Down the generations, locals long had a beef with our bull!

I find it hard to imagine that Tom Scanlan is dead over 30 years.

Tom was 75 when he died suddenly in June, 1994 - at the time I was 37. Though close on four decades separated us in age, we were great friends. Similarly, he’d been a close friend and neighbour of both my father and my father-in-law.

All three were born between 1910 and 1920 - a tumultuous decade in the history of this country. Not having known my father, I loved to hear Tom and Jimmy Meade speak of him and his ability and skill as an ‘inventor’, woodworker, electrician, beekeeper, and greyhound breeder.

In the 1970s, Bartlemy Macra na Feirme were researching the history of the parish and Tom Scanlan was a fount of knowledge on history, folklore, traditions and genealogy. He imparted so much information to me, showing me paths, wells and forts, remains of castles and old cemeteries.

He told me so much, and yet I felt I’d only got the ‘tip of the iceberg’ as regards our locality. I still miss him and for years after his death, when someone put a ‘historical query’ to me, without thinking, I’d answer “I’ll ask Tom about that”.

After he died, I wrote a little tribute to Tom. In 1994, there was no internet or fax or computers or anything like that. Nevertheless, the piece I wrote found its way across the Irish Sea to England.

In the 1950s, a man named Johnny Slattery was working in the north-east Cork area. Mechanisation was coming into Irish agriculture with tractors replacing working horses on many farms. Then the coming of ‘the electric’ with rural electrification brought a further revolution on farms.

The back-breaking twice daily work of milking cows by hand was changed, utterly changed. Milking machines were becoming available and Johnny Slattery was a milking-machine installer.

Both my father and Tom were great about engines and that sort of thing, so they became friends of Johnny as he put in ‘bucket machines’ on farms in this area. Johnny actually stayed with the O’Sullivan family of Rathaneague, Bartlemy. That was in the 1950s.

By the early 1990s, Johnny Slattery had been living in England with years. Someone sent him the paper cutting with my words in memory of Tom.

A few weeks later, I got a long letter from Johnny. He wrote of Tom and my father and so many others around Bartlemy, Rathcormac, Watergrasshill, and Castlelyons.

There were five or six pages of memories and stories from nearly half a century ago. He mentioned an incident involving a bull here on our farm.

The Ahern family in Bartlemy village - across from the church - had a small farm but always kept a few cows and calves. In my own youth, I recall Paddy ‘Fagin’ Ahern minding these cows as they grazed the grass on the roadsides - always known as ‘the long acre’.

Though Fagin was an Ahern, he was no relation of the family he stayed with in the village.

Anyhow, Johnny remembered Fagin herding the cows down the hill towards the School Cross. Our cows were in the Kiln Field across from our boreen and were ‘accompanied’ by our stock bull.

Well, whatever the reason, didn’t the bull go kinda crazy in the field and made to come out over the double gates into the Kiln Field.

Fagin got a fright and called my father, and between them and Paddy Geary, who worked here, they got the bull free from his entanglement with the strong iron gates.

According to Johnny, ‘the bull was never the same and had a bad temper’ and had to be got rid of fairly fast after that.

Just two years ago, at Teddy McCarthy’s funeral in Glanmire, I met Dave O’Mahony - a close relation of the great Teddy. Dave and his family had lived locally in Bartlemy in the 1940s when his father was a farm labourer. Dave and his siblings went to the National School here.

We talked and talked as Dave recalled his days as a child here – he could remember my grandfather Batt who died in 1951.

Out of the blue, he asked: ‘Tell me, John, is the bull on the farm still kinda mad?”

I was flabbergasted! “Howda ya mean?” says I.

Dave went on to tell me that when he was a young fella going to school, or to Mass or to Woods’ shop in the village, he knew and, he said, ‘everyone knew’ that ‘Arnold’s bull was mad’!

Over the last 50 years of farming, I’ve had at least four ‘narrow escapes’ with different bulls so I was intrigued to hear a similar story from the 1940s.

Growing up here, there was always a fierce echo back from Ryan’s quarry, and people claim that a bull hearing his own ‘voice’ thinks it’s a rival and this can cause problems.

No, Dave O’Mahony’s theory or explanation was very different. He said that my grandfather always felt that a certain small herbaceous plant that grew on and near many of the field ditches hereabouts was the problem.

This little plant seemed to be consumed without a bother by the cows, but the bulls reacted in a completely different fashion. Maybe some element in the plant’s composition reacted unfavourably with the bull’s genetic make-up.

We often heard the phrase ‘like a red rag to a bull’ - in actual fact, most bulls are actually colour blind!

Then the story of the ‘mad bull’ arose again just this week.

I mentioned earlier our neighbours the Ahern family, across the road from the church in the village - the household where Fagin lived. Last Monday we had a funeral Mass in the church. Mary - always known as Maun - Byrne, née Ahern, died last weekend.

In her 94th year, she was one of the six children of Mike and Jo Ahern - in earlier times, the Ahern family also had a grocery shop.

Though she had lived in Cork city for years, she ‘came home’ to Bartlemy for her last journey.

Before the Mass, her family stood with her coffin outside the door of the home where Maun was born in June, 1932.

With locals, we talked and prayed and reminisced, cried and smiled on a poignant occasion.

I was talking to Maun’s family - in her later years she often spoke of the nearby Bartlemy Fair and her childhood during the War Years.

One memory I was told about stunned me. “She often spoke of the mad bull below at Arnold’s.”

Amazing, isn’t it, that the same story keeps coming up again and again? It must be true.

You know, over the last few days pondering over those stories from down the years, all I could think of was: “Oh, how lucky I am.”