Long-lost era of the donkey and cart

It is many years since the Foróige club in Bonniconlon with their group leaders produced a parish history.

There was a memorable account in it of a line of ass and carts wending their way to the mountain bogs. This was something which would mean a lot to the elderly generation who were wont to travel distances by ass and cart in the Ireland of 50-plus years ago.

The scene from the local ballad The Turf Man from Glenree would be reminiscent of this time when the young men of the village loaded up a cart of turf and brought it to the turf market in Ballina. The market was located at the Ham Bridge near Emmett Street.

The tracing of the donkey to the cart was a job in itself. They had the hams and the straddle that would go on along with the winners. They would then harness the cart to the donkey’s traces and then they would put on the belly band and the cart and donkey were as one and were ready for the journey. Each house had a cart house - a rectangular shed with a galvanised roof that would house the cart until it was time to trace it to the donkey and then they would set out on their journey.

There were horses and carts in an earlier era and the horse cart had a wider base than the donkey cart and people used them to carry heavy loads, say a hundred or half hundred weight of meal. The donkey was mainly for turf or wool or they might bring calves or bonhams - that is baby pigs - to the weekly market in Bonniconlon. There was a market there each Tuesday and this was well attended and there was a slaughterhouse in the village, the property of Martin Bernard Durcan. The buyers were from Sligo - they were Cook and McNeily - and they came there from 1914 to 1938 after which John Lawrence of Main Street in the village bought the pigs and sent them to the Bacon Factory in Castlebar for slaughter.

The donkey and cart were used for carrying hay from the field to the garden or the hay shed. This meant loading the hay and building it in a regular shape until it was of a particular height and width and then the ropes were attached to the shafts of the cart and thrown up over the load to secure it to the cart and then it was ready for the road. 

The load of turf was brought home from the bog in the same way. The load was carefully built so that it would not fall out of the cart. The turf was turned out off the bank of turf in the same way and then it was built in a stack at the side of the bog road.

In this way the humble donkey, who bore the infant Jesus, played his part in providing fuel for the household and fodder for the livestock. This writer remembers his grandfather carrying wool in bags to Richard Barrett’s warehouse in Barrett Street in Ballina at a time when farmers in Attymass were self-sufficient.

The men of the village worked with the horse and donkey. Two men in the area would share the horses for ploughing. They would use the horse cart or donkey cart to bring a barrel of water for the cattle and this scribe remembers seeing the horse and cart and the donkey and cart pass by our house each day with the barrel of water for the cattle.

The donkey would be employed on the beach at Enniscrone too. This was in former times when there no amusements and arcades and children had simple fun on their day out to the seaside. The donkey and cart are a thing of the past, a mere museum piece that still brings back happy memories for those people who recall that bygone era.