BSW2 14. The professor turned sheep farmer

Speaker: Patsy McNultyFrom the Bluestack Way Part 2 playlist.Local writers such as Paul Peppergrass, Patrick MacGill and Seamus MacManus emigrated to America but one American bucked the trend and came to Donegal leaving behind the leafy arches of Harvard for Meenaguish deep in the Bluestacks between 1970 and 1984. Bob Bernen wrote two books out of his experience, Tales from the Bluestacks and The Hills, which recall his experience of the lifestyle and stories he heard from the area. In the Foreword to the first book, Bernen wrote: ‘Ten miles north of Donegal Town, in the extreme north west of Ireland, runs a range of low, rounded hills known as the Blue Stacks. Technically they are classed as mountains but to the ordinary eye, they look like hills. Their name – taken from the Irish name of the highest peak – Croagh Gorm, is fitting, for from a distance they always appear a deep, purple blue, even on the clearest days. Around these hills lives a small group of farmers whose lives continue to be rooted in the eighteenth-century patterns, or earlier. Technologically and agriculturally their methods scarcely reveal modern influence. Today, we read about ancient and medieval technology which can still be seen in use on Blue Stack farms, some of them home-made in forms that have long since disappeared elsewhere. Machines are seldom used. Into this bit of anachronous farming community a modern man and his wife moved, to farm sheep and to live in the manner of their neighbours. Some of what they heard, saw or experienced is recorded in the following tales. The tales are therefore unlike fiction, which falsifies in order to achieve a greater effect. The aim here has been to preserve a true picture of some aspects of Blue Stack life at the moment of its final disappearance, and as it fades into the modern world around it.’ Dealing with individual stand-alone chapters, the books present a picture of a community farming without machines, the interaction of men and animals and a deeper understanding of the life around them and of the earth and the living things that come from it. In our audio piece, Patsy tells a little bit more about the man and his best friend from the hills, Nothar.You can also listen to a 1978 radio documentary about Bob from RTE Radio One.