Lumper

There were owners of lines of schooners, large contributors to the societies, and small men, their few craft pawned to the mastheads, with bankers and marine-insurance agents, captains of tugs and water-boats, riggers, fitters, lumpers, salters, boat-builders, and coopers, and all the mixed population of the water-front.

Over piggeries, and mixens, and apples, and hay, / They lumpered straight into the night; / And finding bylong where a halter-path lay, / At dawn reached Tim's house […]

But, my dear woman, why ever have ye come lumpering up to Rainbarrows at this time o' night?

Lord, what's the good o' my lumpering all the way to church and back again, when I'm as deaf as a plock?

“Over there I'm growing Lumper,” he tells us as we look across potato rows growing between poplar windbreaks.

The Lumper, as they call this particular variety of pots, is a symbol of this Irish dilemma, for this is the infamous potato that failed in the 1840s and caused the great famine. The Lumper is therefore one of the most historic of all the heirloom potato varieties now preserved under the careful eye of historic museums and potato enthusiasts alike, myself included.

In the 1840s, however, these two counties were among the worst affected when Ireland's potatoes -- those big floury Lumpers that sustained millions -- began to rot.