National Ploughing Championships (November-2009)
Transition Years donned their wellies and went on an unusual outing recently- to the National Ploughing Championships!
The event took place on a 600-acre site at Cardenton near Athy, Co Kildare, very close to where it was first held 78 years ago. There were over 900 trade stands at the show, in addition to the 300 competitors who took part in events over the 3 days. City Girls down on the farm by Yasmin My teacher Geoffrey McCormick brought my classmates and me, in his wife's car, to the ploughing championships in Athy where my maths teacher Maggie Owen lives. We went to her house and her house is very nice, it is posh like a country house. Maggie made breakfast for all of us before we set off to the ploughing. I asked Maggie if I could see her whole house and she said no problem, Maggie has showed us around the rooms. After that, we went to what was known as the purple car park and we walked to the ploughing. We could see the funfair out on the field and I was so excited because I wanted to go there. Maggie asked the woman who was a charge of the ploughing if the entrance could be reduced because we are deaf. Usually students who go to the ploughing championships pays €15, so the woman looked at us and saw Karen and Sabrina were using sign language. She finally told Maggie the total for our group was €30, and Maggie paid for it and we owned her €5. This was a good prize and we had to admit that we were lucky. Most of the people there were at the farm machinery and stalls and we looked around. First thing me, Sabrina, Leesa and Karen wanted to go to funfair. The funfair was in another field. We had to walk a long way, it was too crowded round about 60,000, wow, that's a lot. Maggie kept pointing to the place where she wanted to go, she said ooh look at that. I am sure Geoffrey was like 'Oh my god, that's so girly', poor him, he was the only one man and 5 of us were women. We went to the funfair Geoffrey and Maggie looked after our bags, phones, scarf and whatever we couldn't hold. We only went in two rides at the funfair because there were long queues. We went to the cows competition, they have nose piercing, yuck... I saw something with one cow, I have to say that he was trying to humped other cow. We met Maggie and Geoffrey and we had our lunch. When I ate my curry chips, mmm, it tasted gorgeous ha-ha.... I looked around us and it reminded me of an Oxygen concert in Kildare ( I am not sure) every summer because of the way people sit on the grass, talking and eating. There were food shops and ice cream vans, it definitely looked like Oxygen. I never went to Oxygen but I have seen pictures in newspapers and it looked relax and people have fun. We met Maggie's sister, her partner and her daughter. We walked around and looked at all the stalls. Leesa bought a giant pink football. We bought drinks and took pictures and things like that. We went to Maggie house again to drop her, and then we went straight home. We did have a great day.
