JUST back from Kerry by way of Corofin in The Burren, and I drop into the Sky Center in Shannon for a newspaper and sundries in the early afternoon. It’s that kind of bright day where the planes flying away out to where ye are all gilded with gold from a slanting sun, and all seem to be going faster than usual.

In my garden pond an hour earlier I’d seen the first frog spawn of my year, a slower ritual life cycle, even more heartening somehow.

I meet for the first time a lovely man of the Glynns whose mother’s people from East Galway had all been stonemasons. He greets me because he’d read a piece I’d written somewhere about the old cute farmers of long ago and how they kept their milk for the creamery cool on the high summers long before there was electricity and cooling systems.

They stood up their creamery cans in water sources of course, like ponds and rivers and brooks, and hoped that would keep the milk from turning and souring. But if the weather got even hotter than that then the cutest of them recruited boys to catch them a few yellow frogs and dropped them into the tanks.

The frogs, swimming for their lives all night, kept the milk agitated and prevented it from souring. Any survivors were fished out in the morning!

It would not happen now but it happened back then. A lot of things did.

The lovely Glynn man had a pot of mighty stories. When he was a child, he said, he remembered there was a special bog close to their house. Again the era was long before fridges.

And when their neighbors killed a lamb for the pot the meat, which was for later days, had to be kept cool and safe. So what did they not do but place it in flour bags in a hole in this special bog — “not every bog will do it” — and the lamb would stay perfect for 10 days or more.

And he had more. He told me of an hotel in the Gort area, not there any more, and he actually saw them burying game meat such as venison in the dunghill (manure pit) behind the hotel for days on end.

It was the heat of the manure which tenderized and seasoned the meat so that it was famed by the gentry of the region when they called for dinner. Maybe that still happens in places.

And he told me of the herbal remedy which the people used create from “bog onions” from a special kind of fern growing in bogs. And he told me how his family of stonemasons long ago crafted the great Celtic cross in the heart of the village of Tulla up the road.

The process was called “dropping the lead.” A special cutting wire was imported from Italy, and his father and uncles had a water wheel to power it.

Away it sawed for eight weeks altogether, and always somebody had to be tending it, night and day, to drop the lead, to ensure the wire was always in contact with the stone surface it was cutting away. I think they use laser beams for that now, and it is still a slow process.

It is still a mighty country when you can stop in the heart of a modern shopping center, under today’s speeding jets, and hear the old yarns like that. I love that.

No more than a few hours later in Daffy’s Pub in Corofin I had the honor of launching a new CD of great ballads for a local balladeer called Joe Keirse.

And Joe sang a song on the night about the Noughaville Mines that were briefly established in the area within living memory. And the verses remembered the names and addresses of many of the mine workers, and their personalities too (some of them were dandies and handy with the women!)

This was not just a ballad. This was a fragment of folklore, just as live as the lamb being buried in the bog.

(If you have Clare connections get them to send you a copy. It is called My Home in Kilnaboy and includes all the great old ballads like “Shanagolden” and “The Chapel Gates of Cooraclare”).

Anyway, coming back home from Shannon, I encountered a huge funeral on the narrow road passing the Carrygerry Chapel. I pulled in to the side, and, as my father taught me long ago, crossed myself and bowed my head as the hearse passed slowly by. It took eight or nine minutes to clear the road, and I could move on towards home.

Overhead, another day, the planes were still golden, the skies clear, frogspawn on my pond, and the promise from Glynn of a bottle of bog onions soon to ward off any ailment under the sun that might afflict me in the future.

Not a bad weekend at all.