Harry Browne

My Mother's Mother came from Co. Wicklow and her brother had the small family farm so that each year, when we were old enough we were packed off to the country for the summer holidays. Her brother, Tom Quinn was married to Judy Burke and they were childless. They lived on a farm in the Wicklow mountains in a town land called Corragh some four or five miles above Hollywood. This farm was extremely remote at that time. There was no electricity, no gas, no running water, no bathroom or any of the facilities without which we could not function nowadays.

But what a paradise for children! There was no effective supervision on us from morning to night, we could go anywhere and talk to anybody we met. Our Granduncle owned “Eighty Eight acres from the river to the sky” to use his own claim. On that farm there were sheep which inhabited the higher hills roundabout, a pig which was slaughtered towards the end of the year, when we had returned home, and cows which had to be brought into the byre for milking morning and night.

All cooking was done on an open fire, pots and pans were suspended over the fire on a “Crane”, an iron bar which was hinged to the wall over the fire and hooks attached which hung down towards it. The pots and pans had a hooped handle which hung on the hooks. There was a kettle of water continually on the simmer at all times. Frying was done on a frying pan with a similar hooped handle and care had to be exercised if one did not want to lose the food on the pan into the fire. Baking was done in a pot oven, a simple three legged pot hung from the crane with the cake of soda bread inside and the lid covered with hot coals from the fire. The taste of that hot soda bread with loads of homemade butter still lingers in my memory some sixty years later.

Butter was made in a churn by pumping up and down a type of paddle in the new milk. Eventually the milk would split into butter and buttermilk which was a cure for multiple ills. I remember Judy drinking a pannikin of buttermilk after churning and saying “God bless me and the cow”