The Farmer Who Fished by Moonlight

The men of Cill Chaoil (Kilkeel — ‘the narrow church’) and Áth an Loinge (Annalong — ‘the ford of the ship’) did not choose between the mountain and the sea. They did both. By day, they worked small farms on the steep slopes above the coast — a few acres of rough grazing, a potato patch, a strip of oats. By season, they fished. When the herring ran in late summer and autumn, every man with a skiff was on the water before dawn, and the harbours blazed with lantern light long before the sun came up.

This was not hobby fishing. It was survival. The farms on the lower slopes of the Mournes were too small and too poor to sustain a family alone. The sea provided the difference between getting by and going hungry. For generations, this dual identity — farmer and fisherman, mountain and tide — was the defining rhythm of life along the Mourne coast.

The herring season was the hinge of the year. From late July through November, vast shoals of herring moved along the County Down coast, and the harbours at Kilkeel and Annalong came alive. Men who had spent the morning bringing in hay would be at the harbour by late afternoon, readying lines and nets. Wives, mothers, and daughters gutted and salted the catch by lantern light at the quayside, working through the night to pack barrels before the fish spoiled.

The boats were small — open skiffs, many built locally from Mourne timber and pitch. A man might row out with his sons, drift with nets under the moonlight, and haul the catch before first light. On a good night, the harbour would be so full of boats that you could walk across the water from deck to deck. On a bad night, the sea took someone's father, and the village would know before breakfast.

The calendar of the Mourne coast was not measured in months but in tasks. Spring was for planting — potatoes in the lower fields, oats on the higher ground. Summer was for hay and for mending nets. Autumn was the herring — the season that could make or break a family's year. Winter was for repair: patching boats, fixing walls, surviving.

The harbours at Kilkeel and Annalong were the meeting point of these two worlds. A man might walk down from his farm with soil still on his boots, step onto a boat, and not return until the small hours. His hands knew the weight of a spade and the pull of a net in equal measure. There was no sharp distinction between land and sea — the two bled into each other, and the people moved between them as naturally as the tide.

The dual life has faded. Modern fishing is a full-time, specialist profession — the 105 boats still based at Kilkeel are crewed by professional fishermen working year-round, not farmer-fishers in skiffs. The farms above the coast are larger now, or abandoned, or converted. But the harbours themselves remain. Kilkeel is still the largest fishing port in Northern Ireland, still landing 55% of the province's catch. Annalong's harbour, built originally for the granite trade, still shelters a handful of working boats beneath its stone walls.

Walk the harbour wall at Kilkeel in the early morning and you will see the modern fleet coming in with the dawn, decks piled with prawns, crab, and lobster. The catch has changed — herring gave way to prawns in the 1950s, when fishermen started hauling strange creatures they called “creepy crawlies” out of their nets — but the harbour has not. The same stone quays that farmer-fishers rowed from two hundred years ago are still being landed on today.