Travels in Wicklow, West Kerry and Connemara. John Millington Synge

‘If I didn’t ask it how would I ever get it? The lambs is good lambs, and if you buy them now you’ll get home nice and easy in time to have your dinner in comfort, and if you don’t buy them you’ll be here the whole day sweating in the heat and dust, and maybe not please yourself in the end of all.’

      Then they began looking at the lambs again, talking of the cleanness of their skin and the quality of the wool, and making many extravagant remarks in their praise or against them. As I turned away I heard the loud clap of one hand into another, which always marks the conclusion of a bargain.

      A little further on I found a farmer I knew standing before a public house, looking radiant with delight. ‘It’s a fine fair, Mister,’ he said, ‘and I’m after selling the lambs I had here a month ago and no one would look at them. Then I took them to Rathdrum and Wicklow, getting up at three in the morning and driving them in the creel, and it all for nothing. But I’m shut of them now, and it’s not too bad a price I’ve got either. I’m after driving the lambs outside the customs’ (the boundary where the fair tolls are paid) ‘and I’m waiting now for my money.’ While we were talking, a cry of warning was raised, ‘Mind yourselves below; there’s a drift of sheep coming down the road.’ Then a couple of men and dogs appeared, trying to drive a score of sheep that someone had purchased, out of the village, between the countless flocks that were standing already on either side of the way. This task is peculiarly difficult. Boys and men collect round the flock that is to be driven out and try to force the animals down the narrow passage that is left in the middle of the road. It hardly ever happens, however, that they get through without carrying off a few of someone else’s sheep, or losing some of their own, which have to be restored, or looked for afterwards.

      The flock was driven by as well as could be managed, and a moment later an old man came up to us, and asked if we had seen a ewe passing from the west. ‘A sheep is after passing,’ said the farmer I was talking to, ‘but it was not one of yours, for it was too wilful; it was a mountain sheep.’ Sometimes animals are astray in this way for a considerable time – it is not unusual to meet a man the day after a fair wandering through the country, asking after a lost heifer, or ewe – but they are always well marked and are found in the end.

      When I reached the green above the village I found the curious throng one always meets in these fairs, made up of wild mountain squatters, gentlemen farmers, jobbers and herds. At one corner of the green there was the usual camp of tinkers, where a swarm of children had been left to play among the carts while the men and women wandered through the fair selling cans or donkeys. Many odd types of tramps and beggars had come together also, and were loitering about in the hope of getting some chance job, or of finding some one who would stand them a drink. Once or twice a stir was made by some unruly ram or bull, but in these smaller fairs there seldom is much real excitement till the evening, when the bad whisky that is too freely drunk begins to be felt.

      When I had spoken to one or two men that I wished to see, I sat down near a bridge at the end of the green, between a tinker who was mending a can and a herd who was minding some sheep that had not been sold. The herd spoke to me with some pride of his skill in dipping sheep to keep them from the fly, and other matters connected with his work. ‘Let you not be talking,’ said the tinker, when he paused for a moment. ‘You’ve been after sheep since you were that height’ (holding his hand a little over the ground) ‘and yet you’re nowhere in the world beside the herds that do be reared beyond on the mountains. Those men are a wonder, for I’m told they can tell a lamb from their own ewes before it is marked, and that when they have five hundred sheep on the hills – five hundred is a big number – they don’t need to count them or reckon them at all, but they just walk here and there where they are, and if one is gone away they’ll miss it from the rest.’

      Then a woman came up and spoke to the tinker and they went down the road together into the village. ‘That man is a great villain,’ said the herd, when he was out of hearing. ‘One time he and his woman went up to a priest in the hills and asked him would he wed them for half a sovereign, I think it was. The priest said it was a poor price, but he’d wed them surely if they’d make him a tin can along with it. “I will, faith,” said the tinker, “and I’ll come back when it’s done.” They went off then, and in three weeks they came back, and they asked the priest a second time would he wed them. “Have you the tin can?” said the priest. “We have not,” said the tinker. “We had it made at the fall of night, but the ass gave it a kick this morning the way it isn’t fit for you at all.” “Go on now,” says the priest. “It’s a pair of rogues and schemers you are, and I won’t wed you at all.” They went off then, and they were never married to this day.’

      As I went up again through the village a great sale of old clothing was going on from booths at each side of the road, and further on boots were set out for sale on boards laid across the tops of barrels, a very usual counter. In another place old women were selling quantities of damaged fruit, kippered herrings and an extraordinary collection of old ropes and iron. In front of a public house a ballad-singer was singing a song in the middle of a crowd of people. As far as I could hear it, the words ran like this:

      As we came down from Wicklow

      With our bundle of switches;

      As we came down from Wicklow,

      Oh! what did we see?

      As we came to the city

      We saw maidens pretty,

      And we called out to ask them to buy our heath-broom.