The Origins of the Dairy Industry in Ulster

By George Chambers

Dairying is practically unique among modern industries in being able to trace its origins back to Biblical times. Even with automatic robot milking systems and sophisticated micro-filtration producing the key components of health and fitness supplements, the value of this essential family nutrient and foodstuff has been cherished over many centuries. Dairying in the province of Ulster has a long and distinguished history, the subject of The Origins of the Dairy Industry in Ulster.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ulster Historical Foundation
• Release date: Sep 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781913993207

Book preview

1

CHURNS AND BUTTER IN THE BOGS

Dairy husbandry is the oldest practice of man since he first domesticated animals, and in this island of high humidity and equable climate it has flourished from its primitive beginnings down the centuries.

J.I. Magowan¹

In the summer of 1946 at Lissue near Lisburn in County Antrim, a visiting German archaeologist by the name of Dr Gerhard Bersu made a discovery that seems to be a suitable starting point for this story of the origins of the dairy industry in the historic nine-county province of Ulster. At the suggestion of Professor Estyn Evans, then the renowned head of geography at the Queen’s University of Belfast, Dr Bersu and his wife Maria were carrying out a programme of exploratory ‘digs’ on one of the many ‘raths’ or lightly fortified medieval farmsteads that dot the Ulster landscape. The chosen rath at Lissue, located on sloping land then owned by a man called William Drake and known locally as ‘The Fort’, yielded the usual crop of flint tools, iron pins, and bronze jewellery, together with fragments of pottery, coloured glass, wooden utensils, leather footwear, and animal teeth and bones. But the patient researchers and their assistants also uncovered two unexpected objects of much greater interest: the first was a slab of ‘fine greenish slate’ heavily decorated on both sides with over 20 designs, which helped to date the main rath as a homestead of the late 10th century; and the second was a small wooden churn with many similarities in design to the vessels that were still in use for buttermaking in hundreds of Ulster farmhouses at the time of the excavation.²,³

The churn was found lying on its side at the bottom of what had been a deep trench or ‘fosse’ at the northern end of the site, where there had been an earlier and smaller rath. Though embedded partially in silt and covered by several feet of boulder clay, it was full of water – which was surely a tribute to the coopering skills of the man who had made it. The churn consisted of curved staves – there were 19 in all – standing on a circular base and held in place by two wooden hoops made of split branches, and by a third hoop and an upper rim both made of iron. The bottom, like the staves, was made of oak and consisted of three pieces held together by wooden pegs or dowels; and the hoops were fastened to the staves by iron pins. The central hoop had originally carried two iron rings on opposite sides of the vessel, but one was missing when the find was brought to the surface. The vessel was about 20 inches high; its diameter varied from just under 13 inches at the base to 7½ and 6½ inches at the oval neck, giving it an effective capacity of about seven gallons.

The Lissue churn: left, elevation; centre, attachment of upper hoop; right, base, Ulster Journal of Archaeology, 3rd series, x (1947)

The supposition is that this churn was used on that South Antrim settlement around 1,000 years ago for the production of butter and probably also for the movement of milk from summer pastures to a homestead.⁴ Its design suggests that when it was in use it would have been closed by stretching a piece of cloth or animal skin across the elliptical opening and securing it with a thong tied round the groove of the iron rim. The elliptical opening was adjudged by the archaeologists to have been a feature of the original design rather than the result of deformation of the iron rim in the stony ground: if that were indeed the case the shape was clearly intended to facilitate the pouring of liquid from the churn into smaller containers. The function of the iron rings on the sides of the vessel is believed to have been to facilitate its suspension from a tree or other overhead structure by means of ropes or chains, enabling churning to be effected by a swinging motion rather than by the plunging or tumbling motions generally used in more recent times.⁵ Now preserved in the Ulster Museum in Belfast, this fascinating vessel is a physical reminder of the antiquity of dairying in the province and of the importance of milk and dairy products in the diet of its ancient inhabitants.

Woman standing in front of cottage with butter churn. HOYFM.L919.3 © National Museums NI, Collection Ulster Folk & Transport Museum

Other ancient churns

Over the years many other ancient churns have been found in bogs during turf-cutting operations. For example, in 1834 a man called John Tamney unearthed two small churns in a bog at Dreenan in the parish of Maghera in County Londonderry.⁶ These were found at a depth of three feet; each had been hollowed out of a single piece of wood, presumably part of a tree-trunk. Both had a diameter of about 12 inches; the first was 13 inches tall, the second an inch shorter. Lids had been provided, and one of these was still available for inspection when the team of army engineers responsible for the ordnance survey of that period reached the area a year or two later. Significantly, this piece of decaying wood had a small circular hole in the centre; and that identified the vessels as early examples of ‘dash’ churns, in which the agitation of the milk or cream to produce butter was effected by a ‘dash’ or plunger with a long handle protruding vertically through the lid.

An earlier discovery in another bog in the same general area was also reported to the army surveyors: this involved a wooden vessel with sloping sides, found at a depth of three feet in a bog at Ballynenagh in the parish of Artrea in 1831.⁷ At the time this vessel too was unequivocally described as a ‘churn’; a drawing of it under that designation is to be found among the ordnance survey manuscripts in the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin. Circular in section with a diameter of 12 inches at the bottom and nine inches at the top, the vessel stood 32 inches high and had three distinct parts: a barrel hollowed out from a single piece of wood, a separate base, and an unusual lid held on by a rod which slotted into holes in two handles located near the top of the sloping sides. There was no central hole in the lid, which means that if the vessel was indeed for producing butter, the agitation of the milk or cream would have been effected either by swinging it in a suspended position or, more likely, by rocking it on a fulcrum such as the edge of a table or bench, in the manner described by the late Professor Michael O’Shea of University College Cork in a fascinating paper on ‘Old Irish Buttermaking’ published in 1949.⁸

Wooden vessel from bog near Bushmills from ‘Field Archaeology in the Ballycastle District’, by E. Estyn Evans, Ulster Journal of Archaeology, 3rd series, viii (1945), pp 14–32

Several smaller wooden vessels found in the bogs of Londonderry and Antrim around the same time or earlier could also have been used as ‘rocking churns’. Typical of these was a vessel found at a depth of three feet near the edge of a bog at Moneyglass in County Antrim about 1830:⁹ this had been made from a single piece of wood hollowed out to provide the bottom and sides. Another vessel found some years later at a depth of five feet in a bog at Mostragee, also in County Antrim, had originally had three separate parts: a bottom (which was missing), a lid of three pieces – said to be ‘very curiously put together’ – and a barrel hollowed out from the trunk of a tree and tapering from a diameter of 12 inches at the base to 8½ inches at the mouth, where two handles were provided.¹⁰ When found, this elaborate vessel was serving as a container, but its design suggests that it would have had other uses including the churning of milk or cream by a swinging or rocking motion. A similar churn found at a depth of three feet in a bog at Ballyhutherland in County Antrim in 1834 was also being used as a container.¹¹

In contrast to these examples, there was absolutely no doubt about the prime function of a beautifully made and well-preserved vessel found later in a bog at Ahoghill, also in County Antrim. This vessel, then in the possession of the Rev. James O’Laverty, the remarkable parish priest of Holywood in County Down, was a perfect example of an early dash churn – with optional extras.¹² The barrel, of circumference 46 inches and height 14 inches, was hollowed out from a single piece of oak. The workmanship was of a high standard, manifest in the smoothness of both the interior and the exterior surfaces, the provision of perforated carrying ridges on both sides of the barrel, and the functional design of the lid. In conformity with the mouth of the churn, the lid was oval in contour so that it would remain firmly in place when the handle of the dash was being moved upwards and downwards in the churning process. The same purpose was served by a tiny projection on the inside of the neck of the churn which fitted into a nick on the edge of the lid. Though the whole lid was carved from a single piece of wood, the orifice for the handle of the dash was provided both with a sturdy rim and with two lateral supports, which also served as handles to facilitate the opening of the vessel when churning was complete. As a neat finishing touch the lid had a series of perforations round its outer edge, the purpose of which was believed to have been to facilitate the attachment of a cloth or piece of skin to improve the seal between the lid and the barrel of the churn.

An Ahoghill churn from E. Clibborn and J. O’Laverty, ‘Bog Butter’, Ulster Journal of Archaeology, 1st series, vii (1859), pp 288–94

Some 32 years after the detailed description of the Ahoghill churn had appeared in the Ulster Journal of Archaeology, an antiquarian named Frazer described a very similar churn that a collector in Derry city had obtained from someone described as ‘a travelling dealer’.¹³ The dealer was said to have ‘picked up’ this churn around 1875 in the course of ‘his journeyings through county Derry’. The description and illustration of the distinctive lid and perforated carrying ridges of the vessel are virtually identical to those of the Ahoghill churn. For the researcher this immediately gives rise to the question of whether the two churns really were two, or were one and the same. However, when the published descriptions are closely compared, small differences emerge in respect of the heights of the vessels, the shape and diameter of the necks, and the nature of the wood. Moreover, several of the refinements incorporated in the Ahoghill churn were neither illustrated nor mentioned in the description of the Derry churn. These considerations – together with a subjective judgement that Father O’Laverty, as an avid collector of such antiquities, is unlikely to have given up the Ahoghill churn by 1875 – suggest that the descriptions and illustrations relate to two separate churns made to the same design, probably by the same craftsman.

Ardmore and Glenveigh churns, from P. Keville, Ulster Journal of Archaeology, 3rd series, iii (1940), pp 73–4 and A.T. Lucas, Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, lxxxviii (1938), pp 125–7

Derry churn, from W. Frazer, Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, xxi (1891), p. 588

Sixty-three years later, in 1938, yet another churn of similar design (but of smaller size) was uncovered 10 feet under the surface of a bog at Ardmore in County Armagh, a few hundred yards from the southern shore of Lough Neagh.¹⁴ From the published description this vessel too seems to have had the distinctive lid, with the strong central port for the handle of the dash and with the lateral supports, in this case described as ‘wings’. Unfortunately these features were not fully illustrated in the published drawing, but there can be little doubt that the churn was of the same general design as the Ahoghill and Derry churns. So too was a fourth churn, found in 1975 at a depth of four feet in the Glenveigh Bog on Gartan Mountain in County Donegal.¹⁵ Again the most notable feature of the vessel was its thick lid, incorporating ‘an octagonal projection’ which carried the port for the dash and was ‘furnished with two side wings’.

Thus, over the past 200 years the bogs of Ulster have yielded a crop of churns of varying degrees of elaboration, demonstrating clearly that the production of butter was a major preoccupation of the inhabitants of the province in ancient and medieval times.

Bog butter

Other indicators of the importance of dairying in Ulster down the ages include the discovery of bovine bones and associated materials in archaeological excavations; the accumulation of evidence that tracts of mountainous land were used as summer grazing for dairy cows over many centuries; and the widespread unearthing of parcels of ‘bog butter’ in the province’s peat lands. Commentators differ on the explanation of the bog-butter phenomenon, but no-one can dispute the scale of its incidence. For example the ordnance survey of four parishes in County Londonderry in the 1830s provided oral and/or visual evidence of 20 discoveries of bog butter in the course of the previous 10 years.¹⁶ Eleven of those cases had occurred in the parish of Maghera, within a period of eight years, from 1828 to 1836. The depth at which the butter was located was recorded for half of the 20 cases in the four parishes; it ranged from one foot to 12 feet, with a concentration in the range two to five feet. The container in all but a few of these cases was a hollowed-out portion of a tree trunk, which with the passage of time had degenerated to resemble bark. Other containers found in the county during that period were earthenware crocks, an ornamental wooden vessel described as a ‘meddar’, and a ‘jacket’ of bark held in place by strands of wild honeysuckle. A further discovery made some 25 years later in a bog at Coolnaman in the parish of Aghadowey involved a butter ‘firkin’ consisting of 13 staves around 14 inches long, standing on a separate base and provided with an elegant lid.¹⁷ The crumbling remains of a very different container – a wicker basket – surrounded a large cylindrical block of old butter found in 1923 on the farm of Robert Stuart at Annaghmore, near Castledawson.¹⁸

Bog butter also featured prominently in the ordnance survey of County Antrim in the 1830s, with a concentration of finds in the parishes of Ballymoney, Billy, Derrykeighan, Dunluce, and Kilraughts in the northern part of the county.¹⁹ For example in Billy and Derrykeighan alone some 13 cases were recorded between 1820 and 1837. In the county as a whole the discoveries noted up to the end of that period had been made at depths ranging from one to five feet; the containers in all cases were or had been wooden vessels variously described as ‘meddars’, ‘methers’, ‘cans’, ‘pots’, ‘noggins’, ‘casks’, or ‘churns’. One unusual container was a box about two feet long and of cross-section six inches square, dug out of a tree trunk. Another variant was an inner container made from the skin of an animal secured with a leather draw-string. A memorable discovery in the parish of Billy involved a quantity of at least 30 pounds of butter, rivalling finds of 30, 40, and 60 pounds in three of the most notable occurrences across the River Bann in County Londonderry.

Bog butter from the 15th/16th century, found near Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, in the Ulster Museum. By Bazonka (own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0]

Much smaller quantities were also found from time to time; for example in 1892 the aforementioned Father James O’Laverty – parish priest of Holywood and historian of the Roman Catholic diocese of Down and Connor – had in his possession a lump of a few pounds which had been found wrapped in coarse cloth at a depth of 12 feet in a bog at Gortgole in the parish of Ahoghill, also in County Antrim.²⁰ In describing that specimen, the somewhat eccentric O’Laverty wrote that it bore the marks of the hands of ‘the ancient dame who pressed it into its present shape’! And in the next century Professor Estyn Evans of the Queen’s University of Belfast, in less colourful terms, reported on a find made at Magheralane near Randalstown in the summer of 1946.²¹

Bog butter has been discovered too in the other counties of Ulster. During the ordnance survey of South Down in 1834 the engineers were told of a find in the parish of Drumballyroney two years earlier: the container was said to have been a hollowed-out section of a tree trunk and its contents had reputedly been ‘disposed of’ in Belfast.²² A better-documented case arose in another area of County Down in June 1844, when a flattish circular cask made from part of the trunk of a willow tree was found at a depth of 18 inches in a small bog on D.S. Ker’s Montalto estate near Ballynahinch.²³ Provided with two ornate handles and a separate bottom ‘ingeniously inserted’ and covered with a partly broken lid, the cask contained 25 pounds of old butter ‘in a wonderfully preserved state’. Antiquarians in the area, invited to view the vessel and its contents at the offices of the Down Recorder newspaper in Downpatrick, said that they had neither seen nor read of anything like it before, but their obvious lack of knowledge on the subject did not deter them from pronouncing gravely that it could date from the reign of Henry the Eighth or earlier! There must, however, be a distinct possibility that this particular find dated only from the time of the Battle of Ballynahinch in June 1798, when apprehensive residents of the town were reported to have buried provisions including ‘casks of butter’ as Crown forces from Belfast and Downpatrick approached the area to engage the United Irishmen encamped on Ednavady Hill.²⁴

‘Irish Bog Butter’, by F.J. Bigger, Ulster Journal of Archaeology, 2nd series, v, no. 2 (1899), p. 112

At least five finds were made in County Armagh in the 20th century. The elaborate churn found at a depth of 10 feet in a bog at Ardmore in 1938 and mentioned above was full of bog butter.²⁵ Twenty-two years earlier, in the immediate aftermath of the Easter Rising in Dublin, a group of men working in a bog at Carrickrovaddy in the parish of Cullyhanna in South Armagh found an ornamental wooden vessel bearing the sign of the Cross and containing ‘a white greasy substance’ later identified as bog butter.²⁶ This find was made at a depth of six feet. Eight years later, Norman Stevenson of Sandbank found a foot-long block of the substance in a decayed wooden container at a somewhat greater depth, in a bog at Derrytrasna near Lough Neagh.²⁷ Likewise, Johnston Anderson found a quantity of 10 pounds at a depth of three feet in a bog at Derryhirk²⁸ in May 1945. In relation to the original surface of the bog the depth of this find could have been as much as six feet, since the bog was believed to have been worked previously to a depth of about three feet. The fifth Armagh find is one of two exhibits of the commodity on display in the county museum at the time of writing: this was unearthed in a bog at Derryhubert in 1959.²⁹

The other exhibit of bog butter in the Armagh County Museum was found in the Stiloga bog in County Tyrone at a depth of four feet. A further find in County Tyrone was reported by the well-known local historian T.G.F. Paterson³⁰ in 1946: this discovery had been made four years earlier during turf-cutting operations on a farm at Cavanakeeran near Pomeroy, and it involved a small brick of butter of dimensions similar to those of a squat one-pound packet of later years. In the neighbouring county of Fermanagh, finds appear to have been very few; there are no mentions in the relevant volumes of the Ordnance Survey Memoirs. The sole example revealed in the present survey emerged in 1940 when a Frank McCusker found 25 pounds of old butter in a bog at Feddan in the parish of Derryvullan near Enniskillen. This find was notable both for its above-average size and for the elaborate hot-wire art-work that adorned the rim of its open container.³¹ Occurrences appear also to have been few in counties Monaghan and Cavan. However, in the former a quantity of the substance was found about 1965 at a depth of four feet in the townland of Corlea.³² The container in this case was quite an elaborate wooden vessel with sloping shoulders, a short vertical neck, and perforated ridges on either side. In complete contrast, a find at Enagh in County Cavan about 1959 was contained in the bladder of an animal;³³ it is possible that the bladder had also been used as a ‘shake churn’.

A search of the published Ordnance Survey Memoirs for County Donegal failed to reveal any references to discoveries of bog butter in that county in the 1830s. However, in more recent times the National Museum of Ireland has taken in many parcels of bog butter from the county, one such being the contents of the elaborate churn found in Glenveigh Bog on Gartan Mountain in 1957.³⁴ And an indication that the age of finds is still not ended came in April 1994 when the Belfast Telegraph reported the discovery of a quantity of over 40 pounds of old butter by Falcarragh farmer Peter Ferry as he prepared the bog for the start of the turf-cutting season.³⁵

Many reports on the discovery of bog butter include references to the properties of the substance and to its general state when brought to the surface. Occasionally it has been described as more like cheese than butter. In other cases a similarity to lard has been mentioned. Frequently there are references to a hard skin on the surface. Edward Clibborn, curator of the Royal Irish Academy’s museum in Dublin in the middle of the 19th century, claimed to have tasted many samples and to have found them invariably ‘rancid or acid’ but generally free from other strong flavours including saltiness.³⁶ Chemical analysis of a very limited number of samples has confirmed the absence of salt.³⁷,³⁸ However, that does not necessarily mean that these characteristics were absent in the original butters, since salt could have been leached out and volatile flavours dissipated by prolonged storage in the damp environment of the bogs. On the other hand, an undesirable contaminant has been shown to survive without change; namely hairs from the cows that gave the milk from which the butter was made.³⁹,⁴⁰ In the two cases recorded the colour of the hairs was red, which may provide a pointer to the type of cows involved.

The records of discoveries in the early decades of the 19th century also contain interesting comments on the state of the substance at the time of its emergence, the most frequent being that the butter was ‘mouldered’, decayed, or otherwise unusable. By contrast, the second most frequent comment is that the butter was sold to a chandler in the nearest market town. It is hoped that the word ‘chandler’ in those cases meant ‘a maker of candles’ rather than ‘a supplier to seafarers’. The choice between the alternatives hangs on whether the economics of candle-making would have sustained a price for bog butter that was approximately half the price of fresh butter, such a price having been recorded on several occasions. In other cases the ancient butter was said to have been used as a fuel for candles at home; or for polishing shoes; or for greasing cartwheels; or even ‘as a remedy to relieve pains in the bones of various persons’!

Estyn Evans, professor of geography at the Queen’s University of Belfast from 1945 to 1968, once described the bog-butter phenomenon as ‘mysterious’: ‘None of the discoveries which occasionally astonish the turf-cutter and relieve the monotony of his labours is more mysterious than ... bog butter’, he wrote in 1957.⁴¹ ‘Mysterious’ is the appropriate word, for no-one knows exactly why butter was left in bogs, and only recently have we begun to appreciate how long some of it has been there: Dr Caroline Earwood carried out a massive survey of the information available on 274 examples of bog butter known to museums or described in the literature in Ireland and Scotland, with particular reference to the containers in which the substance was found. From the typology of the containers combined with carbon dating of representative examples of the contents, she has developed a new understanding of the antiquity of the bog-butter phenomenon.⁴² Estyn Evans himself expressed the view that the main reason for burying butter was no more complex than a desire to save summer surplus for consumption in the early months of the following year,⁴³ a practice still prevalent today but achieved now through the refrigerated cold-store. However, the noted geographer also thought it probable that some of the deposits – particularly those left in ornate containers or without any container at all – were not meant to be recovered, but were to be seen as superstitious offerings to the bogs, perhaps to induce more abundant pastures in the future. In this connection Evans also believed that there was a close association between bog butter and the ancient farming custom of ‘booleying’ or keeping grazing cows on common pastures in the mountains and on the fringes of bogs during the summer months.⁴⁴

Another oft-quoted theory is that the purpose of burying butter was to preserve it for an indefinite period in circumstances where salt was not available or could not be afforded. An elaboration of this theory claimed that herbs such as garlic were incorporated into the butter as an alternative to salt,⁴⁵ both to act as a preservative and to confer a strong and distinctive flavour. Professor O’Shea supported that theory in his paper on ‘Old Irish buttermaking’;⁴⁶ and there is evidence for it in more ancient writings. For example, in a strange publication entitled The Irish Hudibras: A Description of the Western Isle, William Moffet in 1755 wrote these lines about the riches of a typical Irish gentleman of that period:

But let his faith be good or bad,

He in his house great plenty had,

Of burnt oat-bread, and butter found

With garlick mixt, in boggy ground,

So strong, a dog, with help of wind

By scenting out, with ease might find:

And this they count the bravest meat

That hungry mortals e’er did eat.

Here then is lilting evidence of an association between butter, garlic, and the bog, whatever its exact significance!

Professor O’Shea suggested too that there could well have been a religious angle to the practice, with the highly flavoured butter ultimately being used as Lenten fare. That thought may have been inspired by the writings of Thomas Dineley on his journeyings in Ireland about 1680, in which he noted that the Irish diet included ‘Butter layd up in wicker basketts, mixed with … a sort of garlick, and buried for some time in a bog, to make a provision of an high taste for Lent’.⁴⁷ But another couplet from Moffet’s Hudibras indicates a more mundane use for the stored product: this states with disarming simplicity that

Butter to eat with their hog

Was seven years buried in a bog.

The answer may of course be that both pigmeat and highly flavoured butter featured in ancient Lenten feasts.

Yet another possible explanation of butter burials was given by the most distinguished of the 17th century English commentators on the Irish scene: Sir William Petty, a Fellow of the Royal Society who had held the office of Surveyor-General of the Kingdom of Ireland. His explanation was simply that the Irish liked a strong-flavoured butter and achieved this by storing the product in a bog until it became very rancid.⁴⁸ But in direct contradiction of that uncomplicated theory, Edward Clibborn, writing in the middle of the 19th century,⁴⁹ referred to earlier evidence that the purpose of the practice was to ‘sweeten’ the butter by allowing unsavoury flavours such as those of wild garlic and other weeds consumed by the cows to be dissipated. And Father O’Laverty, on the strength of a verbal report from India about a similar practice in Assam, became converted to the theory that the purpose of burying the butter was to allow it not only to mature, but also to become more nutritious.⁵⁰ In effect, however, there is only a shade of difference between this and Sir William Petty’s explanation, since the development of rancidity could be construed as ‘maturing’, and the chemical changes involved in that process could be seen as making the product marginally easier to digest. Perhaps, therefore, the last word on the flavour question should be that whatever the nature of the butter before its entombment, the substance that emerges centuries later is rancid and saltless, cheese-like, and free from discernible odours of garlic or other plants.

Reverting to possible reasons for burying the butter in the first place, it is necessary also to consider whether the practice was associated with periods of conflict in Irish history. Confiscation of livestock and food supplies was certainly used as a weapon against the indigenous population in the Cromwellian and Williamite wars in Ireland, and presumably also in earlier conflicts. At that time butter was still a vital element in the Irish diet; there would therefore have been good reason for attempting to conceal supplies from marauding forces. That could provide the explanation for at least a proportion of the butter found in bogs, but there are weaknesses in the theory. As Professor Evans has pointed out,⁵¹ it is surprising that other valuable possessions of the ordinary people have not been found concealed in bogs if security was indeed the motivation for burying butter. Moreover, it is hard to believe that if butter was buried only during periods of conflict rather than as an ongoing