Cloone show

Last weekend we went to Cloone agricultural show. Cloone is a village in County Leitrim where Niamh's father grew up and her grandmother still lives, in the house she was born in. It is also known at Boxty Cloone as it's where they say boxty originates. Boxty is like a kind of potato pancake, made by mixing glue (or 'water and flour' as they insist on describing it) and raw potatoes. It was developed during the terrible 'famine' of the mid 1800s (I use the quote marks as the English were still exporting large amounts of food from Ireland as people dropped dead in their thousands), when potatoes were affected by a blight that rotted them in the ground. Someone clever in Cloone realised that the rotten bits floated, so if you grated the potatoes into a bucket of water, you could scoop off the bad bits from the top and then mix the remaining bits with flour and make flat bread out of it.
So, among the many competition categories at the show was boxty. There were many categories familiar to fans of Australian shows, such as sponge cakes and best onion, but there were a few that would be unfamiliar or at least different. In the latter class would have to be hay – in Australia this would be a bale of hay, judged by whatever standards balers have, but in Cloone it was a large handful of hay tied carelessly with some twine, as if someone had just picked it up on the way there and left it somewhere absent-mindedly. But totally unfamiliar to your average Australian, and I dare say most non-Irish, was the turf category. Turf is the Irish English (or Hiberno-English for the nerds!) word for peat (the Irish word is móin in case you're asking), the standard cooking and heating fuel, gathered from Ireland's plentiful peat bogs, dried in the fields in short lengths then taken home and stored under cover. It emits a lovely smell and I'm sure there's different ways of preparing it, but to the untrained eye it looks like blocks of mud on a plate.
On more familiar ground, there were some beautiful examples of knitting and glorious flower displays; Irish houses – and streets – particularly in the country, are festooned with bright flowers, so this was reflected in the quality of the flowers.
I haven't mentioned the rest of the show. Unlike an Australian show, there wasn't a rodeo or cattle-work competitions, but, there was a dog show, with quite a few categories, a dunking board and a display of the world's smallest cow, to there was something for everyone!
If you'd like to see some photos, have a look at this flickr album!