Tours are available of the restored home with over two hundred years of history and stories. Here is an extract of one now:
Life In The Old Homestead
The fire burnt with a warm orange glow and sometimes depending on the direction of the wind you couldn’t see who was in the house with smoke. Usually there was a cake baking in the oven pot hanging from a crook over the fire and the smell of the cake wafted through the house giving everybody a good appetite. Sods of lit turf would be lifted up with the tongs and placed evenly on top of the lid to bake the top of the cake. You can still see the smoke up there. A sun beam would light up the room coming through that window and my grandmother always told me about the her neighbour Nanny who would hang her coat over the sunbeam. You could see all the dust particles swirling around in the sunbeam.
The Churning was a very important job to make the butter for the bread and when the butter was skimmed off we would drink the mugs of buttermilk which gave you a good complexion. The churning was done with a dash churn in this house like this one. Everybody neighbour who visited had to take the dash and give it a few dashes, this was to make sure they didn’t take the butter home with them. Long churning makes bad butter and we usually tried to finish inside the hour. When the butter was skimmed off it was salted and clapped with the clappers into nice rectangular shapes with well crafted designs on top. It was great stuff and you wouldn’t get the like of it anywhere.
The neighbours would drop in for a mug of buttermilk and a cut of homemade bread and butter. This was a big part of the diet at the time. You were able to ate a good feed of salty bread and butter then because it was worked off physically in the fields through the sweat of the brow.
Many more stories to come.
Tour Bookings
Phone Niall 086 7361948
Email: info@loughcrewmegalithiccentre.com