WRACK, TANG, OR JUST PLAIN SEAWEED

Jim Bennett describes an Irish Industry

IT WAS ON THE SEASHORE that man found his first foothold in Ireland. Out of sheer necessity he had to live by the sea, gathering cockles and mussels, digging for bait to enable him to catch fish.

During the long hard winters, and in the late spring, when fodder for the animals became scarce, the shore dwellers would bring the cattle, sheep and horses down to the beach where they could find edible seaweed as a substitute.

The Scottish farmers who settled in County Down at the time of the Plantation found that their sheep throve on this diet and kept fat all winter, where other animals, on a normal diet, would fail.

It has since been proved, by controlled experiments, that for animals, the food value of the knob wrack, Ascophyllum Nodosum, which grows near the high tide mark, is almost equal to that of fresh meadow hay, yet nowadays this valuable natural resource is almost completely neglected as an animal food.

Certain Species of seaweed are still gathered for human consumption: Chondrus’ Crispus (Careageen, or Irish moss), Porphyra, known as sloke, or layer, and Rhodymenia palmata, perhaps the most popular, which is sold as Dulse. Apart from the deliciously flavored Dulse, which is eaten raw, they can all be cooked and are usually served boiled with potatoes.

Much of the Dulse sold in seaside resorts in Northern Ireland comes from a little village in County Down called Ballywalter. A man there has been collecting the weed from the rocks a few miles off-shore for the past sixty years. Now a sprightly seventy- two, during the summer he still goes off at low-tide in his little outboard motor-boat, taking a friend along to help him cut the Rhodymenia which grows on the rocks.

Very often he sets out at four or five o’clock in the morning in order to catch the tide. Later, he makes a second trip during low tide in the afternoon, hard work indeed for a man well past retiring age; yet he told me recently that he has never had rheumatism despite the cold, damp nature of his work. The bout of influenza he had last year was the first illness he can ever remember. It shocked him so much that he thought the work must be getting too much for him and he almost gave it up. However, he has recovered from that depression; and he was soon hard at work again.

The SEAWEED is carried ashore in sacks and then laid out and stacked to let the surplus sea water drain away. Next, it is spread out on the stony foreshore, or along the harbour wall, to dry completely, which takes from two to six hours, according to the weather conditions. The dry Dulse is loaded into sacks and sent to Belfast, where it is packed into small paper bags for distribution round the resorts. During the busy tourist season it is just as common to see people walking along the streets eating Dulse as sweets, potato crisps or ices. One traditional place for the sale of Dulse is the Auld Lammas Fair at Ballycastle in County Antrim. This started as a hiring fair at which farm servants used to be taken on for a year by their masters. There were the usual attractions of a country fair, with gay stalls and peepshows, but two of its essentials were and still are, at the present day Dulse and ‘Yellow Man.’ The latter is a kind of toffee, bright yellow in colour. There is a well known Irish song about a young man taking his Mary Anne to the Lammas Fair at Ballycastle and treating her to Dulse and Yellow Man.

Besides being used for food, seaweed has long been known as a fertiliser. In coastal areas of lreland and Wales, in the Isles of Scilly and, doubtless, elsewhere, it is still used as such. The lanes, between their stone walls, which zig-zig down to the sea Shore, used to be known as wrack roads and fields near the shore always had a gate giving direct access to the sea. In some little bays, where the driftweed was known to collect, the Wrack Harvest was a time of merry making and noisy jollification.

It might also sometimes. develop into a time of squabbling and fighting, over the distribution of rights to collect in particular areas. Very often these were regulated by some complicated system. In places, for instance, weed beds were allocated in strips to different farmers, usually in proportion to the size of their farm holdings, and boulders used as boundary marks are still to be seen.

There was a time when seaweed was so vital to the success of the potato crop that a seaweed farm was established in County Down. This remarkable place was at the mouth if Carlingford Lough, in Mill Bay, where, at low tide, a large area of mud and sand was exposed.

The wrack beds were half-acre rectangles, set with rows if boulders, and they became so valuable that farmers would pay up to £10 for one bed; more, indeed, than he paid for the land on to which he spread the seaweed-fertiliser. One farmer was reported to have sold his wrack bed for £145!

Ideally, each farmer held three beds, one close inshore for the knob wrack, one a little farther out for the bladder wrack, and one out in the deep water, for lazy wrack, which, being always covered with sea water, grew much faster than the others.

‘The crop was harvested between March and June with knives and sickles. The reapers, who worked bare-footed, had also to reset the heavy boundary marks if the had become submerged in sand, as some times happened. The sand and mud were too soft to allow carts to come in and draw the weed away, so it was made into rafts and floated ashore with the tide.

In recent times, a Royal Air Force pilot who flew over the wrack beds reported that he had spotted submerged farms, or what seemed to of been little farms marked out by boulders, stretching away into the sea.

PERHAPS the most profitable way if exploiting seaweed lay in the production of kelp, by burning the species known as Laminaria. This practice continued down to recent times. It was big business among shore dwellers in the eighteenth century as kelp was then in demand for use in the manufacture of soap, glass and bleaching material.

Drying Dulse On The Peir

The thick, tangled weed was either thrown up by the winter storms, or cut, at low tide, by men using knives strapped on to long handles up to twenty feet in length, so that they could reach the best weeds which grew in deep water. The weeds were dragged ashore and dried over low stone walls, then ricked and thatched in the seem way as hay.

On dry summer days the weed was burnt in a kelp kiln, which was simply a narrow rectangle of stones, open at both ends. In this the kelp would burn for several hours, fresh weed being fed in a little it a time. It took about sixty tons of seaweed to produce one ton of kelp - another reason why kelp was so precious.

In the 1750s the rents were paid in kelp in one area of West Donegal. Any surplus that remained after the landlord’s demands had been met was bartered for the luxuries of tobacco and spirits.

THE Ashes, or kelp, of seaweed had some kind of preservative property: a book by Martin Martin on the Western Isles if Scotland tells how, at the end of the seventeenth century, seals, fish and sea fowl we’re found preserved in these ashes. It was also possible to preserve cheese by lapping it in tang, to use the old Norsemen’s word for sea wrack by which it a still sometimes known in Ireland.

One other further unorthodox use made of seaweed. Smugglers used to hide contraband under the’ great cart-loads of wrack being drawn away for fertiliser, an ideal way of taking the goods inland after they had arrived at the coast.