In the Republic of Ireland, by tradition, Protestants were said to dig with “the left foot”. In Northern Ireland, by contrast, it was Catholics who did that.
The point is, there was no exclusively ethno-sectarian technique for spadework. It’s just that, with right-footed excavation considered the norm in any area, the religious minority were always said to dig with the other one.
But time was when, whichever foot you used to dig, in much of the northern half of this island at least, you were probably digging with a McMahon spade.
So ubiquitous was the output of a certain Fermanagh-based manufacturer of the implement, indeed, the surname became an eponym.
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In their catchment area, which included most of Ulster but also a swath of Connacht and Leinster, you didn’t call a spade a spade. You called it a “McMahon”.
The company, which operated for over a century until 1970, occupies no fewer than five pages of a remarkable book that landed in my pigeon-hole recently.
I say “in” my pigeon-hole, but more accurately, it landed on top of the whole pigeon loft because, with its A3 format, it didn’t fit in any of the individual apertures, even the ones where coffee table volumes usually end up.
In the Ould Ago: Illustrated Irish Folklore, by Johnny McKeagney, is bigger than some actual coffee tables I’ve seen.
But not only does it have to include a compendium of textual information on every conceivable aspect of Fermanagh heritage, it also features McKeagney’s meticulously hand-drawn tableaux of each scene and subject.
So the five-page spread on the McMahons is encyclopedic, including a history of the firm, sketches of the family homestead and foundry, floor-plans, product designs, pages from the company ledgers, as well various other artistic embellishments, added for light relief like marginalia in the Book of Kells.
The drawings make the point that, whatever you called it, and whichever foot you used, a spade was never just a spade in Ireland. There were different ones for every county and soil condition.
McKeagney’s sketched identification parade includes specially sized and shaped models labelled “Sligo”, “Cavan-Leitrim”, “Monaghan bent spade”, “Drogheda with head”, among many regional variations.
This was a point previously made by the great Welsh geographer and archaeologist E Estyn Evans who, in his 1957 book Irish Folk Ways, mentioned a Tyrone factory (by then closed) that also produced the implements.
Its “spade gauge book”, he reported, featured 230 different patterns (“not counting the special turf spades”), with various widths, depths, and angles to suit the conditions of Omagh, or Portrush, or Kilkeel, and so on.
Evans went so far as to include a helpful, hand-drawn map of Irish spade patterns, generally narrow and one-sided in the south and west (except Mayo), broader and two-sided elsewhere.
(Incidentally, he also suggested some justification for the Protestant-Catholic dichotomy. Most diggers in Ireland used the right foot, he said, a habit reinforced by the traditional one-sided Irish spade, or “loy”, which unlike the English version, didn’t offer a choice. Conversely, Evans added, “in eastern Ireland, and particularly the Protestant districts of the north-east, the left is normally the digging-foot . . .”)
I don’t know what make of spade Seamus Heaney’s father was using under the window while his son had a writer’s epiphany in the poem Digging. But the McMahons inspired poetry too, if only of the kind that rhymes.
“The Oul’ McMahons’ Spade”, a 1973 epic by Matt Duggan, also features in McKeagney’s book, although its last verse implies that the venerable implement had been made redundant by the entry of Ireland, north and south, into the European Economic Community:
“Now we’ve joined the Common Market we’ve no need to work at all/We just turn the cattle loose and watch them grow./Then, when they’ve eaten all the grass, we sell them in the Fall/And hibernate while Arctic breezes blow./The friend that gave us sustenance in our hours of greatest need/Is cast upon the scrapheap and betrayed,/Spurned even by the people that it helped to clothe and feed,/Fermanagh’s friend, the oul’ McMahon spade.”
The business had indeed closed by then. But reports of the spade’s retirement were premature, because Duggan’s verses inspired a small local revival.
In a reverse of Seamus Heaney’s epiphany, a letter-writer to the Fermanagh Herald confessed that in 30 years of “trying, on and off”, he had never mastered the McMahon, finding it awkward and ineffective.
Then the poem inspired him to debate the issue with a local farrier who also had one and agreed to demonstrate it in the letter-writer’s garden. The key, it turned out, was that the farrier’s model was “sharpened like the blade of a scythe”. Wielding this, the doubter was at last convinced. “I have never used a better spade,” he said.
The McMahon story is just one small part of McKeagney’s book, which runs to 202 such pages, all sumptuously illustrating the history, heritage, and folklore of his native county. It’s a labour of love, clearly. And although first published in 2010, it is still available, for €50 plus €10 post and packaging, from folklorebook.com.
