Hundreds celebrated Apple Festival in North Tipperary over the weekend

Hundreds of people visited Cloughjordan Ecovillage last weekend to celebrate the annual harvest of the humble apple, at the Féile na nÚll. 

Locals and visitors alike came bearing bags, crates and even wheelbarrows full of fruit for pressing into juice by local food enterprise The Night Orchard. The apples were first pulped in a large grinder, then wrapped in square cloth bundles, stacked up between boards and compressed with a large hand-turned screw thread. The busy juicing team reckon some 600 litres were pressed on the day.

A number of new festival offerings proved very popular: the Riot Rye baking demonstration on how to make a wholemeal apple tart with Irish organic grain, a plant medicine walk by Su Huschke and a talk by Paul Lawford of Small Change who built his own off grid tiny house on wheels.

Festival goers were able to taste a selection of the 60 varieties of heritage apples that grow in the ecovillage, with names as charming as Finola Lee, Mrs Perry and Eight Square. There were tours of the ecovillage land including the research and education gardens managed by youtuber Bruce Darrell.

For art lovers the festival featured the premiere of Dancing The Orchard, a choreography produced by Instant Dissidence, and local dance artist Julie Lockett presented a series of her ‘landscores’ written in chalk on the ground and walls of the Enterprise Centre.  

The annual Apple Bake competition was won by local architect Caelan Bristow with her French apple cake with the under 18-year-old prize going to a Dublin visitor John James Clarke. Musician Shay Hannon, who has entered many apple pies over many years, won a special prize for best improver.