A Gallery Of Images
All the images come from various pages on my web site
They include images from :
Art Page
Achill Art Page
Achill Photos Page
and also the Achill Turf Information Pages
Fields showing lazybeds in Cashel, Achill
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Fields Showing Lazybeds In Cashel, Achill Island.
In past times each house had its stripe (strip) of land. This was used to grow cereals, potatos and other vegetables. The method of cultivation was called lazybeds. Although this type of cultivation has ceased to be used in the past 20 years, except by the very few, the results of the lazybeds - the shadows of the ridges - can still be seen in some of the fields. Lazybeds required a lot of hard work - and so every family needed many strong sons to dig the land - that is not to say that the female gender had things easy - far from it!
The reason why lazybeds were used for cultivation, as far as I can figure out, is because firstly, there is a lot of wet weather in Achill so high beds and deep trenches would encourage drainage, and secondly, since the depth of soil is very shallow in places, digging trenches automatically increases the depth of the soil in the beds. It is tough work!
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