FROM THE ARCHIVES:The importance of agriculture to the country as a whole meant that the harvest was of more than passing interest to everybody in the country a century and more ago. This report on the harvest in 1900 by an anonymous special correspondent was appropriately headlined A Passing Glance. – JOE JOYCE
IT HAS been often said that one cannot see a country flying through it in an express train, but a bird’s eye view can be best got from a balloon, and an even better and more comprehensive method is that of the quickly unfolding panorama which is offered from a railway carriage window.
An experienced eye can note many things, and a very reliable glimpse can thus be had of the present state of the crops between Dublin and Roscommon.
There is certainly one class of farmers that has no reason to complain, and that is the grazier.
Seldom, indeed, has the country at this season had such an appearance of rich luxuriance.
The full colour of trees and hedges and the freshness of the new grass and aftermath lend a charm which would greatly delight the eye of a cross-Channel farmer.
Cattle are looking first-rate, and sheep, though they do not like the wet weather so well, are healthy and thriving.
Turnips never looked better, and although the want of sunshine has not been conducive to sufficient storage of sugar in the mangels, they show no sign of flagging, and there is plenty of the season yet left to correct the “wateriness” provided the autumn keeps fairly dry.
In a word, there is an abundance of green food, with plenty of grass, which, with thriving stock, offers a cheery prospect for the grazier.
But this is the rosiest side. Hay suffers a good deal between Enfield and Dublin, and perhaps a portion of this loss may be attributed to dilatoriness, for a good deal of hand “cocks” may be seen on an “aftermath” with every appearance of a month or six weeks’ growth, and surely some odd days might have been snatched to have secured it before the late heavy rains.
Where the land was not too low, and they had sufficient time to settle before the storms, they appear to have suffered less damage, and were being made into large “cocks” or stacks in apparently fair condition, though a trifle discoloured.
For potatoes there is the gravest outlook. It is evident that the last two good years have lulled farmers to sleep in the matter of spraying, and very few green patches, which would have betokened this operation, were to be seen. All along the route there was the same baneful appearance. In some of the wet spots near Clonsilla and Enfield, and in the peaty parts of Roscommon, nothing but the bare blackened stalks were left.
There seems to be little hope but that the blight will be more widespread and trenchant, in the better districts at least, than it was in 1897 or ’94, but of course the real extent of the damage can only be realised when the time comes for digging.
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