Was She Listening?

Perhaps St Brigid was listening yesterday and looked down on our rather beginner-ish making of the crosses and approved. For what ever the reason we finally got a beautiful spring-like day today, on the 2nd Feb. The sun shone and was warm, quickly burning off any frost on the grass and melting the thin ice on the water in the wheel barrows. The sky was clear blue and the birds sang. There was barely a breath of wind. All encouraged, I nipped a load of laundry into the machine and hung it on the line outside to dry. Some of it even dried! That seems like the first time we've been able to do that since early December. My younger brother has just flown off to the Algarve in search of the sun. He could have stayed here. OK, maybe we are not THAT warm, but spring is definitely round the corner.

The lack of wind and rain mean that I can move my goose-house making operation out of doors, which is handy as the finished house will be 3' by 4' by 3' and would not fit through the Tígín doors once built. Yesterday, cowering from the icy blast and lashing rain, I had started off but concentrated on completing single panels to build myself effectively a 'flat pack'. Today I would have a chance to put it all together and so finish the roof, hinged door flap and bolt.

It was so warm that I was able to work in a polo short and sweatshirt, even rolling up the sleeves at one stage. I did, though, put on my garden knee-pads; the concrete was a bit cold and damp for too much kneeling. We have now put this house in the orchard so that the geese can get to know it, get used to it and, who knows, even learn to love it and use it. They are currently over-nighting in the calf house and we have a little routine where I release them in the morning and they waddle off up the cattle race to the 'pond garden' and orchard. Then about 5 p.m. I go out and find them and they happily waddle back into the yard and into their calf house where I shut the door and give them their supper of sprouted wheat (this has proved to be very palatable and the geese love it, hoovering it up).

On the dog walk today, which took me down to Feigh Bridge, I took a camera. Today may be dry and warm, but the recent heavy rain has filled our little local lough, Lough Feigh to what seems to be an unprecedented level, at least in local memory. Lough Feigh seems to spend most of its life as little more than a water filled raggedy ditch surrounded by tall bull-rushes and other reeds, so that what open water there is can not easily be seen from our lane. Suddenly it is a decent sized, expanse of shining water with swans a-swimming and geese honking. When the nieces were up in August we went down through John Deere Bob's fields to look and had to walk miles across wet boggy grass to get to the lake's edge.

Unfortunately, it is not easy to get good photos from our lane as we run along the top of a round-backed ridge. I will have to consult my local maps and see if there is a road or path which runs closer to the edge before all this watery magnificence drains away. Lough Feigh is unusual in having no river draining into it and only a tiny, convoluted ditch draining out. It seems to get its water just from our ridge and the River Lung runs in a neighbouring valley just to its south. The twisty turny 'ditch' joins the two only when the lough is at its fullest. Perhaps this is the start of spring and the lough can return to 'raggedy ditch' once again.