New life on old Feakle farm

A FEAKLE FARM celebrated new life as it welcomed its first new born calf in forty years.

Batt and Dan O’Shea farmed on land in Magherabaun in Feakle, they died in the 1990s and their last owned cows before them in the 1980s.

Now Paula Carroll and her family reside on the same land and over the weekend they experienced what could be described as a magical moment with new life born on the farm on Friday for the first time in four decades.

Paula explained, “there has been no calf born on this farm for probably 40 years. Until today, when this lovely 12 year old Belgian Blue Mammy gave birth to this little girl, unobserved and without a bother on her. The neighbours were called and we stood and gazed and talked and felt blessed. All us non-farmers in this place where farming is now a memory”.

“Old place new life,” she remarked.

Scariff’s Jim Collins recalled that over a hundred years ago the sister of his grandmother Ellen Rodgers married O’Shea and moved into the same land, her two sons were Dan and Batt, first cousins of Jim’s father.