Field Outing – Frank McNally on an impromptu trip to the National Ploughing Championships

I hadn’t been at the Ploughing Championships for 20 years or more and wasn’t planning to attend this year. Then came a late-night text on Tuesday from Paul Hayes, who was organising a dawn raid on Ratheniska the next day and had a spare seat in his self-drive-enabled Tesla.
So it was that early Wednesday, I embarked on a jaunt reminiscent of the inaugural Bloomsday, albeit with more speed and less alcohol, in the company of several of Dublin’s leading eccentrics.
Our group included Trevor White – suave, Raglan Road-born director of the Little Museum of Dublin: celebrity baker Gerry Godley (of Bread Man Walking fame, currently on sabbatical); and Paul himself, an ebullient PR consultant who could almost pass for a Dubliner if he tried, but tends to go full Mattie McGrath when driving in the direction of his native Tipperary.
It was a whistle-stop visit of the ploughing site, only long enough to marvel again at the vastness of Anna May McHugh’s operation. The world and its mother had gathered there as usual. Even the cloudless blue skies above were crowded, thanks to blimps.
Back on the ground, meanwhile, every facet of Irish life seemed to be represented by a promotional stand. I saw one in passing for the National Prison Service and wondered whether they were offering advice to anyone thinking of becoming a prisoner. But I was searching for the National Brown Bread Making championships at the time and didn’t stop to ask.
Even the Little Museum of Dublin needs to be represented at the ploughing these days, as Trevor had concluded after years of people saying so. His inaugural stand was our group liaison point. And I was delighted to see that it prominently featured the work of a Monaghan-born diarist, although not alas this one.
Heading the museum’s rural outreach project, with impeccable credentials, was Patrick Kavanagh, who tilled actual fields in his youth before ploughing lonely metaphorical furrows in Dublin for the rest of his adult life. The museum’s exhibit included his 1949 debut as Diary writer for Envoy, an avant-garde literary magazine published by one of the inaugural Bloomsday jaunters, John Ryan.
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Among the people I met in Ratheniska was the magnificently named Percy Podger. He sounds like a character from Charles Dickens but is a real-life Kildare sheep breeder, specialising in a German breed called Schwarzkopf: “the Big Daddy” of the ovine world.
Sure enough, his prize ram was a horse of a sheep: 200kg in weight, with a back long and straight enough that Rhys McClenaghan could have done his Olympic routine on it.
“His father was German champion,” Percy told me (of the ram, not Rhys), and the son too had had an aristocratic bearing, unfazed by the crowds patting his head and transmitting the contented self-assurance of a sheep who makes babies for a living.
Interestingly, as a sign above the pen advertised, Percy doubles as a “citizen empowerment” consultant, with qualifications from that prestigious educational institution, “The School of Hard Knocks”.
He explained that a lifetime of fighting battles about, for example, grazing rights on the Curragh, had earned him skills he could pass on. And he was indeed an extremely articulate man, his ability to discourse knowledgeably and at length on many subjects another of the reasons I never did find the brown bread-making contest.
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Speaking of which, on the way back to Dublin and at the suggestion of Gerry Godley – he’s always checking out the competition – we stopped for lunch in Abbeyleix at the Mueller & O’Connell bakery.
“Artisan sourdough specialists”, and doing a big trade, the shop is (I’m told) one of the reasons Abbeyleix is now being called the “Clifden of the midlands” (or was it the Kinsale?).
Later again, over post-ploughing pints in Slattery’s of Rathmines, Gerry talked me into doing one of his own courses in bread-making in the coming weeks. If all goes to plan, next September, I may actually enter the national brown bread contest.
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There is no escaping Kavanagh at this time of year. With another Kavanagh Weekend in his native Inniskeen imminent (September 27th-29th), he also haunted the launch on Wednesday night of the inaugural Baggotonia Festival (baggotonia-festival.com), which runs from now until Saturday.
Kavanagh was one of the spiritual founders of Baggotonia, a Bohemian enclave of Dublin whose outer boundaries remain vague but whose central axis was Baggot Street upper and lower: Kavanagh’s city surrogate, as Benedict Kiely put it, for the main street of Carrickmacoss on a fair day.
Festival events include something called “Poetry Plein Air” at the poet’s sculpture on the Grand Canal Saturday afternoon; a screening of Alan Gilsenan’s Ghosts of Baggotonia; and on Friday, less obviously (but no less intriguing), a talk on the life of Charlie Haughey by Conor Lenihan, in which the local but late, lamented Coq Hardi restaurant is sure to feature prominently.
Also on Saturday, freshly returned from its outreach mission to darkest Laois, the Little Museum of Dublin hosts something called a “Walk of Shame”. This will emphasise the area’s “debaucherous past”, apparently, and is suitable only for “ages 18 and over”.