'Field Notes' from a farmer and footballer

David Carty's memoir of an Irish rural life

It is said that everyone has the writing of a book in them. David Carty knew he had a couple under his belt – his two-volume history of Skryne Gaelic Football Club, ‘The Blue Kings of Tara’. But he got a surprise to realise he had a short memoir published on Amazon this year, by Little Meadow Press.

Of course, it helps when you have a daughter and son-in-law working in the publishing industry and have also amassed a lifetime of diaries and notes from a farming and Gaelic footballing career, as well as recording the plain happenings of everyday life.

Karen Carty and Terry Foley of Anú Design got their hands on David’s life memories, and Karen carefully collected and curated the pieces, each one accompanied by a specially commissioned illustration by Terry.

David Carty, who captained Meath in the 1966 All-Ireland Senior Football Final against Galway, was born in the early 1940s into a busy farming family in Skryne. After studying at Warrenstown College, he spent almost 40 years working his family farm. Married to Olive, they have four daughters, and he has a great love of nature and the countryside.

The memoir is appropriately titled ‘Field Notes – Memoirs of An Irish Country Life', and David writes eloquently, and, as anyone who knows him will attest, with a characteristic humbleness and a deep integrity. He reminisces about his childhood his school days, his Gaelic football career and his family. That childhood was framed by an authoritarian 1950s Ireland where teachers and priest were invariably treated with great reverence – and in many cases, also an equally great fear and dread.

Characters from his childhood such as the Bus Man, Jack Lynch, and neighbours Tessy and Busco Loughran are recalled, are as Billy the farm workhorse, and haymaking time. The emotional morning in August 1969 when he was milking the cows and word came via a neighbour’s phone that his father, Tommy, his farming partner, had died in hospital. David’s Gaelic football career was a roller coaster of exhilarating highs and dispiriting lows. He has written about both with an unflinching honesty and stoicness.

The harsh words of some of the Dublin media after he was taken off the pitch during the 1966 All-Ireland rankled with him, but he also recalls the delight when he made the Meath senior football team in August 1961, in the Player Cup in Finglas, against Louth, ‘a boyhood dream realised’.

David’s stories, many simple, short and direct – though no less powerful for that – are precious insights into a life lived with a fast disappearing rural Irish world the book is an evocative and timely record for all with an interest in Irish heritage and country life.

The book is available on Amazon, click here