July Jeopardy - Frank McNally on this month's ominous reputation

Irish Times

2 days ago

For a month that brings high summer, July has some ominous names in Irish folklore. An mhí mhairbh (the dead month) is the most stark – if referring mainly to the heat, I think. But then there is 'the hungry month', another traditional description, denoting the end of the previous year's harvest supplies, when food used to be at its scarcest.
Hence also 'Staggering July' and 'the Yellow month'. The latter was
Buímhís
in Irish, which an 1830s diarist of rural Kilkenny, Humphrey O'Sullivan, tells us referred not just to the colour of the fields but to the faces of the poor in July. The 'blue month' was used too, apparently, for similar reasons.
I was reminded of this on a foraging walk in a place called Ballyhoe, on the Monaghan-Meath border, last weekend. Our host Emma Hoey, who also runs a lakeside yoga centre there, was lamenting the relative lack of plant life compared with teeming May or June, or even with the early autumn that August will bring.
Most of the surrounding hills were still green, at least. Off in the distance, meanwhile, on the Meath side of the lake, I was fascinated to see machinery turning several patches of yellow even yellower. Could the grain harvest have begun there already, in early July?
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Then the name of a semi-mythical townland, known in childhood but long forgotten, floated back to me. 'Where is Barleyhill?' I asked the group. 'You're looking at it,' someone said. And sure enough, they were harvesting barley on Barleyhill, as they have for centuries. But presumably a bit earlier than when this used to be the hungry month.
***
In northeastern Ireland, of course, July is also the Orange month, for reasons that have little to do with agriculture. The two have not always been unconnected, however, as I'm informed by a blog called The Fading Year. If July was the hungry month in Donegal too once, the blogger points out, it was also a thirsty month, when poitín production reached an annual climax.
Much of this happened in Inishowen, where remoteness from officialdom and ready access to ports created a huge cottage industry in the 19th century, with thousands of illegal poitín stills supplying local and export markets (Scotland in particular). A traditional risk of the trade was the plume of smoke that betrayed a still's location. Against which, the annual troubles across what was not yet the Border were an accidental ally.
In the book 70 Years of Life in Ireland (1893), William Le Fanu, quoted a distiller called Dolty MacGarvey. 'We always dry the malt in the beginning of July, when all the police are taken to Derry to put down the riots there; we can do it safely then,' MacGarvey explained. He added, in a sentiment pious Orangemen would echo: 'God is good, sir. God is good.'
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Paying amorous tribute to the month, a modern-day poet named Mundy celebrates another kind of harvest currently reaching its height in public parks: 'July please,/I'm on my knees./The smell of your fresh-cut grass./Your blue sky grins,/For all its sins/Look another gorgeous Levi ass.'
But it's interesting to note that, amid his song's general theme of male lust, there is throwaway mention of a 'mongrel' barking. Because to the ancient Greeks and Romans, July brought the 'Dog Days' of summer: so-called for the prominence of the dog star Sirius in northern hemisphere skies, but also because they were also thought to induce a dangerous desiccative condition in men similar to the effects of hydrophobia, aka rabies.
Roman historian Pliny the Elder warned of increased attacks by rabid dogs in July and August. But according to the Greeks, a man didn't have to be attacked by a dog to be vulnerable. This is because he faced an even bigger risk in high summer from the increased wantonness of women.
No less a person than Aristotle wrestled with the question of why, during the hottest days of the year, women seemed to become more interested in sex, at the very time that men were dangerously incapacitated.
He needn't have wondered. The answer had been provided centuries earlier by Hesiod, whose theory of the humours argued that men are naturally hot and dry, while women are innately wet and cold. The heat of the dog days therefore brought the female condition into equilibrium - piquing sexual appetite - while simultaneously enfeebling the male.
Perhaps, even in the era of global warming, the enfeebling effects of July are not a big problem in Ireland yet: Mundy's song certainly suggests otherwise. But the belief that men should avoid sex during the dog days spread even to northern countries and lasted into relatively modern times.
Consider The Husbandman's Practice, an 18th century guide for English farmers. It advised working men to 'abstain all this time from women', explaining: '…the heat of the sun is so fervent and violent that men's bodies at midnight sweat as at midday; and if they be hurt, they be more sick than at any other time, yea very near dead.'