maybe near Mount Collins, he thought. Well, he said, my father got the loan of a lorry from someone in Conna and himself and Paddy Murphy struck off one morning for the ‘turf-country’.
A deal had been done and a price agreed - he thought it might be around £20 for the lorryload of turf. It was well dried so, with two four-prong pikes, they filled the load and were back in Bartlemy by nightfall.
Next day - no tipping lorries back then - they piked out the turf in the haggard at home. It was summer, but Paddy thought they might have covered the sods with some kind of sacking.
That’s when my father ‘built’ the Turf House above the dwelling house by the garden wall just below the grove of trees.
Paddy explained that at that time Ford’s boxes from the factory in the Marina in Cork were used for practically everything - kennels, fowl houses, calf pens, fuel stores, even back kitchens! They were of a sturdy construction, having brought machinery parts across the ocean by boat from America.
My father put up four corner posts of forestry timber with the Fords boxes as roof and wall material. He covered the roof with felt, and sure, it was the grandest, driest place to keep turf, coal and timber.
When we were growing up in the 1960s, we still called it the Turf House, though the use of turf had ceased in our homestead many years previously - it was only a memory, but the name stayed.
We used it for every kind of wood - ash, furze, black and whitethorn, sally, alder and oak. We also used one side as a kind of a store for old things that were of no use but yet were ‘too good’ to throw away - the relics of auld decency!
Now and then, we replaced some of the felt on the roof. Then disaster struck in 1980.
We were building a milking parlour just above the turf house in the grove. A Hymac machine preparing the construction site accidentally hit the roof of the timber structure and down it came like deck of cards.
We were distraught - not so much because of the value or cost of it, but the link with the past.
In fairness, the builders were brilliant. New corner posts were erected and this time a galvanized roof was put up. We put on side sheets of this and that and the other - including old barrels flattened out - even a few old car number plates!
Every autumn, the Turf House would be filled with a winter’s supply of timber, split with an axe, and with heaps of branches chopped with a billhook. By Patrick’s Day ,you’d see the back wall of the house once more.
Then, maybe seven or eight years ago - around the time Paddy Murphy died in his 98th year - Bill, a fuel merchant from Tipperary, called one day - what was he selling? Turf, that’s right, fine hard, black turf.
For old times sake, and because I just love the smell of turf-smoke, I said I’d take a few bags;
If I could choose a place to walk with you
I’d choose the longest road
And it would lead us to a house that no one knew
Bellows by the fire, and the turf smoke rising higher
Than the lark that wings and always sings of you
Ah yes, that song of Sean Dunphy’s reminds me of simpler times when we were younger.
And so, 70 years after the structure was first built, the ‘new’ Turf House was once more a store for those lovely, sundried sods that my father and Paddy Murphy had once brought to Bartlemy in a different era.
We love the turf and, mixed with our own ash, it provides wonderful heat and a great homely atmosphere. During the winter we get a few bags every fortnight.
They say time and tide wait for no man and, of course, timber posts cannot last forever either. A bad storm last year saw two of the 1980 corner posts lurch a little off centre - as if leaning towards the village of Bartlemy!
I knew what was coming and the wild, windy weather of recent weeks completed the demolition process of our second Turf House.
We got all the fuel out before we were left with a twisted, gnarled heap of timber, rusty iron sheets and a huge number of memories.
So, please God, in a few weeks, when the weather picks up, we’ll clear off the site and the plan is that the Third Coming of the Turf House will again be ready to accept deliveries of turf and timber by autumn time.
Read More
Meeting pals from St Colman’s Class of 1974, half a century on More in this section
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Andrew Mitrovica
Mort Laitner
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Rami G Khouri
Nikkei Editorial
visit website
