To celebrate Heritage Week 2025, and this year’s theme ‘Exploring Our Foundations’, we thought it would be nice to look back at the tradition of haymaking on farms, which has taken place in Ireland for several centuries and forms part of our cultural and natural heritage.
Traditional hay meadows, where grasses and other plants were grown to be cut and dried, supplied essential winter fodder for livestock. They were also valuable for biodiversity due to the variety and abundance of flowers and seeds they produce. This offered great benefits to wildlife, especially pollinators like the Large Carder Bee (Bombus muscorum) and birds like the Corncrake (Crex crex).
Keeping it local
Haymaking was a major event in the farming calendar and many of the hand tools, machinery and processes had their own local names. Much of this heritage has been passed down the generations by storytelling, writing and through old photographs.
Choosing the right field
When the time came to choose a field, a farmer would set aside a field for the summer crop of hay making sure to exclude any livestock. The field may have been given a light feed of farmyard manure in the spring. When the meadow grew tall with grasses and wildflowers, they were cut down manually using a scythe and later grass cutting machinery was used, at first pulled by horse and later by tractor.
A waiting game
Before cutting, the farmer would watch the skies and wait for a settled period of weather to avoid too much sun, or rain on cut grass which would wash out the nutrients. When the weather was right, mowing would begin and the pressure would be on to work as quickly as possible. To get good hay they wanted to avoid overworking the hay by hand or with machinery.
Team work
This was a busy time, and a farmer often formed a partnership with his neighbour, exchanging labour, horses and machinery on a day-to-day basis. It was possible to have four or five people working in the meadow to make the hay, but if the crop was heavy or bad weather was due, even more help would be needed. A tea break was a crucial part of the day to keep the team refreshed, well fed and rested.
Gathering the hay in
The hand tool of choice was the pitch fork (or pike) for turning and shaking the hay. There were also several types of hay turners and kickers around at that time, some pulled by one or two horses as they were slowly replacing manual power. Today hay making is mostly a one-person operation.
Hay was usually turned for four days after cutting to allow it to dry. A horse drawn hay rack had teeth that could be lowered and raised and was used to bring the hay to a small pile, known as a peek (or other local names including haycocks, dragon cocks, cociní, cockeens, cutyeens or lapcocks). The hay had to be completely dry before being gathered in. If it was too wet it could overheat, or rot.
Hay ropes (or Súgáns) were twisted and thrown over the hay stacks to make them secure before being pulled by the ruck shifter unto the cart and into a hayshed or larger haystacks.
In the farmyard the hay was forked off the ruck shifter on to the dry mud floor, then built into the hayshed, filling one link of the shed at a time.
Saving hay seed
Hay seeds were primarily sourced from existing hay meadows, sometimes with the sweepings from the hay shed or loft and putting them into bags, or allowed to naturally regenerate, or depending on being naturally colonised from nearby grasslands.
The farmer might also collect seed directly from his own or a neighbour’s meadow or use a method called ‘green hay’ where freshly cut hay containing seeds was spread on a new or restored meadow.
Making the hay in the 1930s
An old letter dating back to 1937 reveals a lot about hay making at the time. It shows a discussion between two cousins, one of whom had emigrated to America while the other remained in County Antrim.
Sam, the Antrim farmer, writes about how difficult it was to get help on the farm, so he worked with a neighbouring farmer, and they got through the hay work in 1937 without too much bother:
“Between him and his neighbour, they put up about 220 ricks of hay and had it all in on the 11th of September”.
Sam sold 35 ricks to one neighbour and 25 to another. He seems delighted that he had not too much to put in and thinks he will have some more seed hay to sell.
Haymaking in the future
It’s lovely to look back and remember the older traditions and heritage around hay making that lay at the heart of many rural communities during summers past.
Many hay meadows have been lost over the last 50 years due to agricultural changes, mainly the intensification of land to increase production, and land abandonment.
With greater awareness of declining biodiversity and pollinators, and a need to be less reliant on inorganic fertilisers and herbicides, interest is growing in retaining, restoring and managing grassland areas to become more species-rich not just on farmland, but in community spaces and private gardens. Allowing meadows to develop and grow through spring and summer then cut from mid-July to September will bring huge benefits to pollinators.
It’s also encouraging to see agri-environmental schemes rewarding farmers who retain low input grassland, with more diverse swards having a greater value. Old grasslands may also have a considerable heritage value containing ancient field systems or feature stones.
Many rural and urban communities are now carefully managing grasslands. Simply changing the management and allowing existing wildflowers and grasses to grow will add pockets of these important habitats, providing pollinators with an important abundance of wildflowers like wild clovers, vetches and trefoils. This vital work will help form a network of wonderful species-rich grasslands that are so valuable for pollinators, and our heritage.
Haymaking may no longer be as important in the farming calendar, but it is far from a forgotten art. The skill of using a scythe is still taught and celebrated in the National Scything Championship and haymaking festivals in Trim, Callan and Omagh. The skill of haymaking is being kept alive for future generations.
Photo credits: Wilson family, Co. Antrim.
To find out more about species-rich grasslands and meadows
How-to-guide. Creating and restoring meadows in local communities and gardens
