MARY was a farmer's wife, a true Cumbrian, born and bred. She lived near Fingland in the north of what we used to call Cumberland. A friend had sent me to her door one day when I was researching for an article, but as it happened, a chance remark led to a whole book. She put the kettle on and rummaged in a drawer trying to find a photo of her father holding a scythe. “He used to cut the grass at the churchyard,” she said. “I've still got the old scythe somewhere.”
Mary was an old lady when first we met. She failed to find the picture but over a pot of tea talked about the old Cumbrian way of life and her father's day.When she was a young woman he made a point of standing at the door on Saturday nights holding his pocket watch in his hand, making sure she and her sisters arrived home by ten o'clock. If they were late the rule was that they were not allowed to go out the following Saturday evening.
“My father was very strict. Very Edwardian I suppose. He was a lay reader and at times on Sundays he read in church. Some of us didn't always attend and I remember once he asked me where I had been sitting, as he hadn't noticed me. Who'd been sitting in front of me? Who'd been sitting at one side; and who on the other? From then on I made sure I knew exactly who was sitting by me. Yes, he was strict, but we loved him dearly and sometimes he forgot we had been late coming home, and we still went out!”
“Farming was not in a good way. I remember how he was always trying to improve our smallholding, like when the drovers came by ...”
Drovers on their way from Silloth passed their steading several times a year, usually driving cattle to distant Carlisle to be sold at the Sands market. Mostly the men were Irish. Bullock wallopers, she called them. Rough and wild-haired, their Irish brogue almost impossible to decipher, they ran behind the cattle with sticks, swearing and urging them on. Not necessarily cruelly, I was later told, for the cattle had to arrive at the market place in good condition. They had to be good at their job and mostly they were. Their livelihood depended on it.
It wasn't only cattle that were driven past Fingland. At other times strings of ponies went by; or even a donkey or two. And, come summer, when the corn had been cut, amid much honking and gaggling it was the turn of the geese.
Mary smiled when I asked how many. “Goodness, hundreds! One year there might have been a thousand filling the road. It seemed like it. They were so slow. Father bought fifty to fatten up for Christmas, and he did the same another year. He paid a shilling or two for each bird but he lost money both times. Not profitable. I used to go and watch and sometimes there would be a young lad with the drover and perhaps a dog helping. It was such a sight.”
A boy drover ... how often, I wondered, had young lads helped to walk the geese to market? How old would they have been? Mary's chance remark might almost make a novel. A Cumbrian drover lad ... but would it work? With this in mind, a tentative visit to Silloth convinced me it was worth a try. For years geese and cattle were shipped across from Ireland to Silloth, transported in a steamship called the Yarrow. It was a popular passenger and goods vessel, the pride of her owners, who even went so far as to advertise that she was fitted with that modern wonder, electric light.
Twice a week the Yarrow sailed from Dublin, calling at the Isle of Man on the way, the animals housed down below. Then back she would go for fresh loads. There were other vessels using the docks but the Yarrow was a favourite with Silloth folk.When geese or cattle arrived they were driven off the vessel and landed on the dockside at the Lairage where they were penned into fenced areas. The Irish geese were reckoned to be about half the size of native geese. But how could geese, whatever their size, walk all the way to Carlisle and survive? It was more than twenty miles (32 km).Well, soon everyone I met in Silloth was describing how the geese were given boots.First a wooden raise was laid out, in fact two, end-to-end. A raise was a kind of open-top passageway with high sides. Hot tar was poured into the first, and sand or grit further along into the second. With everything ready, a tremendous rumpus broke out. The protesting geese were driven through the hot tar and then through the sand, and so were shod for the journey ahead.
Often enough, once you mention about walking geese to market, everyone wants to tell you a bit more: that the feet of a flock being driven down out of Scotland and through Carlisle and on towards Shap were once shod in little leather bags, one per foot, tied up round the leg. It's a nice story.
The drovers were a tough lot, often sleeping out at night, perhaps in a ditch, or curled up inside their heavy coats in a field, and turning them into a kind of tent. The coats were sometimes amazingly large, several layers deep with handy pockets for the odd snared rabbit. Good against the weather. Not all farmers welcomed them. At night when the geese were getting weary they got a farmer to let them into his field. But some would not allow that because the geese fouled the grass.The journey to Carlisle was a slow business and the birds grew weary. At times birds would sit down in the road and the drovers would have a hard time carrying them on until they could rest a little. At day-end yet another job was to pick out small stones,which had become embedded in their feet.
At Newton Arlosh, about a third of the way across Cumberland near the Joiner's Arms Inn, the road divides and a two-mile stretch even today is still called the Irish Road. It's surfaced now of course but some claim it was once no better than a sandy track. Today it is an almost forgotten secret road. When I talked about the Irish Road to a lady there she said she had lived nearby for twenty-seven years and had never realised why it had got its name.
She was one of several people who helped with useful detail including Silloth former teacher Donald Waugh; television, film and stage actor Tim Barker; Mrs Jean Day; and Captain Chris Puxley, Silloth harbour master.
But the geese ... the long walks out of Silloth began about August when the harvest was due, or if the harvest was a little late they might start nearer September. Just as Mary's father bought geese to fatten and sell at Christmas, so other farmers and cottagers did the same.
“The birds were always hungry. Whenever they could they stopped and fed at the roadside and the drovers had to keep moving them on. It was as well we couldn't understand what the men were saying. Their language sounded terrible! Once the harvest was over of course there was always wheat lying about in the fields and so every morning we drove our small flock out to the stubble, and gathered them in at night in case of the foxes.”
“Come the middle of November the geese were brought in for good because they were finished in the fields by then. We penned them in the orchard and fed them on chopped turnips cut like big chips. Swills full were thrown in among them and that's all they got.”
At Carlisle, the geese were sold off, often to other farmers. Sometimes a drover would do a deal with the new owners and walk the geese to their farms for a modest fee, which included the exchange of a luck penny. At Fingland, two weeks before Christmas, the birds were killed and rough plucked and then they were sent to market and sold for Christmas dinners.
Mary said: “You always knew when there were geese around. Such a gaggle. They could be really noisy. As good as watchdogs. But come Christmas, everything became quiet again. It was a strange feeling but that's how it was.”