In Eric Cross’ 1942 book The Tailor and Ansty, Irish tailor and storyteller Timothy Buckley recounts the wisdom held by the old Irish, before “the people got too bloodyful smart and educated, and let the government or anyone else do their thinking for them.” They had a way of reckoning time that advances from the rail of a fence to the age of the world:
A hound outlives three rails.
A horse outlives three hounds.
A jock outlives three horses.
A deer outlives three jocks.
An eagle outlives three deer.
A yew-tree outlives three eagles.
An old ridge in the ground outlives three yew-trees.
Three times the time that the sign of a ridge will be seen in the ground will be as long as from the beginning to the end of the world.
“The tailor is wildly off,” notes philosopher Robert P. Crease, “in his estimate of the age of the universe, which is unlikely to be (lifetime of the rail) × 38. Still, his point is well made that the old Irish unit system may possess certain superiorities to ours in that it was ‘reckoned on the things a man could see about him, so that, wherever he was, he had an almanac.'”