30,000 get all steamed up with machinery at Moynalty festival

Up to 30,000 people turned out for a celebration of horse and steam power surrounded by displays of vintage engineering in Moynalty, Co Meath, yesterday.

The 31st annual Moynalty Steam Theshing Festival - looking more like a Heath Robinson cartoon than ever - featured an array of belts and engines most of which were pressed into service during the afternoon threshing sheaves of oats and providing a rare glimpse of farm life as it used to be.

But if farming wasn't your thing, although it looked like it was for most people, there were hundreds of vintage cars from a Reilly Elf to a London bus, commercial vehicles, trading stalls dealing heavily in nostalgia, and a stall selling traditionally made boxty, brown bread and pancakes.

Even the Celtic Tenors were there to give the afternoon a musical lift while two whole pigs roasted succulently on a barbecue.

Bouncing around on a quad bike was local landowner and organising stalwart Seán Sheridan who sold the field to the Moynalty Stream Threshing committee some years agio, giving the annual exhibitions a permanent venue.

Now the committee has build a museum on site which Seán hopes will become a year-round attraction. It is mainly a museum of farm implements, featuring wheel rakes, traps, sidecars, and a wide variety of "agricultural things" from butter churns to chains for measuring land.

But it also represents something of a museum of the household, with stone hot water 'bottles', settle beds, clay pipes wooden cribs, many of which were in use in living memory.

Outside at the threshing section, huge black plumes of smoke could be seen belching from a 16-tonne, 1931 coal-fired traction engine owned and operated by Michael Barry of Meath.

The engine would probably have been aimed at agricultural contractors, but Michael explained his one had always been privately-owned and operated on a large estate in the Louth area up until the 1960s.

Beside Michael's engine was a more familiar-looking machine, a 1949 Allis Chambers tractor offering testimony to the development of mechanisation in agriculture. "But most of the older stuff would have been a common sight in Ireland up to the mid-1960s," explained Séamus Connell, a farmer from nearby Oldcastle. "Bands of people, farmers and their helpers would go from farm to farm from September to November threshing the crops. All people did it in groups of 20 to 30 in sleet, snow and rain".

Nearby, a Blackstone "hotbulb" machine fuelled by parafin oil was humming merrily, a sign explaining that it spent much of its working life on the farm of a Colonel Farrell of Moynalty.

But the best of the day was probably the boxty, grated raw potato mixed with flour, milk and an egg, which was prepared over an open turf fire by Teresa Gilsenan. Not a preservative, e-number or artificial additive insight.