Bottle hunters look away!

Saoirse

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Not technically about finding bottles but it is related...

I grew up in rural Ireland and as kids in the early 70’s autumn was our favourite time of year. Why? Well all the berries would be ripe for the picking and there were a few ways of earning a couple of shillings with them.

The most lucrative was to collect as many blackberries as possible and deliver them by the bucket load to the local hardware store owner. He then sold them on to someone else who used them to make dye for wool. He paid by the pound and half ripe, semi rotten blackberries were welcome (with the occasional handful of sand thrown in there to increase the weight!) unlike the other revenue stream which involves bottles, which I’ll come to in a minute.

I seem to remember it was 5 pence (a nickel in American money) a pound which in those days was a small fortune and if you were picking 5 pounds a day well you were the richest kid in on the block by a country mile! Most of my earnings were spent on fishing gear and new inner tubes and patches for my bike, happy and simpler times…

On to the bottle related part of this short story…

My Uncle owned a large farm that had been in the family for many generations, handed down from father to son ad infinitum. Parts of this farm were extremely remote, hilly and generally not used for anything except to graze sheep on. In the centuries gone past Poitín (Moonshine to the Americans) was a popular but highly illegal drink that was distilled all over remote parts of Ireland and parts of my uncles farm were no exception. Poitín generally was not bottled on site as it was much harder to transport bottles on a donkey than in a milk churn. However, nearer civilization there would be a ‘bottling plant’ (In the loosest sense of the word) which was usually a long ago abandoned shed, still quite remote but close enough to civilization to make it feasible. Bottles used were what you could get your hands on, old medicine bottles, bottles that had contained medicine for cattle, old jars, anything that was glass and a cork or something else could be used as a lid to seal it was pressed into service. Many old timers insisted on the Poitín maker reusing his old bottle.

Once bottled some of the stock was buried in the ground, the safest place for it, to keep it away from prying eyes and was slowly dug up over the winter as and when it was needed or to be sold.

Remember the blackberries? How does this tie into the bottles?

Onto the other revenue stream from blackberries, - Jam.
During the autumn my aunty would make blackberry jam and as there was never enough jars she would pay us 1 penny for every jar that we could find and bring back to her kitchen so she could wash and scald them in boiling water to sterilize them, in readiness to be filled with blackberry jam.

Well we knew the location of all those old stills and where the ‘bottling plants’ were located and we were always sure to find some jars there, as well as those old medicine bottles etc.

While we hunted for jars we put aside all the old bottles we would find, we had plans for those at the end of the day! The bottles were no use to us, only the jars had any value so after a long days jar hunting we would set up all those old bottles on a wall or a hillock and take turns throwing stones at them to see who was the best shot, we had a mini league that went on all autumn so you can imagine how many old bottles got destroyed during the bottle breaking season…
 
Last edited:
Not technically about finding bottles but it is related...

I grew up in rural Ireland and as kids in the early 70’s autumn was our favourite time of year. Why? Well all the berries would be ripe for the picking and there were a few ways of earning a couple of shillings with them.

The most lucrative was to collect as many blackberries as possible and deliver them by the bucket load to the local hardware store owner. He then sold them on to someone else who used them to make dye for wool. He paid by the pound and half ripe, semi rotten blackberries were welcome (with the occasional handful of sand thrown in there to increase the weight!) unlike the other revenue stream which involves bottles, which I’ll come to in a minute.

I seem to remember it was 5 pence (a nickel in American money) a pound which in those days was a small fortune and if you were picking 5 pounds a day well you were the richest kid in on the block by a country mile! Most of my earnings were spent on fishing gear and new inner tubes and patches for my bike, happy and simpler times…

On to the bottle related part of this short story…

My Uncle owned a large farm that had been in the family for many generations, handed down from father to son ad infinitum. Parts of this farm were extremely remote, hilly and generally not used for anything except to graze sheep on. In the centuries gone past Poitín (Moonshine to the Americans) was a popular but highly illegal drink that was distilled all over remote parts of Ireland and parts of my uncles farm were no exception. Poitín generally was not bottled on site as it was much harder to transport bottles on a donkey than in a milk churn. However, nearer civilization there would be a ‘bottling plant’ (In the loosest sense of the word) which was usually a long ago abandoned shed, still quite remote but close enough to civilization to make it feasible. Bottles used were what you could get your hands on, old medicine bottles, bottles that had contained medicine for cattle, old jars, anything that was glass and a cork or something else could be used as a lid to seal it was pressed into service. Many old timers insisted on the Poitín maker reusing his old bottle.

Once bottled some of the stock was buried in the ground, the safest place for it, to keep it away from prying eyes and was slowly dug up over the winter as and when it was needed or to be sold.

Remember the blackberries? How does this tie into the bottles?

Onto the other revenue stream from blackberries, - Jam.
During the autumn my aunty would make blackberry jam and as there was never enough jars she would pay us 1 penny for every jar that we could find and bring back to her kitchen so she could wash and scald them in boiling water to sterilize them, in readiness to be filled with blackberry jam.

Well we knew the location of all those old stills and where the ‘bottling plants’ were located and we were always sure to find some jars there, as well as those old medicine bottles etc.

While we hunted for jars we put aside all the old bottles we would find, we had plans for those at the end of the day! The bottles were no use to us, only the jars had any value so after a long days jar hunting we would set up all those old bottles on a wall or a hillock and take turns throwing stones at them to see who was the best shot, we had a mini league that went on all autumn so you can imagine how many old bottles got destroyed during the bottle breaking season…

Great story and memories.

Quite often I find a surface bottle dump with all the bottles broken. Invariably, I will also find the brick (s) the kids used to smash the bottles so long ago. What you describe is a common site to these eyes. :(
 
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