Did the 'little people' help shape the charmed life of Ireland's oldest lady?

THE weary reporter took one last pull on his cigarette and tightened his scarf against the winter chill.

It was nearly Christmas, yet here he was at 9pm at night preparing to interview an old woman. An exceedingly old woman, in fact.

The year was 1931 and the local lady in question had celebrated her 101st birthday that September.

Sarah McCashin was widely believed to be Ireland’s oldest woman, and reaching that great age was undoubtedly worth a column inch or two - but the scribe’s expectations were low.

At best, he thought, he’d get a well rehearsed and half-heard line about the secret of her long life. Surely after all those years, time would have conspired to rob her of the memories of how she had spent them.

How wrong he was.

As he entered the house in Toome, ‘on the storied shores of Lough Neagh’, he was introduced to Sarah who was warming herself in an armchair by the cosy parlour fire.

She was ‘hale and hearty’, he discovered, and blessed with ‘wonderful health and vigour’. Better still, she was ‘possessed of a clear and retentive memory’.

Sarah spoke in a firm and strong voice and still read, he noticed, without the need for glasses. On her hand were rings worn thin by time, and she often touched them absent-mindedly as she chatted warmly.

Soon his busy pen began jotting down a colourful collage of an extraordinary life, well lived.

Sarah took him all the way back to the 1830s and her early days at Pleasant Mount House in Randalstown, where she spent much of her life.

Her father James Blaney was a prosperous farmer, and she inherited from him a love of telling stories.

Battle of Antrim

He often cast his mind back to the turbulent days in 1798 after the United Irishmen marched on Antrim.

After the rebellion was crushed, the after shocks were felt for many months as crown forces sought revenge on the insurgents and their families.

James heard that soldiers were marching on the home of Ned McGuiness, whose son had taken up arms in Antrim that fateful day.

He had survived but had fled - but that would not stop the conquering army from looting and destroying the family homestead.

James raced to see ‘old Ned’ to see if he could help him save the wealth of gold he had acquired by working what was considered the best farm holding in the district.

Noticing that the cabbage crop was doing well out in the field, the pair resolved to cut off the heads of the plants and hollow out the stalks with a knife creating a pocket to conceal the guineas.

And this novel approach was not in vain, for while his home was indeed burned to the ground, Ned’s life savings were lying safely in the fields for him to retrieve after the soldiers’ appetite for destruction was sated.

But while he had every sympathy for his neighbours, the Blaney family also had regard for the Crown. Indeed, seven-year-old Sarah accompanied her father to Dublin to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Coronation.

The city marked the occasion in style, with ‘flags and bunting displayed all over the capital’. It fuelled a love of the place and she often returned on the old mail coach which passed right passed her home.

Though the family were ‘not short of a penny’, James also taught her that money had to be earned.

“I had to do my share of the work - gathering flax and corn in the harvest time. I was up at 5 o’clock in the summer,” she said.

“We made our own butter and cheese, cured our own pork, butchered our own meat and I wasn’t idle.”

They lived well, but not extravagantly. The principal food was milk, oatmeal, wheatmeal porridge, home-made bread and potatoes.

Hard work and plain, natural living - that was the secret of her longevity.

Oh, and a ‘good cup of tea’.

“I remember when tea came out first and the way we brewed it then was to put a pound of tea on at a time in a large pot of water.

“It was boiled and strained and then served out to the family and servants.”

In those distant days ‘it was only used on rare occasions’ - and there was no such thing as teapots.

Things were very different, of course, for ‘Miss 1931’.

“Their mode of living, dress and style is entirely different from that of my young days,” said Sarah.

“Some of them would please me, and some of them wouldn’t. Most of them are very fine girls.

“I do not like to see them smoking. I detest that habit. As for the luxury of cocktail drinking, I would not tolerate it.”

Hell-fire Jack

Those modern girls, with their natty clothes and fast cars, lived life at a different pace - but along the way they missed the novelty of it all.

Not so for Sarah. She was there to see first hand old Ireland transform to the new.

Take the introduction of the newfangled steam trains, for example.

She was there to see history in the making. Literally.

The local woman and a friend, Miss Kane, had the distinction of being the first passengers to cross Toome bridge after the first single track was laid to County Tyrone.

“I cried with fright the whole way to Cookstown!” she recalled.

She added that it was a combination of the speed and the surroundings.

She and her companion were travelling in the engine itself, as there were no carriages attached - perilously close, she felt, to the roaring fire.

The driver told them not to be frightened ‘as the fire was not as big as the fire in hell’.

At the end of the white knuckle ride through the Ulster countryside, Sarah offered to pay for the historic run - but the man at the footplate shook his head.

“My name is Hell-fire Jack, and Hell-fire Jack never takes any money,” he said.

Quite an experience, to be sure, but there was much more to come.

Sarah then revealed, ‘in all seriousness’, another incident which may have shaped her long and charmed life.

Fairies in the garden

When she was younger she recalled there was a ‘firm belief in witches and fairies held by the peasantry’.

It was certainly a more superstitious age. There was ‘a general reliance’ placed on people endowed with the art of ‘tossing the teacups’ - that’s reading the tea leaves for portents of what is to come.

For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don't believe, no proof is possible.

As for Sarah, she had all the proof she needed.

She said she often listened to the music and ‘beautiful singing’ of the little folk during their evening revels at the foot of a certain apple tree in the garden of her home at Sharvogues in Randalstown.

Indeed, she was once warned by a ‘strange woman’ who called at her door one day not to interfere or cut down the tree as it belonged to the fairies.

In return, they made a very special offer.

At the behest of the Fairy Queen, the caller asked for the loan of her rings. They would be returned and would bring her great fortune.

Sarah agreed, and the next day came the same knock at the door and the valuables were returned.

And she maintained the fairies were good to their word.

“I can say in truth that I have had nothing but the best of luck, with money and everything in plenty,” said the 101-year-old.

Undoubtedly, Sarah did not have to count her pennies.

Her father’s brother, Hugh Blaney, was a spirit merchant who ran a fleet of boats plying between Belfast and Dublin. And business was good.

The Blaney millions

He amassed a huge fortune and when he died ‘scarcely a hospital, asylum, college or school’ in and around his native Dublin benefited from the ‘Blaney millions’.

Almost £1,000,000 was banked in Randalstown - an enormous sum in the 19th century.

The benevolence clearly rubbed off on Sarah too. When she moved to live with her daughter in Toome she made a gift of a large plot of land to the people of the Parish, on which the Parochial House and school were built.

But as she sat by the fire on that frosty evening, her guest sensed that he was in the presence of a woman comfortably spending ‘the evening of her days in happy, peaceful tranquility’.

Indeed, the scene reminded him of a poem he had once heard.

‘As a white candle in a holy place,

So is the beauty of an aged face;

As the spent radiance of the winter sun,

So is a woman with her travail done;

Her brood gone from her and her thoughts as still

As the waters under a ruined mill’.

But with the hour growing late, the reporter braced himself to leave - and Sarah thanked him for taking the time to visit.

‘Her only interest, she asserted, was to have a few friends round her to recount to them events of her lifetime, the memories of which so dear to her’.

And with that he was gone - and soon thereafter so was Sarah.

She finally slipped away the following April.

Her death, which was ‘widely regretted in the district’, was the result of a chill.

It comes to us all in the end - but not everyone can say they truly lived.

Sarah McCashin undoubtedly did.