Musical Recording:
Spoken Word Recording:
Just a few words of explanation:
- The name of our farm is The Rhaa, phonetically: Ray.
- To “clear” a farm means to pay off the mortgage, to clear the title.
- One man band = a holding too small to support hired help.
- Santon and Arbory are rural parishes.
- The Isle of Man is mountainous, those of us who live in the middle have to go down hill, no matter whether we go north or south.
Sweet meadows robe Santon, fine views grace The Sound.
Down North broad acres of corn lands abound.
Yet no higher commission did I ever aspire
Than to herd my own cattle and tend my own byre.
On the land which we hold, generations were reared,
Great grandfather farmed and my grandfather cleared.
This trust and bequest owes a charge to their pains,
Their mandate and dower ruled the blood in my veins.
We’d plough and we’d till, plant seed then we pray
For the ripening of corn and for winning the hay.
With potatoes in clamps and dry grain in the bin
We rejoiced in the Chapel that all’s gathered in.
When winter was bleakest we started the day
In the warmth of the byre with the scent of the hay.
There all changed so fast, now it hardly seems real,
From the stool and the candle, to Pyrex and steel.
Up lambing and calving in the hours before dawn,
Out trimming the briars in the lee of the thorn.
Docking turnips or ditching in the hail and the sleet,
Then return for night milking to the shelter and heat.
On the Arbory Plain loam lies fertile and deep,
There’s abundance of upland for the grazing of sheep.
All like tempting prospects I viewed with disdain
I was born here and bred, and it’s here I’ll remain.
It is tough at the bottom in a small one man band.
Margins get trimmed, and you make your last stand.
Yet few callings on Earth such fulfilment may yield
To fence your own pasture. To plough your own field.
Now my fine pastoral zeals The Ungodly have chilled,
And flats fill the Chapel my Grandad help build.
While this truth I relate for what little it’s worth
If God’s in His Heaven things aren’t right here on Earth.
The mill day just a legend, the old times are no more,
It’s the nature of man to lament days of yore.
While the script our tombstone will sombre relay
The last of my bloodline to farm at The Rhaa.
David Kelly
David Kelly | Poetry & Short Stories 