That history thingy, a month that flew by and...

It has been a busy month, and I can't believe that we are now a month, give or take a day or two, off Christmas. Eeeek! 

This was Christmas 2010.

Christmas night 2011

This was October this year and it would suit me thoroughly if Christmas day looked something like this, even including the heron who was hell bent on cleaning out the pond at the foot of the garden!

Our village history exhibition takes place next week end, Grande Opening on Friday night, regrettably all flights to Bermuda were fully booked so it looks like we "Old Uns" will have to turn up.  We're on duty Friday night and Sunday morning.

It has been a rocky ride for the past six months.  Huge credit is due to the lady who is getting it all onto boards and into leaflets.  She has been adopted by us "Old Uns" for her attention to detail, sheer hard work and despite her weariness, never-ending sense of humour. We have taken her to our hearts.  She moved into the village two years ago and this has been, she tells me, the most joyous and wonderful way to get to know everyone here.

Things have not gone smoothly, despite the fact that we have bent over backwards to assist those who are not  living here  as long as we are, with our collective 300+ years. One thing that has aroused my blood pressure is the insistence, from a newcomer, that there must be some scandal to whet the appetites of those who will visit the exhibition.  If there is, we know it and we know it belongs where it is, in the past.  Does the world need to know that Myler's dog took a lump out of the Raider Kavanagh's heifers leg?  I don't think so.

I have been busy all month between visiting my late friend's Mum in the local hospital.  Three days after her 90th birthday this lovely lady took a very nasty fall.  That was on the 19th, and she is still in hospital and likely to remain so for another few weeks. 

 My aunt, who was widowed in September, is now living in the next town having moved from Kerry to live with her son at his insistence.  She is missing her husband of 57 years and her friends, we are both agreed though that this has been a wonderful opportunity for her and I to spend more time together.  She comes up to me for lunch on a Wednesday and we never notice the hours flying by.  She is my last connection with my parents.  My Father's youngest sister and my favourite aunt.  I have learned much about my Father and his youth in these past few weeks.  It has been a wonderful journey.

On Wednesday night Himself and I took ourselves off to a local hall to watch an amateur dramatic production of John B Keane's "The Year of the Hiker".  I am a huge fan of this wonderfully witty writer from Listowel, Co. Kerry.  "Big Maggie", "The Matchmaker", "Sive", "The Chastitute" and who can forget the film of his book "The Field" starring the incomparable Richard Harris, John Hurt and Sean Bean.  

Maurice Walsh, another Listowel man who wrote "Blackcock's Feather", "The Road to nowhere" and "While Rivers Run" catches my heart and my breath with his way with words.  Bryan McMahon - again from Listowel and his "The Honey Spike", John Millington Synge's "The Playboy of the Western World" and "Riders to the Sea" all captured my imagination when I was growing up. 

Maurice Walsh wrote the original story "The Quiet Man"  which went on to become the film which threw John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara together, not forgetting Barry Fitzgerald and a cast which brought a magic to this film.

Péig Sayers from Dun Chaoin on the Dingle peninsula wrote of her life there and on the Blasket Islands, and it was mandatory reading when I was in school.  The class groaned when the book landed on our desks, but to me it was manna from heaven.  Of all places on God's earth, the Dingle Peninsula in Co. Kerry is my soul home.  I could ask for nothing better as part of my education.  Time for another picture of....

...Peig Sayers very own Blasket Island - Na Blascaoid Mhór.  I wonder if anyone could ever guess where I get my love of the spoken word and the magic of literature from? 

...my Kerry-born Father.

The production was amateur but nonetheless enjoyable for that.  I was in whoops of laughter listening to some of the actors attempting to mimic a Kerry accent, God love them, they hadn't a hope with their posh East Coast accents.  Still, nil desperandum, they played their parts well - and John B's wit carries in any one's accent.

It was lovely to head out to the car park and only have to drive a half mile home afterwards.  On bitter November nights, with the icy wind howling down the streets, I find it increasingly less tempting to travel into Dublin city to see a play.  This is when "home entertainment" comes into its own.  A comfortable car with a good heater is another plus point.

With all the activity for the history group, as Ruth - one of my fellow "Old Uns" - said, "I find myself frequently thinking about the life and times of my Great-Grandmother".  On Wednesday night I thought of my theatre-loving Grandparents who would have travelled to the same hall, on a similar night, in pony and trap.  Hardy people.

A ramble, a few photos for Cáit, and whatever else comes to mind...

For Cáit O'Connor

Know that your Kerry ancestry will always soar over the Dingle Peninsula and that you are in our prayers and thoughts every day.

The Connor Pass, Dingle, Co. Kerry

Back towards Feoghanagh and the Múrioc

From the early days of the 'Coo, there has been a link and friendship between Cáit and I because of our Kerry ancestry.  The landscape in the picture is what creates the inspiration in our hearts, our minds and, indeed, every waking step we take.  It would be hard not to love such countryside.  When I read Cáit's lovely blogs I hear her Kerry soul.

Ireland is a small island of  some 3.5 million people, approximately, nestling some 66 miles east of Wales, 22 off Scotland at its northerly top and its west coast makes it the last parish before Newfoundland.  Legend has it that St. Brendan the navigator, whose statue rises above the harbour at Fenit in Tralee Bay, discovered Newfoundland centuries before Columbus touched the shores of America.  Legend also has it that he reached there in a namhóg, the Kerry/Irish language name for a currach or oilskin craft.  Tim Severin made a journey in a similar craft some years ago to see if it were possible that Brendan had achieved what he set out to do.

To my mind it is not beyond the bounds of possibility.  If the Polynesians could spread out across the vast Pacific, and the Vikings reach down into Europe, I am sure that most seafaring nations went out into the wide blue yonder, and if some never came back, well, for there to be a legend, someone must have come home.  Unfortunately, back in the day they were probably treated as the village eejit, told to stop boasting and no doubt, the village wit informed them that they had only sailed twenty miles down the coast.  If they were Irish, I wouldn't chance a bet on it...the village wit is still alive and well in Ireland today.

I was showing the latest tranche of photographs to someone recently, and the comment was passed, "but every time you go to Kerry you go to Slea Head and you take the same pictures of the same islands and the same old same old..."  Well, yes, maybe I do.  But the lovely thing, as Himself says, is that no two view are ever the same.  The light is constantly changing, and the colours are so rich that I have been accused of  making major touch up jobs.  No, Kerry is Kerry and she is beautify personified.  Not that I am biased, says she tongue in cheek!

The bovine gentleman grazing on the salted grass overlooking Smerwick Harbour, Slea Head, wins a place here for one simple reason.  It has been years, and years, since I have seen a live bull outdoors grazing with his lady friends.  For many years the guy from the Department and his little bottle of tricks has done the job.  I notice that there is a return to basics beginning to appear.  Some of it is, no doubt, a matter of finance for the farmer, and in other instances the growing desire for organic food is driving the return to what nature and God intended.  Bring it on, I say.  Man may be clever in his own mind to invent things in a test tube and to clone...but you can't beat the natural agenda.  As my Grand aunt Julia used to say "God made things simple when he made men", contrary to what you might think, Julia was married and not the village spinster.  She just felt that women had a better way of doing things, with the help of God of course.

Seeing the bull reminded me of the time when, as Secretary of the residents association where we used to live, I had cause to go with a neighbour and a man from the local council into a field.  A field with goats in it.  Also in the company was a man from the Very Big Important Building Firm who hoped to build 600 houses, Tudor design, in the green fields behind us.  We, the residents, were not too enamoured of this.  A meeting of mutually interested parties was convened, and I suggested we meet in the field.  Like all good Irish women, there is a malicious streak in me.  I knew there were goats in the field, after all wasn't I looking at them grazing there every day from my kitchen window across the hedge?

Thursday came and promptly at three p.m., I watched the men arrive at the gate into the field from the bedroom window.  Calling for Mary, and suitably clad in wellies, rackety denim jeans, and a large stick to push back the briars, we headed off to meet them.  Let us call the Builder's man Bob, the guy from the Planning Department Dessie and the goats can name themselves.  Bob gave us a smarmy welcome, wet, limp handshake and proceeded to tell us about the "delights of having quality Tudor style housing which was guaranteed to raise the standard of our own houses and the value as well"...all in one breath.  I nudged Mary gently in the arm to silence the sarcasm I knew was forthcoming.  It could wait.  Dessie, anorak hanging askew, cigarette balanced delicately on lower lip, and notebook stuffed in pocket greeted us with a laconic "Hiiiiii  y'all".

Leading the way through the gate and heading for the gap in the hedge behind our houses, I tipped Mary off about the goats being just behind the hedge and told her not to worry about them. Mary was a Townie but trusted me and with serene dignity we sailed through the gap and on to where the des res Tudor homes were to be built.  Bob and Dessie followed, delicately picking their way in their best shoes through the mud.  A tear in his snazzy blue Merino wool suit from a briar caused Bob to give his considered opinion on fields in general.  All was well until the two lads looked behind them at the Billy goat grazing meditatively on new grown shoots of a gorse [furze] bush.  

Now, I am not sure if the oncoming Hallow'een season had any effect, the vertical pupil of a goat's eye, or just the billy himself, but suddenly the two poor lads seemed seized with concern for our welfare.  Yes, goats eyes can look vaguely sinister, and the chaps were very keen to return to the far side of the gate to discuss the housing matter.  Wide eyed and innocent Mary asked them how could you discuss the matter properly when you weren't looking at the problem directly.  Dessie ran a nicotine stained index finger around his none too white collar, coughed and squeaked that we should keep this meeting brief, important Council matters awaited his attention and...no joy from us.  

We pointed out that the field would only hold 150 houses at most, if the proposed homes were to be that upmarket, 600 would make them like a council estate.  Tudor, we hummed, well, there wasn't much in the line of traditional Tudor buildings in Ireland, wattle and daub maybe, but Tudor...apart from a few grand mansions, so what about something more historically correct?  Oh! of course we then pointed out that the field was an area of immense natural beauty with the mountain in the background.

Ten minutes into the meeting and Bob was ready to agree to anything.  If we had told him that rare bats flew around the place and that almost extinct butterflies were only to be found just here, he would have agreed.  As it was, drainage was the key weapon in our possession.  We pointed out that the field flooded badly every year in heavy rains and that, only for the bank and hedgerow, our 32 house estate would be swamped.  We remarked to each other, Mary and I, on the intelligence of the well known builder, fourteen years previously, in choosing the side of the hedge he did to build on.

Yes was the word flowing from the little man from the Builder.  He would, he assured us, make sure to bring our "most well considered relevant points to his bosses attention immediately".  Bob and Dessie performed well in the sprint across the field to the gate.  Mary and I strolled in leisurely fashion after them.  As they drove away in Bob's shiny new sporty looking car, we waved at them in friendly fashion.  "Now" said Mary "tell me why you weren't terrified like me of those blurry goats".  "Because they were our greatest asset" I replied "once you have a nanny goat at hand a billy is calm, and that lad has three!".

The field?  Oh! since that meeting in 1995 it still remains a home to billy and his ladies, blue butterflies, pipistrelle bats and a merry band of domestic cats gone feral.

Of the Kingdom of Kerry - and a funeral

The much longed for week-away to Kerry finally got underway on Sunday 22nd September,

and it was touch and go that we might get our break at all. Three weeks previously I had a phone call from a cousin telling me that his father was in hospital in Cork, following a fall, and that the odds were not good.  He had only just celebrated his 90th birthday two weeks prior to that and it came as something of a shock that this vital, energetic man was laid low. His condition deteriorated and he went home to God on 21st September.

Being in Tralee at that time meant that we were able to journey up to Cork on the day of the funeral and return to our home-from-home on the same day.  Tom was a quiet, dignified man whose love of family and pottering about his garden for nigh on thirty years after his retirement was his whole reason for living.  He was married to my Father's youngest sister, and my heart aches for her.  They were married for over 55 years and only had eyes for each other.

If there is one place on this earth that I am not fond of, it is the city of Cork.  Every time we visit it we inevitably get lost.  Sunday night, however, I spent time with a google map sussing out the best route to take and, leaving early on Monday morning for the funeral, we actually found our way to the lovely little chapel where Mass was being celebrated for him with ease.  As we say here in Ireland, "he had a good life" and he slipped away surrounded by those who love him, peacefully.

Our journey home to Tralee, though tinged with sadness, was one of beauty.  Travelling west we stopped off in Ballyvourney, the last village in County Cork, at the last pub in the town and Himself had a pint of Murphy, Cork's answer to Guinness,  I had a glass of Merlot and we toasted a long life and a happy man. The view as we drove back through the mountains was spectacular that evening, a blue mist in the valleys and the setting sun highlighting the mountain tops with a warm golden glow.  Back at the Courtyard, it was good to sit in the kitchen and talk about the day and the life that Tom led and his lifelong love of steam trains. There is a joy in cooking in a kitchen that is strange yet familiar.

Tuesday,the weather giving showers, we drove out to Fenit and whiled away a pleasant hour or two watching a cargo ship being loaded, listening to the gulls cry and the spinnakers singing their tune on the yachts, cheek by jowl with trawlers, in this small marina.

Above the harbour looking down on the cove, a group of houses always attract my attention. One in particular is especially attractive, sheltered by pines, overlooking the statue of St Brendan the Navigator and the Sliabh Mish mountains.  Its blue cladding and white windows are reminiscent of a Cabot Cove house and one might expect Jessica Fletcher to come cycling down the pier on her bicycle.  Indeed the coastline boasts so many coves, one could imagine  Pierce Brosnan [with his Tralee roots] as OO7 coming ashore in dead of night to deal with smugglers in this sleepy harbour.  As children, my daughters were always disappointed that Willy the whale in Free Willy didn't appear.  I am sure the Orcas swim up the coast, just a little further out.

Wednesday saw us driving out over the Connor Pass to Dingle and onwards to Feoghannagh and the Murrioch, small villages out at the tip of the peninsula, windswept by the Atlantic gales and beautiful against the backdrop of those glorious mountains.

St. Brendan's Cove

At Slea Head the seagulls fight over bread we toss them, one so busy fighting for his territory that he fails to secure a treat for himself.

The beautiful Skelligs lie on a silver sea, and I never cease to be amazed by Sceilig Mhichil, and the monastery built on this bleak and barren rock protruding up from the Atlantic.

Out at Feoghannagh we watched a murmuration of Starlings like a tornado against the vast Atlantic sky.  

Edel joined us on Thursday night, and why wouldn't she?  She is a Kerrywoman at heart, and with the wonderful welcome Myra and Derry Daly give us at the Courtyard - a welcoming bottle of wine, homemade brown bread and Butler's chocolates, this truly is a home from home, add to it summer-like weather and you can keep the Bahamas.

On Friday I relive old memories of my childhood holidays in Tralee with a cousin.  Racing down Rock Street to watch the trains cross over on their way to Fenit, our cousin John arriving with pony and trap to take us to Mass in the Dominican church, and later when he had upgraded to a Ford Consul, the very epitome of elegance back in the day.  John passed away on the Friday before Tom.  I had a soft spot for John, he was the image of my Father, in looks and wit - they were first cousins and the resemblance was uncanny.  Ar dheis Dé a h-anamh dilís.

A Dublin spider made his home in the shelter of my wing mirror, and with considerable industry, made a beautiful web between the door and the window.  On the road to Castlegregory on Friday afternoon, we had to go tight to the fuchsia hedge to avoid a passing milk container lorry, his web was damaged. On Saturday he set about repairing his dew diamonded web, his annoyance was palpable.  I am glad to report he travelled back to Dublin without further mishap and now has a stock of fresh Kerry fly for the winter.

We reluctantly pulled away from the Courtyard on Sunday morning; I love being back home and with a change in the weather, the range is in full swing keeping us snug and warm.  Tuesday gave us gales and a leak in our bedroom ceiling.  Himself's language was blue when he took a look up into the old attic and saw sky beside the chimney.  He got on to the roofer immediately who turned up on the day, and hasn't been seen since, but that, as they say, is another story.

Myra Daly
Courtyard Cottages
Greenlawns, Blennerville, Co Kerry

tel 353667124494

353872069057
email welcome@countykerryholidays.com

Sun setting on Galway trip...

Last week we were going on the much vaunted trip to Galway.  That trip that we had pared down to the 11.25a.m., train, arriving at 13.44p.m., bus to Salthill, lunch at the Galleon restaurant, return to train for departure at 17.20.  The sun shone, and the garden called and we postponed to yesterday.  I am beginning to think there is something UP THERE deciding that we are not likely to get there this year.

I am not, however, discouraged.  On Saturday morning we were having a family breakfast and discussing the coming week ahead.  Himself was fretting that he had a list as long as his arm of things to do yet before we close the garden down for the winter.  When I read out my diary list of meetings regarding our village history exhibition, coffee dates with friends back from holidays and other summer pursuits, a re-decoration programme for the garden room [smallest room in the house needs a major rethink], and other obligations, Frances announced that we would be better leaving Galway until next year.  It is now on the list for the first week in October, according to Himself "We will get there this year...heavy emphasis on the THIS!".  I believe him.

When we built our new extension in 2010, by putting one wall at an angle, what should have been a narrow corridor suddenly became an area in which we could sit and enjoy the view.  It became a "room" by accident; Peter, our builder, was the one who named it The Garden Room.  I put a long mirror on the wall, one of those box presses from Lidl as a temporary measure, and some Chinese slate effect vinyl on the floor.  We painted the walls white as an undercoat for an, as yet to be chosen, colour and promptly forgot about it while we got on with the rest of the decorating.  

It has always been at the back of my mind to do something with it; the white, while fresh and "garden room" looking, being North facing is cold in winter, and I don't like the white box.  My beady eye has been assessing this area for the past few weeks and I have now decided that it shall be a light cream colour and I am on the look out for a nice chest to place under the mirror.  I already have a mahogany garden chair in it.  On cool days and cold winter afternoons, I can cosy up to the radiator enjoying a cup of tea and the view.  I made some cushion covers [sewn by hand] out of Mum's old curtains and the apricot and taupe flower on a creamy base colour picks up the floor vinyl and and warm's it up somewhat.  The same pale cream will greatly improve the walls.  Whenever visitors come, they always head for the garden room sighing that they could sit there forever.  Try holding a history group meeting in a room that has four doors off it and holds three people...and that's pushing your luck!

I hate sewing.  Sewing with machines that is.  We have an old sewing machine that was my Grandmothers, and which Mum had converted from manual to electric.  I was terrified of it as a child.  When you eventually got it going, it confused itself with a Gattling gun and shot out broken needles at a rate of speed that makes the modern machine gun look like slow motion.  The nuns at school were very keen that we young ladies would be good seamstresses.  I can hem for Ireland and my carrier bags made from leftover curtain material are popular among my friends.  Anything I sew by hand will never come undone.  This is wonderful until you need to unpick a line of stitching for some reason.

The history group has fallen into  groups, as was inevitable.  There are those of us whose families date back to Adam and Eve, those who probably arrived with the Postman, and those who landed five minutes ago.  The middle group don't know which side they fly with.  On the one hand they are sometimes scathing about the A&E group chats on family memories [nearly all inter-related] and on the other they're not too enthralled with the 5 Minuters.  The 5 Minuter's are determined to organise us all and tell us the history of our families and the village.  Wonderful.  They do more "popping in just for a minute" than Mapp did to Lucia when Lucia first rented Mallards*.  

One popped in the other day to tell me what to write about my family history for the exhibition.  Feeling distinctly Lucia-like I told her it was already written, done and dusted. She kindly told me she would "pop in later" to help me edit it and arrange it properly.  I am seriously considering seccession from the rest of the nation and declaring our garden the Independent Republic of Our Family.

The effect of all this "popping" is that the A&E group have, collectively, decided to present a single A4 sheet with a relevant photograph on their respective families for "blowing up" so they can be put on the "Exhibition Board".  The meeting tonight bids fair to  be interesting.  All this popping and blowing has left me in sore need of a cup of tea.

*Mapp & Lucia; E. F. Benson

September garden

The garden looks wonderful this September.  The rowan trees are full of berries, the packet of wildflowers [free with a tub of butter last spring] has delivered with two kinds of red poppies, cornflowers, pink flowers [as yet unnamed] which mix joyously with the invasive but 
undeniably pretty convolvulus.

I love the garden in September on days like this; the sky and the sea meeting seemlessly, bee's droning as they go about their business and butterflies dancing on the trees.

The sight of a specklewood butterfly sunbathing on the leaves of the sumach tree has always enthralled me; they were a favourite of Mum's, she always associated them with balmy autumn days.  

I love the garden, and I love this garden.  It was a granite quarry from the 1700's tgo 1866 [approx.] and when the quarrymen moved out, my great-grandfather and great-great grandmother moved, literally, up the cliff and into the cottages with a 99 year lease and a measure of security for the  twelve children they were eventually to go on to have.  Eight of them survived; the youngest, my Grandfather, with his father, founded the dairy farm that was the family business for the better part of a century.  The lease was eventually bought out and, today, my branch of the family lives where the dairy farm once was.

Over the years, since it ceased being a dairy farm in 1958, Mum created a garden at the side of the house, wherein she grew fruit and veg and flowers.  We still try to maintain the flowers in her garden

and today Himself is giving it a thorough tidy.  We are in Galway today...not...but that's another story and the betting is on for Monday being Galway day.  In the meantime, the garden is not suffering from our absence.  He's tidying the garden, and I'm doing the indoor chores.  

The surplus jam and chutney she sold at the local shop in the village, I can still see her hovering over her "jam-pan" with a red gingham apron tied around her waist; "Country Living" or "Period Living" personified.  Her dahlia's won prizes at the various horticultural shows and her white soda bread frequently walked away with the challenge cup at the nearest annual agricultural show.

In my childhood, "Bleak House" would have been a better name for here, with arctic winds sweeping down from the north and eastern howlers in from Wales, and only gorse and cotoneaster for shelter.  She managed to keep two flower beds surviving under the front windows of the house, ablaze with peacock tulips, marigolds, pansies and daffs in spring.  Lupins, penstimon and nasturtiums in summer.  Those were the days when she had more time for gardening, limited by areas of bare granite.

Mum and Dad planted a blue cedar in 1967 and in my mind's eye I can still see them seeking enough soil to dig a hole to plant the sapling.  She in a yellow sleeveless linen dress and he in khaki trousers and soft cotton shirt.  After Dad died on 22 March 1970, the night Ireland won the Eurovision Song Contest for the first time, Mum went back to teaching full time and the garden took second place to her work and her various groups, such as the ICA  which is the Irish version of the Women's Institute, and her grand daughters.  Various pine trees had seeded themselves, the ubiquitous gorse had crept even closer to the house and brambles ran riot.  For Frances and Edel, "Gran's" was a wonderful jungle in their childhood, just as in mine when it was the "high mesa's" where in we played  "Cowboy's and Indian's" among the granite rocks.  My pal Alex and I were always the "Indians".

On 22 March, 2008, Mum quietly went to Dad, reunited after 38 years and Himself and I took over.  Bit by bit Himself cut, sawed, chopped and fought his way through the land that time forgot.

TIMBER!!!!!!

Before and after

Blackberries grow where we want them to now

Instead of briars

Cyclamen on the bank 

Successive gorse fires had made for healthy fertile soil where once there was bare granite.  We had firewood out of it for the range for five years.  All over the years the Blue Cedar, now well over 60' high, kept watch over the house.

Himself has the huge lawn he always wanted, I have my woodland areas where frttilaria's dance in spring breezes, shaded by the blue cedar, alive with birdsong from the other trees.  Fat wood-pigeon graze the lawns where once dairy cattle waited entrance to the milking parlour, magpie's thieve food buried by our handsome fox.  At the foot of a small cliff blackberries grow and Himself and I have enjoyed blackberry and ice cream for the past few weeks.  On top of the cliff, ling and heather have returned and the gorse is firmly controlled acting as a boundary barrier.

There are rifts of wild grass and rose-bay willow herb, orange lillies grow along the small dry stone walls Himself built, a reminder of my Kerry ancestry.  The blue cedar still hovers over the house.  This year, because of the winter storms, we have halved it's height and cut dead limbs off, lightened the length of the healthy limbs.  She is, once again, the supreme queen of our garden.

Last night at dusk, as I pulled the curtains across the study window, I swear I saw Mum and Dad standing beneath the blue cedar smiling lovingly at me.

Mum's virginia creeper still going strong

Down on the Bog

Yes, you've guessed it, another week and no Galway.  Still, I'm not grousing over this. We spent a lovely couple of hours down on the Bog, deep in rural Ireland yesterday, and it was pure Heaven, as they say in Kerry.

Following a phone call from sister-in-law, who inherited Himself's family home in rural Ireland, but lives and works in Dublin, he had to investigate a neighbour's report of a missing roof tile and the possibility of a leak into one of the bedrooms.  Despite the fact that my 'to do' list was longer than my arm, I threw all aside and headed off with him.  I am so glad I did; you know the song "It's such a perfect day...I'm glad I spent it with you..."? well yesterday was just such a day.

On the road early, picnic lunch packed and two flasks of tea - just in case we might need an extra cuppa or so [teaholics 'r' us] we thanked God for a beautiful sunny day after a night of high wind and driving rain.

Himself comes from the middle of nowhere, [his description], rush hour is last feed by wild birds in what was his Mother's garden of a summers evening.  Friends and relations of sister in law's who visit always comment on the silence down there, but in fact it is a very noisy place.  With cattle lowing in the bottom fields, sheep on the hillside making their contribution to the cacophony and sparrows, swallows and Mr Big the friendly garden robin - the place is drowned with sound.  

It is not a place I would like to live in.  The solitude is not the problem, but I am a product of my genes, and with a strong Kerry, Limerick, Sligo West coast and East coast background, I like the sound of the sea and the view from the mountains.  I like mid week breaks spent there when it is just the two of us, our girls visit occasionally, but are sea and Mountain lovers by preference.

After we had checked out the house, all being well indoors and organised with the local roofer to come and replace the missing tile, Himself was disinclined to hang around.  It is only three years since his Mother passed away, and I know he felt her absence yesterday.  It was one of those type of days she would have loved, wandering down the lane, picking blackberries and grousing about the damage the rabbits have done.

"Let's go to the bog", he suggested and, nothing loathe, I agreed.  We haven't visited his bog land area in about twenty years, and under a new Government scheme, turf is no longer being cut on it.  The scheme was introduced to protect a landscape that is slowly disappearing and to try to replenish the natural wildlife.

Shortly after noon, we drove along the country road that brings us to the lane into the bog.  It was hard finding it at first; in twenty years it has become overgrown, trees have shot up and the vast open expanse we knew looks more like heathland with rowan, ash and sycamore dotted around.

There is a long bóreen* into his section of bog, overgrown on either side of the path; you have to be careful to stay in the middle of the path.  On each side of it are deep channels for drainage.  It is very tempting to reach out and try to pick blackberries from their briars in some places.  Being an avid wildflower seed collector, the temptation of the rowan trees and the vetches that grow along the path, I had to caution myself to be careful.  Himself was like a fussy mother wandering down the lane before me, watch this, mind your step, don't step in that fox dropping...[as if I wasn't well acquainted with foxes from here]but, eventually we reached a part where it was safe to thrown down the tarpaulin and a plaid blanket over it and take out our picnic lunch.

There is something very special about the taste of bacon, egg and tomato sandwiches washed down by lashings of hot tea and followed by mouth wateringly good fruit cake.  It has that sumptuous feeling of a Famous Five outing and I fully expected Timmy the dog to come bouncing down the lane at any minute.  There was absolutely no sound at all, at first, except the wind across the bog.  Various butterflies softly wafted across the lane. Bees busily hurried from flower to flower.

We sat contentedly eating our meal, happy in the silence that was between us and all around us.  After a while, a little way up the lane there was a rustle in the hedgerow; we held our breath sitting as still as possible for two 60 somethings with arthritis, and a slinky black form ran across the bóreen about two hundred yards away from us.  A mink.  I couldn't believe my eyes.  There was once a mink farm in the vicinity, over two decades ago, but with the decline in the fur industry, many were released into the countryside to wreak havoc on the local wildlife.  

Over the years with trapping, shooting and poisoning their numbers have declined, but...they are still there.  Far more vicious than the native weasel, (we don't have stoats), they make pine martin's look like the friendly house cat.  Himself was uneasy but, as I pointed out, if Minnie the Mink was that curious she, or indeed he, would have come out of the hedgerow closer to us.  Besides which I had a stout walking stick with me.  He soon settled back into the drowsy relaxed half sleep the mink had awakened him from. 

I entertained myself gathering vetch seeds, and trying to capture a picture of blackberries on my camera phone, not very successfully I'm afraid.  Across the ditch the bog was covered in a carpet of thick purple heather; as I roused Himself and began to pack away our things, I heard the very sound I had been hoping for, far across the bog came the call of a grouse.  

We left reluctantly, ambling up the bóreen - enjoying the smell of ripening blackberries that always reminds me of liquorice all- sorts sweets.  That smell that, as a child I dreaded, the smell of back to school and long winter nights of homework, hours spent in a lonely goal on a freezing, windswept hockey pitch.  Standing waiting for the game to come down the field so that you would have something to do.  There are times when a good home team is not a blessing to a frozen goalie.

To-day, that smell resonates with the joyous thought of warm winter fires, casseroles cooking in the range.  Slow cooked food with it's glorious smell floating through the house.  As Eldest daughter always says "the smell to come home to"; I love it.

We called back to the house to pick up some items that sister in law wanted brought back to Dublin; taking the long way, we drove down to the local lake just as the cattle were slowly meandering back up the hill after taking a drink.

Yesterday was a meandering type of day.  Like the slow cooked winter food in a range, it had its smells, sounds and like a good meal eaten slowly with great enjoyment, it will last in our memory as ...just such a perfect day.

*bóreen from the Irish word Bóthair = road, bóreen = lane.