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From their high perch they looked down on long stretches of brown fields ploughed in ridges, with here and there a big gray rock dropped into the middle of it, and here and there a roughly-built cottage, not much bigger, seemingly, than some of the rocks. In a distant field a man was carrying mangolds to a flock of sheep.
Potatoes were a new thing, nothing mystic, nothing religious; women and children could plant them earth-apples that came from foreign parts, like coffee; fine rich food, but much like swedes and mangolds. Corn was nothing less than bread; corn or no corn meant life or death. Isak walked bareheaded, in Jesu name, a sower. Like a tree-stump with hands to look at, but in his heart like a child.
They had to learn to use their hands as well as their brains, to plough a furrow, or bank a hedge, or dig a pit for mangolds. Considine kept them busy, and at the same time made them useful to himself. They used to come in at tea-time flushed with exercise and pleasantly fatigued. The late afternoon and evening were their own.
Then, when we had finished, Sir Lionel said, "Now, Mrs. Tupper, can you take us for a stroll round the farm?" That didn't sound exciting, did it? We walked out, and it seemed a very nice farm, but nothing remarkable. As we wandered toward some sheds, in a field of mangolds, Sir Lionel made us look up at a big hill, and said, "There was a Roman camp there.
Fairly large potato-fields occur at short intervals, and mangolds and turnips are grown for feeding stock. Cabbages also are grown for winter feed, and the character of the country is infinitely more cheerful than on the opposite side of Westport.
Harrow had been bundled out, the establishment of the Considines became a game as entertaining to Lady Halberton in the sphere of religious culture, as chemical experiments were to her husband in that of root-crops with the delightful difference that human souls ran away with much less money than mangolds.
In one of these fields, just opposite the copse, a covey of partridges had their rendezvous, and I watched them from the road, evening after evening, issue one by one, calling as they appeared from a breadth of mangolds. Their sleeping-place seemed to be about a hundred yards from the wayside.
His land is exhausted by the old Mayo rotation of "potatoes, oats, burn," and he has no manure but guano and seaweed. It is like inhaling fresh air to turn aside from poorly nourished people and land to look, from the window of Casson's hotel at Letterfrack, on two bright green oases rising amid a brown desert of bog. Turnips and mangolds are growing in great forty-acre squares.
I had but just passed a magnificent field of mangolds, many of which weighed from a stone to a stone and a half, when I came upon a sight which could not be paralleled in any other civilised country at the present moment.
This honest fellow confessed that digging potatoes and pulling mangolds were not his regular occupations, but that he had come "for the fun of the thing," and to show them there were still "loyal men left in Ireland."
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