The Lumpies

By Erica Van Horn

Breda and I love to walk The Lumpies. We call this group of fields The Lumpies but we are the only ones who call them that. It is not a regular name. It is not a known name. It is simply the shorthand way with which we are able to suggest a particular walk to one another.

The Lumpies are a dishevelled group of about nine fields, or they could be twelve fields. I have tried to count them as I walk and move through them, but it is like being in a big old-fashioned museum where every room has several doors that lead off in different directions. If you go through one door, you may never get back to that same room to go through to a different room, by means of another door. It is a dilemma, but it is an exciting dilemma. I like knowing that I will miss something because that means that there is forever more to find.

The Lumpies are interconnected, with odd entrances from one to the other. Often, a way into a field is only wide enough for one person or one cow. An entrance may be no more than a scramble over the gnarled roots of a tree severely deformed by wind. The tractor entrance might be on another side. Not one of the fields is a square, nor a rectangle. They are just amorphous shapes delineated by time and ditches and ownership. The shape of the fields is lumpy and the fields themselves are lumpy. The ground is uneven due to the weight of cattle and erosion and the lack of tractor activity in any methodical way. The Lumpies are not planted. Some grass seed is probably scattered but not in a ploughed and formal way. Grass and green things grow on the fields, but it is not a properly farmed area. The cattle eat what they find, and there usually seems to be enough. The cattle look healthy. If they do not find enough to eat, they simply meander into another field. Somedays we can walk in The Lumpies and there will be a few cattle in each field we pass through. They are everywhere, but they are not together.

There have been recent laws about not tearing down the ditches. Europe decrees that fields should remain as they are and that every one of those hedges that divide them should remain standing to allow for living places for birds and small animals. The trouble with that decree is that people in Germany and France who are accustomed to large and Fine Flat Fields do not understand the existence of fields like The Lumpies. They would not understand and, most likely, they would never tolerate such a mess.

Farming equipment gets bigger and bigger every year. It is difficult to drive down a road in this part of the county without having to pull over to allow for the enormous machinery to pass. The new machines are As Big As The Roads, and the roads are already barely wide enough for two cars to pass one another.

With ever-expanding equipment, the fields have to expand too, otherwise the work that the machines are built to do cannot be done. So farmers tear out the ditches and make bigger fields. Later, they might be caught and reprimanded or fined, but they rightfully claim that they cannot farm the land if they cannot even drive in with their machinery. There are several schools of thought on this. Farmers solve their problems according to their own needs. Many farmers think that their needs as custodians of the land are the most important. They do not have a lot of time for the rules of bureaucrats in cities. Nor are they overly worried about small animals and nesting birds and insects.

There exist many farming families who prescribe to the old saying: Don’t Eat Hot Food With Strangers. A scone or a biscuit is fine to share over a cup of tea and a conversation, but Hot Food, which is a proper dinner with potatoes and gravy, rarely gets shared outside the family unit. These are the same families who are related to everyone in the area, and if they are not already related to most people, they know exactly who everyone is and who those people are related to. The world is a closed world and it is a busy world, both at the same time. Women rush out of the shop in the late morning, shrieking that they have Left the Spuds on the Boil. The expression Silage Widow is bandied around when the men are off cutting silage all day long and late into the bright evenings. The men barely get home at all. Women have their role to play in all of this. Women drive out to the fields and deliver food to the drivers unless the farm family, where they are working, invite them to come in to eat their dinner. Everyone works together. The jobs of farming are never finished.

These internal mechanisms keep things so busy that there is no choice but for things to continue in the same way as they have always been. There is little tourism in this part of Tipperary. Watching other people work is not really a thing to travel to and see. There is not much besides the farming families and cows and sheep.

Three mountain ranges surround us. The Knockmealdowns, the Galtees and the Comeraghs. On any day, we can walk up in the mountains and we will never see another person. We will see sheep roaming freely, and in the Knockmealdowns, can see Joe Condon’s Galloway cattle, who are lighter of foot than most cattle and who thrive on the hilly slopes of the mountains. They eat the heather and whatever else is available on the commonage. Sheep are not fenced in on the mountains, but Joe’s cattle are offered marginally restricted movement.

As Blow-ins or relative newcomers, we walk the mountains and from our earliest time here we walked the fields, slowly learning who owned which fields and when one was too muddy or when the cattle were in a field and it was not advisable to walk among them. Learning to recognise the change of colour when the cattle ate the grass as far as they possibly could under a wire fence. Trying to draw or paint surrounded by all of this green has been a problem. The land is beautiful with its many shades of green but the greens can appear garish when portrayed by paint. The colour that is real does not look real. If I speak to a farmer and I say that I find this field or that field particularly beautiful, he will look around and say, “Is it? I do not look for beauty. When I look at the land, I see only its usefulness.”

It is just a matter of time before the ditches in The Lumpies are torn out. With a lot of work by big machines, the land will be flattened and several rolling fields will appear. The farmer working that land will be happy and the cattle will be restricted in their grazing to one field at a time as they eat their way through fresh grass.

Erica Van Horn, 2 May 2025

AFTERWORD
This text evolved after my viewing of Deirdre O’Mahoney’s film: Between a Rock and a Hard Place. Along with a discussion of how her own work developed upon her move to the west of Ireland, it includes her concerns about the dilemma of tourists visiting and possibly damaging the Burren, contrasting with the damage that a built tourist centre, complete with car parking would engender. These kinds of issues are real. The tourists are going to come anyway, so logic suggests that it is perhaps best to control their movements. Living in a part of the country with very little tourism, we view changes in the land in a different way, but each change makes its mark on the land and therefore on our lives. As artists, it is our job to take notice.

Erica Van Horn is an artist and writer born in New Hampshire and based in Co Tipperary. Alongwith her husband Simon Cutts, she runs the small publishing press Coracle. Her published works include We Still Have The Telephone (2022), By Bus (2021) and Living Locally (2011). Her online journal 'some words for living locally' has offered an outsider's reflections on rural Irish living since 2007.