Farm Animals in the Town

It is interesting to try to recall the appearance of an almost completely motorless community. There were about 43 units in the farming community in Skerries and between them there were over one hundred working horses continuously moving around the area in their daily routine.

Add to that for six months of the year from November to May the twice daily movement of over a hundred cows to and from pasture to their sheds. It was then, and to a small extent still is, a peculiar feature of this town that many farmers had their homes and yards in the town and their land in scattered fields outside it.

Besides horses and cattle quite a number of people kept one or two pigs for fattening. These were either killed for their own consumption or sold to supplement the income.

Christy Fox (SHS, 1973)