This is a subscriber-only article
The farmland around Moat Farrell is fine, rolling pasture. Cattle happily eat from their green beds and watch me pass. There’s nothing quite like the smell of spring meadows – the wild garlic flowers are growing and pockets of buttercups adorn the verge and fields.
Some of the best farmers I know are great runners. Moving cattle requires fitness. Cattle don’t like dogs and will stand their ground and fight, so in rural Ireland we move them by hand through fields and along roads. More than once as a child I thought myself a hound, for I’ve often chased after escaping bulls and marauding cows. A cow can run flat out anywhere from 20 to 30 miles an hour. They can be slow to get moving, so your only hope is to set off before they do. We can’t outrun them, but we can outsmart them and in the end that’s all we’ve got going for us.
In my youth, our farmland was not connected to our house, which meant as children we had to move them by hand to their summer pastures. This required a full mobilisation of my siblings, parents, bicycles, neighbours and a good deal of running. It was a bovine fiesta.
We would gather our troops on the chosen day, the children on bikes, as my father and mother instructed us where to go. The cows, waiting to be let out to their new summer grass, would low excitedly from the farmyard knowing what was to come.
My mother would then walk down to the main road and man the bad bend to the left of our house, slowing traffic and people. My brother, or our neighbour and friend Gary, would position himself atop his family’s lane next door and the battle would begin.
There’s a strange sense of power when you have control of a public road, even if it is only for a short time. Vacant of cars, it becomes something else, something different, a highway to some other place.
There was a link to a quite ancient thing in our practice then that we did not know, for the very roads themselves, bóthar, ‘the cow way’, are based on the ancient pathways of cattle.
More than once I jogged behind the stock on these treks. The journey of some three kilometres was slow and the cattle often tried to break away or turn back for home. It was as epic as the crossing of the American west to us then. After probably a half hour, we’d reach the fabled land of Kilnacarrow where the summer ground lay.
My young body tired and sweaty, I’d relax on a gate and admire the beasts, our beasts, as they grazed on their sweet summer grass. They were, I think now, the first real runs I ever did.
The Running Book: A Journey Through Memory, Landscape and History by John Connell is published by Picador, RRP €13.99.
SHARING OPTIONS: