It was a wet Friday morning and I was in Bruno’s workshop picking up a welded repair. Bruno was off with the digger making a big job out of a small job, but the two lads were in the workshop, Stevie and Antonio Banderas – or at least that’s what I call them.

We had the usual craic and Stevie was wearing a smart modern take on a donkey jacket, which was nicer than the heavy black thing of 40 years ago. He bought it on Vinted for a steal. I wore the original donkey jacket back in the day, along with the nailed boots with a metal horseshoe heel.

Surprised as you may be, I actually already knew about Vinted, as just last weekend my youngest daughter Alison bought a classic Colombia jacket in a charity shop for €50 and then sold it on Vinted for €300. Her grandfather Potterton would be proud of her.

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A cattle dealer or grain trader in the making? Doubt it, fine art and period houses are Alison’s thing.

In many ways, places like Bruno’s have become the contemporary social venue for farmers to chat and have the craic. While Bruno gets upset if you liken his hugely well-equipped workshop to a blacksmith’s forge, that is precisely where farmers used to meet on a wet day years ago.

News was exchanged and yarns were told, some true, some not. There was no rush shoeing a horse on a wet day, or fixing a broken gate. The forge with its glowing fire was a pleasant place to gather.

Nowadays a visit to the Brunos and the Mortimer Machinerys of today usually entails a chat and some fun. And if there’s time to talk, it’s always rewarding.

Talking with friends and neighbours is so important and brilliant for mental health. Even with mobile phones it can be a lonely world for many. The owners of these premises should provide free coffee to stimulate the chat, but I’d say there’s little chance of that.

For livestock farmers the local mart provides a good opportunity for a bit of social interaction and a catch-up with those you may not see so often.

Horseshoe

But back to the blacksmith’s forge. The following morning, I was walking a field of emerging wheat and, as luck would have it, I stumbled across a big horseshoe, clearly off a draught horse working the land. They still appear from time to time.

The farm’s first tractor, a secondhand orange TVO Fordson N, arrived in 1945 but the four horses remained for a few years while the blacksmith simply converted most horse-drawn implements from shafts to a drawbar.

Having lost a shoe, the horse would be unhitched – perhaps with all the inconvenience of a field puncture today – and brought to Mick Barrett’s forge in Kildalkey.

As an aside and very coincidentally, I read in this month’s Classic Tractor magazine that the standard row width in horse-drawn seed drills was 7in and 5/8in (195mm) to match the horseshoe width of a Shire horse. The shoe I found measured slightly less.

Back in earlier years, the farm had its own working forge with a gable-end stone plaque telling you proudly that it was built by Thomas Potterton in 1835.

Maybe his workmen were spending too long chatting and carousing and cursin’ in the local forge, as I do in Bruno’s, so he decided to put an end to this and build his own.

There’s little chance of me doing that as I seldom use the arc welder nowadays, not even for a crow-shit weld – I’m too lazy and anyhow, I’d miss the craic.