the lad with the long ears



Irish Donkeys Finlay and Beartlai



There is something special about a donkey. It’s their naughty nature and those adorable ears.

When I first went to Ballinasloe fair in 1987 the price of a donkey was 5 punts. If I had rented a big field and bought them all up I would be a donkey tycoon today! The place was flooded with them. No longer needed to pull the little orange donkey carts full of turf, people had got fed up of looking at them standing about in the field, and loaded them up into their traillers to sell at the fairs. Tragically most of them ended up on the boat to France for salami or in a truck destined for the horse abattoir to feed the lions in Dublin zoo.

They then became quite scarce and it is much rarer now to see ‘the lad with the long ears’ leaning out over a gate. In the Celtic tiger years the price of a donkey reached 1000 euro. Now that common sense has been restored to Ireland they are advertised on the Done Deal trading website for between 50 and 200 euro.

Interestingly donkeys, who seem to be a symbol of rural Ireland, were only introduced during the Napoleonic wars, around 1800, when many horses were bought up to be used in the war and replaced with donkeys imported from Spain.

I met Finlay and Bartlai (above) this week and they are such characters they stole my heart. Finlay was put into his shed lately to await the farrier who was coming to trim his hooves. He managed to levitate and jump out of a small window. That is only one of his many amazing achievements! They really are charming and are meant to bring luck to a farm. I think we will have to go shopping.

We have had our own fair share of luck this week with my husband securing one of those illusive Irish jobs; he will be looking after a fleet of buses in Galway city. It became available because unfortunately the Brazilian mechanic who had worked there for the last few years was unable to renew his work permit. The government has clamped down on issuing permits for non nationals. What is also good is he starts at 7.30 and will therefore avoid sitting in the famous Galway rush hour traffic for hours every day.

I have been working on the young pony every day and he has stopped looking as if he is constantly under threat of attack by a mountain lion. I was very excited when he started to walk around at my shoulder, turning right and left and halting when I stop, even backing up if I walk backwards. But although he turns towards me now from the outside of the ring he refuses to approach me more than a step or two and I have to walk in towards him. So I think that is cheating a bit and I am really joining up with him rather than him with me?

See the donkey sanctuary

high winds and shipwrecks in the wild west

3 year old Connemara cross

There are high winds and a strange, warm, misty rain like the end of the world. It is shipwreck weather, with two Danish sailors rescued off the coast of Cork in gale force winds and a haul of silver worth 127 million found lately off the coast of Galway. We have been cowering inside by the fire most of the week.

I have made some progress with the three year old pony and can now get him out to the arena and back into his stable. I had to divide the arena into two with white electric tape to keep him away from the gate and he is now lunging on both reins and turning when asked. He is also happily wearing the breaking tack and side reins. The first day he felt the girth around him he catapulted his two back heels high into the sky and I thanked the Almighty that I wasn’t on board. The quality and athleticism of the Connemara pony originates from Spanish bloodlines. When the Armada was wrecked of the Irish shore, the white Spanish horses (something like today’s Lipizzaners swam in and bred with the tough little native ponies. A Spanish person also washed up on Island Eddie, the tiny little Island in Kinvara bay and the family became the Corless’ (Originally Carlos).

As he is so wild when you take him out of the stable I decided to try the Monty Roberts technique on him. I you tubed Monty doing his famous ‘join up’.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Dx91mH2voo

The horse is meant to run around and the human chases him. You keep your body square to the horse and keep looking him in the eye. We did that very well. I kept looking, he kept running. Eventually the horse starts to flick his inside ear towards the human. Amazingly this did happen after a few minutes. Then he is meant to slightly turn his head towards you as he goes around. He did as predicted- how easy was this… He should then start licking and chewing, like a foal and drop his head in a sign of submission. I couldn’t believe it when he started doing exactly. At that point you are meant to become passive and turn away at a 45 degree angle and drop your gaze to the ground. He should then walk over to you and start following you around like a dog and you can put the saddle on and jump up with a bond that will never be broken as he is so desperate to be your friend, you can ride him bareback, backwards etc etc and he will willingly do whatever you desire.

Only he didn’t walk over to me. I kept repeating all the steps but when he is meant to ‘join up’ he makes it quite clear that I am an impostor and he does not want to be part of my herd. He stands cemented to the ground shaking and looking terrified. I tried standing and waiting, walking away, putting the rope on him and pulling him towards me. No way José. No join up! I feel flawed. He did the horse bit right, it was the human that couldn’t speak the right language. I had visions of him following me around, with ribbons in his long black mane, bowing and lying down like a circus pony. He obviously has different ideas, mostly about getting back into the field and eating grass with his REAL friends. Maybe trying to join up with the whole world collapsing around us in a hurricane was a bit ambitious; I am trying not to take it personally

autumn berries and cows to the mart

Spindle Tree

Galway County Council has granted planning permission to open the farm as a nature park, with a farm café and indoor playground in the barn. The one objecting neighbour now has two weeks to lodge an appeal and this will take Bord Pleanála, in Dublin, 18 weeks to process.

The Autumn berries are on the hedgerows; holly, red hops, sloes and blackberries. Hazelnuts are ripe and mushrooms are magically appearing in the mornings. I love watching out for the surprising pink berries of a lone windswept Spindle tree on the side of the road, shining out against the backdrop of the blue-grey Burren rock.

The calves have gone to the mart. They made the best price ever with the heaviest at 295 kilos making €895. This would be twice what they normally sell for. It seems whilst the rest of the world is investing in gold we are sinking our spare cash into fat cows; wealth marked by the size of your herd, like the nomadic Maasai people in Kenya. Farmers are too scared to put their money in the banks and the prices at the marts have rocketed.

It is the time of year to stable the three year old pony and start his training. He is another half Connemara, a beautiful yellow dun colour with black mane and tail, about 15.2hh high. I caught him yesterday to put him in for the winter and he was very obliging, letting me put the bridle with the training bit on without any fuss. He also let me brush him all over, which I was delighted about as he hasn’t had much handling, and I cut the end off two long dreadlocks in his mane that had tangled into a rope from three years of freedom.  I was so excited about his good behaviour I decided to try and get him into the arena to start teaching him to lunge. But on seeing his sister, who started roaring at him with separation anxiety, he jumped out over the 5 bar gate back into the yard and I was lucky to persuade him back into the stable as he eyed up every other gate to get back out the field. I will have to move her and the old horse to the other end of the farm and put up a rail over the gate before we try that again.

I eventually got all the ingredients for the ‘delicious seaweed smoothie’

It looked like something that had been bubbling in a witch’s cauldron for a week; I half expected bats wings and cats eyes to float to the surface. However much I blended it did not get smooth. Every mouthful had a tiny, fibrous rubbery bits suspended in a silky mucous. I managed to drink a pint, concentrating on all the lovely vitamins and minerals I was imbibing and not the fact that it resembled a pint of green you know what.
Sorry Prannie, I blame the cook.