Mummers
Edwina Guckian
You’d hear them coming down the road; their music, drums and cheering echoing round the frosty hills. Some Christmas nights I’d imagine I heard them with the anticipation of their arrival but when they did come my heart would be racing with excitement and fright, a bit like the possibility of meeting Santy! A blur of straw, ribbons, rags, meal bags, bailing twine, net curtains, tea towels, jackets inside out, one welly, one boot, tinsel, skirts on harry legs, black faces, white eyes; were they men or women and how many exactly of them there were I could never tell.
As a child I always knew it was my grandad playing the fiddle when he came in disguise to our house at Christmas with the Mummers. I knew his boots and his long fingers crouched across the strings, moving so gently and inconspicuously, much like how he moved himself.
They would sing, dance, play music, tell stories and bring lots of devilment into our home. We’d feed them and giving them some money and wave them off down the road to the next house they thought would welcome them with a trail of straw left behind them. The Mummers went from house to house across the 12 days of Christmas, the Wren Boys hunted the wren on St. Stephen’s Day, the Biddy Boys on St. Brigid’s Eve and the Strawboys were all year round for weddings and wakes. But they all had much the same goal; to bring good luck to your family and your home for the next year.
In our house, waking up on St. Stephen’s Day was just as exciting as Christmas Day. My cousins and I would spend weeks planning the route we’d travel, designing our costumes, practicing songs and tunes on our tin whistles, finding the right tin for collecting the money and praying for dry weather for our day of wandering the roads. My mother regularly headed off at weekends with a bag of colourful clothing and a straw hat when the call came for the Strawboys to appear at a local wedding. I loved listening to her stories when she came home of the craic they had. When I was 10 I finally got called up to the Strawboy squad. This group of people I performed with for many years were all so talented in their music, song and dance. They didn’t see themselves as professionals; they were just people who kept traditions going in their areas but they had a huge influence on me. They were also the biggest collection of Leitrim and Roscommon messers you could come across therefore making the perfect clatter of Strawboys. I have the best of memories from these times and revisit them often. As these Strawboys got older they stepped back from their roles in the hope the next generation might carry it on. Times change, ways of life change, interest fades, generations move away, memories and stories are lost and it’s as simple as that for a tradition to die out in an area.
Over the past 7 years at Áirc Damhsa Culture Club I’ve been working on the revival of these traditions with the youth of the area. Not that it took much persuasion; they jumped at the opportunity. Every Christmas 300 children dressed from the club, dressed in disguise, travel from house to house in their locality and visit nursing homes and hospitals across the west and midlands bringing music song and dance to many of those that were once mummers themselves. What has been our biggest challenge over the year is finding someone to make the straw hats.
In February 2019 a lady from the Heritage Council of Ireland came to my grandfather’s old workshop at the side of our house with a van load of straw and taught me the basic skills needed to make the hats and skirts of the mummers. Once you have those you can then work on your own designs. Like many of the crafts made from straw, the hat starts with the making of a straw rope. This was something I had done since I was a child on our farm. Twisting the handle rhythmically as my grandfather and father fed the hay into the rope and reversed slowly away from me. I wanted to pass on my newly learned skills to the youths at the club so that they too could all make their own hats and costumes but sourcing straw was the issue. Modern harvesting means the oats are no longer cut by hand but mulched into bales. The straw the Heritage Council lady brought to me had to be sourced in England. Sitting at the table that night sharing my straw problems with my family my dad said “Sure why don’t you just grow it yourself!”. Now, I’m pretty sure that’s something my father possibly looks back and slightly regrets saying, for all the work I’ve put him through since and the swarths of land I’ve “borrowed” from him for growing oats, not that he’d ever say it. But this is where the project began “Sowing the Seed”.
I planned a Meitheal; to gather a few friends, prepare the soil and set about sowing oat seed that March 2019 but Covid 19 halted that idea fairly fast. Instead, I turned my mind to researching the strawing traditions of Ireland. The very people I was reading about at the time, those rural people that kept these strawing traditions alive, were the very people now under severe restrictions in a frightened world; being isolated in their homes, not allowed to leave and not allowed visitors. And so I joined my great friends and musicians Fionnuala Maxwell and Brian Mostyn for a year of road trips across Leitrim calling from house to house as the Modern Day Mummers. We sang, danced, played tunes and chatted on the door steps of Leitrim’s oldest generation dressed in the straw costumes that I had made in February. The welcomes were heart - warming. They opened the doors with smiles, some peeped out curtains, others tried their best to invite us in for tea, they laughed, cried, danced, clapped along, some took out their instruments and joined us, others just wanted to spend the day talking and a few even asked if they could come with us for the day. It did as much good for the 3 of us as it did for them. While the pandemic is a year the world will never forget, I will always remember it for that wonderful generation of people I was blessed to meet across the county and all they shared with us during such a vulnerable time.
In Spring 2021, Creative Ireland and Leitrim County Council provided me with funding to buy oat seed. With the help of Fionnuala & Brian, we put a call out to people and communities across Leitrim to join the project and set about distributing the seed at several locations from the top to the bottom of the county. There was even some smugglers at the distribution points sending seed over to Roscommon! Over 150 people are now taking part with many joining in from outside Leitrim too. We set up a What’s App group for the participants which was a great way of all the members keeping in touch with each other, asking questions and sharing their progress and advice. We’ve just completed this year’s harvest and there are now many stooks of oats hanging from the rafters in sheds across Leitrim waiting for their day to come. Thanks to the continuous support of Leitrim County Council, Creative Ireland and The Arts Council, over the next year we are hosting talks for the group with professional oat growers, historians on straw in Irish folk traditions, workshops in harvest knot making and mummers costumes, trips to the National Folk Museum, commission visual artists to create new work using straw and oats, visit and interview people that kept the mumming traditions alive in Leitrim particularly those around Kiltyclogher and more. Fionnuala and I are currently researching Henry Glassie’s writings on the mummering traditions during his time in Fermanagh as well as the traditions around the Mummers’ Play with the aim of us writing a modern version of this with new Mummers’ songs and dances to accompany it. We hope to hand this over the community groups in Leitrim and have folk drama once again appearing in homes at Christmas with the resurrection of Mummers groups across the county. Other group members are travelling different paths with this project. Some are researching the effects of growing oats on soil quality while others are more interested in the uses for oats in food, farming uses and the mills that once operated in Leitrim. There are so many paths to travel within the project with very exciting outcomes that can have a big impact on a community but at the end of the day it all starts with the simple act of sowing the oat seed.
In Spring 2022 we’ll once again be distributing the oat seed across Leitrim and all are welcome to join the project.
www.sowingtheseedproject.com