By Cormac MacConnell

THERE was a strange great brute of a stone in the farmyards of many of the houses of my childhood. A depression had been chiseled into the tops of the stones.

It was invariably full of warm rainwater a child would put his hand into, feeling the slightly slippery liquid through the fingers. Sometime later I learned that in the old days at the turn of the last century these stones were part of a pestle and mortar system for feeding the great workhorses of that era with pulped furze.

The beetle was either of heavy wood or stone. The young furze with its bright yellow blooms and sap-filled twiggery was pounded into a pulpy mess in the stone, and the old horses that were the farm families’ engines loved that pulp. It was full of vitamins and kept them in good working order in the Mays of yesterday.

This May has turned into a strange one. The third week has been wet, cold and windy, maybe the worst, an old farmer told me tonight, in a half-century.

“Never mind,” he said, “out of it will come a scalding summer and the grass growth will be great. There is an old saying, a wet and windy May will fill the barn with hay.”

That’s a bit dated now since the farmers don’t make the old blanched whisperingly dried hay any more. It is all silage or wilted grass in circular polythened bales. They gather like giant black footballs in the corners of meadows that were populated by white haycocks up until about twenty years ago. All is changed, changed utterly.

Driving through the townland of Paradise near Kildysart in Clare today I saw the brightly beautiful furze blooms glowing again through the rain. The land here is good, rich and fertile, but anywhere it gets the chance the furze (which we always called whins) brings its golden presence, usually in the poorer marginalized corners of the grazing lands.

Nobody is feeding it to big draught horses any more but, truly, it is a beautiful sight, brighter than anything else blossoming and sprouting in the Maytime.

It reminds me of the long empty reaches of West Connemara, purple mountains and blue seas counter-pointed by the prickly gold on the mountains and foothills. It may be a weed to farmers, but it is also the brightest flower of May.

Away back a few centuries in the Ulster of the Scots planters there was a Maypole tradition this month, certainly in Ar-magh and Down and Antrim. On certain May days dictated by local custom townlands would converge on the nearest town or village, and each townland would have its own Maypole, always garnished with furze, for color and, as I understand it, also with little dolls dressed with exquisite taste by the girls of the townland.

The bodies of the dolls had been carved from soft wood and their dresses and gowns stitched by the girls’ clever fingers. Each hue as bright as the garnish of the furze.

On the march into town for a competition to select the best Maypole the townland groups would frequently meet at crossroads and there would be raillery and joshing, some of it bawdy, between the groups. Each one would sharply criticize the Maypole of the other in a ritual way before proceeding to the celebrations and competition in the town.

Whichever group was judged to have the finest Maypole would celebrate all the way home, music and song and dance, calling into every home in the townland.

There was another more earthy side to that which I was only told about recently by a scholar from Derry. The Maypole tradition, apparently, was a fertility celebration, not just of Mother Earth but of those who worked it. The celebrations had a sexual side to them, by all accounts, and if you went far enough back in time you might discover that the Maypole itself was a phallic symbol.

Certainly there were likely to be pregnancies and births nine months after the Maytime celebrations, and these pregnancies, I learned with surprise, were those which gave rise to the old rural whispered phrase — still widely whispered! — suggesting that this or that parish maiden was “up the pole!” You learn something new every day.

I have a drink in Ballinacally in Griffin’s great old pub —one that no man or woman should ever pass by — and sometime down the long slow lazy pint I mention the beauty of the furze on the hills. And because I talk too much, I suppose, also mention the connection of the Maypole with the old whispered phrase.

And a wise man whose father was born on one of the islands out in the Shannon tells me about a quack who traded in the Kildysart area in living memory. Mostly he cured horses and sick cattle, but he also had a cure for ringworm.

And there are stories about a magic bottle he gave to several men whose wives had still not conceived after several years of marriage. The bottle almost always worked the oracle and, on several occasions, even led to the birth of twins! And the locals always believed that pulped furze was one of the ingredients involved.

Driving home serenely later the rains eased. The sun shone the way it should always shine in our Mays in the west of Ireland.

And every horizon around Clarecastle and Ballygireen and Newmarket seemed to be crowned by golden furze bushes, their wiry bodies moving in perfect time to the breezes from the Estuary and the ocean.