Shannon's Cross Remembers

Western People from 9th July 1980

At one end of our lane lies the village of Lisacul. At the other is a crossroads which everyone local knows as "Shannon's Cross" (or Shannon Cross(ing)). It is just your basic junction, where the road from Lough Glynn to Ballaghaderreen meets our lane and a road off to the village of Moyne so it is very useful to us but very much anonymous.

Police car shot up at the scene.

You will find no sign saying Shannon Cross, or any road-signs pointing to it. The only map I have ever seen it on is the hand-painted "interpretive" map in the Garden of Remembrance in Lisacul. As far as we know it is named for the fact that the Shannon family owned the farm here and is nothing to do with the mighty River Shannon half an hour's drive away.

5 and a half tonne of Kilkenny rock. It is a very
fine Memorial Stone. 

This quiet cross roads was violently thrust into the spotlight of the national news here on the 8th July 1980 when some bank robbers trying to escape Ballaghaderren, where they had just held up a bank, rammed their car into a Garda (Police) car racing from Castlerea to try to intercept them and in the ensuing gun fight (Armelite rifles and pistols) two Officers were tragically shot and killed.

It is not my place to re-tell the story so I will provide a summary from the Internet. Wikipedia covers it well with... "Henry Byrne and John Morley, two officers of the Garda Síochána, the police force of Ireland, were murdered on 7 July 1980 by alleged members of the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) during a pursuit in the aftermath of a bank robbery near Loughglynn, County Roscommon. 

Flags for Roscommon, Sligo and Mayo plus
the Irish Tri-colour and the flag of the Garda
Síochána 

The officers' deaths provoked national outrage. Three men were apprehended, convicted and sentenced to death for capital murder. Two of the sentences were later reduced to 40 years imprisonment while the third was overturned....and...

Police Brass Band doing the honours

"On 7 July 1980 three armed and masked men raided the Bank of Ireland in Ballaghaderreen, County Roscommon. The group held staff and customers at gunpoint before leaving with IR£35,000. Gardaí (Irish) police arrived on the scene but were unarmed and were unable to stop the armed men from escaping in a blue Ford Cortina.[1] The perpetrators were intercepted by a Garda patrol car from Castlerea station with four Gardaí, including Detective John Morley, who was armed with an Uzi submachine gun. The two cars collided at Shannon's Cross, Aghaderry, Loughglinn. One of the raiders jumped out of the Cortina and sprayed the patrol car with bullets, killing Garda Henry Byrne.

A good crowd for the unveiling.

One man left the Cortina and ran off while his two accomplices – wearing balaclavas – ran in the opposite direction. There was an exchange of shots in which Morley is believed to have wounded one of the men, but he himself was fatally wounded. Both of these men were later apprehended, while a third man - Peter Pringle- was arrested in the city of Galway almost two weeks later. The two other Gardaí - Sergeant Mick O'Malley and Garda Derek O'Kelly - survived the shootout".

The old original plaque on the wall of Castlerea Garda Station. 

There has been a Memorial plaque on the wall of the Castlerea Garda Station since the event, but the local people have now had erected a superb Memorial Stone on the crossroads and this was unveiled in a beautiful moving ceremony last week. There was a huge crowd, flags flying, politicians (4 from the 'lower' house, 2 including our friend Senator Frank Feighan from the upper) some giving speeches, a large group of Police including local 'top brass' and members of the Guards' families. 

A Memorial oak tree was planted by/for each
of the families at the Ceremony. 

Apart from the cross roads being a local junction, this blog can claim a couple of connections to the events of 1980 and to the Ceremony last week. First 'Civilian' on the scene after the shootings was none other than the Father and Son team who used to own and live at this house. Referred to in previous posts as the 'TK's they were father and brother to Friend of the Blog, 'Vendor Anna'. Dad was 70 at the time according to our old copy of Western People newspaper, son would have been (I think) 28. 

Manu (left) and Pedro (right)

They'd been shopping in Castlerea and were on their way home. Dad was a retired Guard. The paper tells that the killers "brandished guns at both and (Dad) struggled with one of them and knocked the gun from one before being overpowered". The killers then un-hitched Dad's trailer and hi-jacked his red VW Beetle to flee the scene. Dramatic stuff and very brave for an un-armed 70 year old retired 'cop' facing a man with an Armelite who had possibly already killed 2 Guards. More recently it has been some of Liz's work colleagues doing all the lovely stonework  for the Memorial, me taking a few pictures and Liz doing the Village website, Facebook and Twitter feeds advertising the event. It has been a lovely thing all together and the whole area has done the Guards and the families proud. The Memorial stone will be there for years to come. 

Manu in the 'gear'

In other news, we are continuing to enjoy and be impressed by our two Help-X lads, Manu and Pedro. They are working very hard and getting lots of good tidying, mowing, clearing and trimming done. We work solidly from 9 in the morning thru to 1 pm. They have settled in well and (regular readers will know we love this) are telling us that they feel very relaxed and at home. They are loving all the food and sleeping like logs. 

Tidying up the orchard. 

They are promising to cook for us (something Spanish) on Wednesday and Manu turns out to have an ability with the wood carving (totem poles etc!) so we have supplied him with a big tree-trunk and a set of chisels.  He will carve us "something to remember (them) by", he says. They have fallen in love with the pigs and now throw most of the cuttings/prunings in to the pigs rather than on the compost heap, so that they can say 'Hello' to the pigs and tickle them round the ears. The pigs are impressed too. More on these guys as their stay progresses.

Pedro's new 'best mate'? Pride.

2  minor dramas in the livestock section. One of the turkeys misjudges a leap from the 'patio' chair and gets his leg caught, leaving him half-hanging, chest on the ground but leg stranded 12 inches above him. I do not realise his distress for about an hour by which time his leg has gone numb. He is in the sick-bay now because his 'Brother' believes in kicking a man when he is down and was treading on him. Nice. He looks like he is getting the use back of his leg so we hope he will be better by morning. 

4 'minders' for the gosling. 

One of Beeb's 7 chicks, now 3 weeks old and quite well feathered, managed to get separated from the family by straying into the goose pen and incurring the wrath of Gorgeous George, the gander. The chick fled out the back of the pen and thus out of line of sight and sound of Mum. We tried to find her and re-unite them all but lost her in the long vegetation. We needn't have worried. She came back into the yard flying over a 3 foot wall, whirring wings like a pro! She landed close to Mum and scampered the rest of the way to a happy re-union. No mean flyer that baby. 

Going Once....Going Twice...

Crack! The (nominal) gavel comes down on our long running local drama, "The Sale of the Land". Back in early September I posted that the 28 acres of land around us had gone up for sale and that we were considering buying one of the fields. ( http://deefer-dawg.blogspot.ie/2016/09/field-of-dreams.html ). Back when we bought this place we took a small (2.5 acres) chunk out of what had been a 30 acre farm, in our case the house and buildings and the fields immediately surrounding. In the process we became good friends with one of the three sisters selling the place, 'Vendor Anna' on this blog.

No relevance to this story - just a '365'
pic I snatched of a water-well drilling rig
which parked in the village.

The three sisters held on to the remaining 28 acres for 4 years but have now put the land up for auction. They very generously created an option for us to buy the 1.5 acre field opposite in which we had registered an interest. We had to have a good old poke around in the dusty corners of the cupboard labelled "Our Financial Life" but alas, no such lump of 'wedge' presented itself and we had to pass on the option. Well, this sale has now gone through without us and we have a new neighbour. You don't win them all. Never say 'Never', though. The field is likely to remain right there and just maybe, in a couple of years when the cupboard might be a bit more yielding.......

Dry cured hams awaiting their 8 months (or so) of air drying.

Meanwhile, back in the bit we did manage to buy, plenty of stories are still chugging along happily. The big, complete pig legs we saved at butchery time for our version of Parma/Serrano ham have now completed their 21 day stay in the dry cure mix (3 parts salt, 1 part sugar, various spices, refrigerator) and come ready to be scrubbed clean of the encrusted cure (using cider vinegar properly but I used white vinegar), bagged in their muslin sleeves and hung up in a well ventilated, cool, dry place for (the recipe says) 4-18 months. Our plan is to try the first one next summer (so about 10 months) and save one for Christmas 2017 (14 months). The air drying is to get the lovely sweet Serrano flavours. The salt cure is to give us a head start in the not-very-Spanish local climate. If you hang up uncured meat in the West of Ireland in October, I think you'd just generate a maggot-sanctuary in a bit of a hurry.

The hams hang in their muslin sleeves.
We will hide them up when guests are
using the room!

The first print-run on the village calendar has sold out and we know that many have already left the country en route to their delighted recipients. We have had delighted feedback from the UK  and I have also posted them to Germany and Canada. Liz is already taking orders for a 2nd print run. The village website is widely seen as a great success and gets plenty of 'traffic' both locally and from people who have connections back to the area but now live abroad, the 'Diaspora'. It is to the website that many people are going to register their interest and place their order(s).

Liz has given up trying to knit here and is reduced to playing
a game on the laptop as long as the 'kattens' do not try to
eclipse her view. The laptop is up on the cookbook 'lectern'
to stop tiny feet walking on the keyboard. 

Our other main  'project' if you can call it that, is to try to integrate the "kattens" (they are too big to be called kittens any more but not yet big enough to be called 'cats'). They are almost 6 months old now and not too vulnerable to doggie molestation. They can jump up onto safe high places and make themselves quite big by arching their backs, bog-brushing their tails and hissing and spitting. The dogs tend to stop and think about it now.

Lovely colour from the beech trees in the
(now empty) pig-run

Most evenings and sometimes during the day when we are around to supervise, we open the door through to their Sitting Room and let them come through to explore and enjoy the family, fire-warmed company of the Dining Table. They love it and we are starting to believe that we may actually get these cats through from kittenhood without either of them suffering death (or injury) by dog. We do not yet trust them all together unsupervised, however, so they can not yet have the "access all areas" freedom enjoyed by our adult cats, the fearless 'Soldier' and the big-enough-to-damage-the-dogs, alpha-male 'Blue'.

Borrowed ram-lamb Silas has still not, to our knowledge, succeeded in mounting any of the ewes (no give-away blue painted rumps at the breakfast bar) but he has settled down with the ladies and is now very much inside the flock. I frequently see him in close company with the big ewe 'Myfanwy' and the youngster, 'Rosie'. The experts tell me that this is all OK and that ewes, even when they are in season, only come receptive to the ram on a 13-18 day cycle (average 17). We don't know where they were before Silas arrived, so we have no idea how many days we need to wait. If they weren't on at all, then the presence of a ram should bring them round. Happily, Sue says we can keep Silas for as long as we like or need, even through Christmas, so the lad has plenty of time to grow into the big boots left behind by the mighty 'Rambo', our 2015 tup.

I owe him an apology, though. In my previous post, I suggested that he was named for the biblical Silas who spent time with St Paul; Sue had said something about the diagonal white cross he had on his face as a young one. Apparently not. He is named after 'My Uncle Silas' in the HE Bates books because he is a country boy and Sue hopes he will be a disreputable, fun-loving, philandering rogue. Especially the philandering, I would think. I had not heard of these books, but Sue and Rob loved a TV series from 2001 starring Albert Finney as Silas and gave him the name in memory of it. Go Silas.

Winter Waffle (A Sense of Solstice)

I quite like this shot of myself and 3 dogs, which Lizzie took in
the monochrome mode on her phone. 

The 21st December, the Winter Solstice is probably now my absolute favourite single day in the calendar. This is probably because in this life 'over here' we spend so much time out of doors and the weather, the day length and the dark evenings matter more - when I was in Kent I'd be up at just gone 04:00 but then work all day inside a huge chilled warehouse with air-con offices and it didn't matter a hoot what the weather was doing outside. You would only meet it when running from covered reception area to your car across the car-park top storey.

I am on Christmas cake duties this
year. Here the cake gets its marzipan.

Now the 21st is the day on which the days stop getting shorter and start to get longer, the evenings brighter and the Springtime 'officially' closer. It is a definite turn-around in fortunes when all manner of aspects of life stop getting 'worse' and start to improve. Lately I have made it the day by which I make sure all the killing, the livestock harvest is done so that mentally I can now think of the current members of the menagerie as our 'fighting weight' from which we will start to build again for the new season. There are one or two more animals to finish, including our June-born lamb Dylan but we will get well through this season before we look at him. I can do the 22nd, 23rd, 24th and 25th, and so on, on a rising, creative trajectory; we are cooking meals, creating food and preparing for Christmas, making things rather than ending lives and 'destroying' or finishing things. Just me being sentimental perhaps.

The  final turkey 'harvest' gets it in the neck. 

This re-start has, this year, added extra facets. This year we got into turkeys which are probably the epitome of harvesting at the Solstice. I killed our last poult this morning and we had her plucked and 'dressed' in time for Vendor Anna to collect her at lunchtime. This one was unusual in that Anna only wanted a 'crown' (the breasts, sternum and underlying ribs) so we have a rather unusual looking breastless carcass in the freezer which we may try to roast spine-uppermost on a bed of spuds, parsnips etc at some stage. Luckily we are both partial to the red meat.

Spatchcocked young Silver Brahma rooster. 

Those roosters I described in the last post turn out to be a breed called "Silver Brahma". One of them was more than a year old and seemed very tough so he went for stock, but one of the young ones got spatchcocked and roasted last night and, despite his 'scrawny' looks, turned out to be a revelation in terms of being meaty enough to feed 2 of us with left overs and having a flavour up there alongside the Hubbard meat birds we do each summer.

Liz coming to of a morning armed with Kindle,
 cat, onesie and the red flame of a fire in the
range

From my own point of view (I can only speak for myself here) I am also including the unexpectedly solid closure I got from the Theo funeral - my Theo era ended pre Solstice and I am now able to start the post-Theo synchronised with this turning point in the year. Down at the Sligo house-build we have also pretty much done with demolition, so the post-Sostice jobs are mainly going to be building and creating. We do actually have a chimney to pull down -  it was central to the old roof ridge but the new roof will sit back a couple of feet and be a tiny bit higher, so we need to create a new stack on that new line.

15 bales of straw for JD's cattle. 

We have been getting into this buildering with the new block-walls at the back of the house and, most recently, what is known as a 'ring beam'. I had not heard of this, but it is a continuously poured beam of concrete reinforced with steel bars (rebar) running all around the tops of your walls at roof height. You create wooden shuttering up from the outside and inside of the walls and heft buckets of wet concrete up ladders to pour into the channel you created. Loads of fun. Tiring, too!

A tree in the nick of time.

It has, though, been an unusually 'close to the wire' Christmas. It is the 21st today and we have a long list of things not yet done or only just done what with delays related to Liz now working, Liz heading for Silverwood land to child-mind while the adults headed for the UK, and the funeral. Things like buying the tree and decorating it, we like to do as a couple, so it was not as if I could have nipped off, bagged our tree and presented it to Liz on her return 'ta-daaaa!' So it was not till Sunday that we bought the thing and tonight we put it up. This was almost too close - Supervalue where we buy the tree had started with hundreds back in early December but by now they only had 4 left. We were lucky to find a decent one among them. Today, too, I have been marzipanning the cake and Liz has been doing Domestic Goddess. We have nipped out with the trailer for 15 bales of straw for some nearby cattle - they have the 'all is safely gathered in' feeling too. We may, between us all, actually be ready on the 25th to enjoy the day. I hope you are too. Now, where's that ruby port?

Of Eclipses, Equinoxes and Frog Spawn

Partial solar eclipse, Friday 20th March 2015, Co Roscommon.

Friday saw us up early and trying to see the Solar Eclipse. We gather that most of the British Isles missed this entirely due to heavy cloud cover and it was looking dodgy here too from the forecasts. We were ready with our chunk of smoked glass (borrowed from the frame of a family photo and smoked by holding it in a candle flame). You also know, these days, exactly what to expect and where, as the astronomers have long since done the number crunching.

This one, for example was going to track through as a full eclipse out in the North Atlantic, sliding through SW to NE between Scotland and Iceland. You'd need to be out at sea to get the fully dark effect. Out on the margins, we'd get 95% cover and, my brother in Swindon, for example, a bit further out, was due 88%. We'd see the moon slip in from top right of the sun making a 'smiley face' canted to the right, then slowly slide past (right to left) leaving only the 'bottom 5%' of the sun visible, and finally moving off to the left giving us back the crescent sun and finally all of it. Even 5% of the sun is enough to give you gloomy daylight and would still be too bright to look at with the naked eye. We knew too that the eclipse would start at about 08:24, be darkest at 09:24, and then be all over by 10:36.

We were disappointed to wake up to the cloud cover but quickly realised that the cloud was moving fast west to east and actually had plenty of breaks where bright sky (even pocket handkerchiefs of blue sky!) could be briefly glimpsed. If we could persuade one of these thin bits to pass in front of the sun we'd see our eclipse. Even better, we realised, the hazy cloud would do the job of our smoked glass and we'd be able to see and photograph the event without that complication. We did OK and snatched some passable pics. The morning went very gloomy as we got towards the 95%, but no worse than a black rain cloud gathering. All the chickens went quiet and birds stopped singing. We just about saw the peak before the clouds ran out of gaps and thin bits, so we retreated indoors and watched the sky brighten back up from indoors over breakfast. The astronomers tell us that the next one for Ireland is not till 2026.

Frog Spawn at last - overnight 19th/20th March.

Not satisfied with one solar phenomenon, of course, we are also 'doing' the Spring Equinox this weekend, the official first day of Spring (well, if you've not already done that with your Imbolc and St Bridgit's crosses (1st Feb)). This one has the added tweak in that the Jacobin (French Revolutionary) calendar changed from the "Windy" month (Ventôse) to the Germination or 'seed' month (Germinal) so I don't feel too upset about missing the standard Irish 'Paddy's Day' date for the planting of early spuds. Mine went in yesterday.

Paddy's Night feast.

The local frogs may know all about this 'seeding' thing, mind. Our females finally gave in to the instinct to dive in with the boys (who had been in the pond for ten days already, patiently waiting and dodging the frost and ice) and get physical. We have frog spawn at last, laid in sizeable clumps near the lower edge of the stone beach. We also have our newts back. Newts tend to only live in ponds in the mating season and summer. They leave the water to find a cool, safe, damp place in which to live for the non-breeding season and to hibernate, compost heaps, the bottom of a hedge, patches of long damp grass (not difficult in Roscommon!). The adults are one of the main predators of young baby tadpoles, so we hope we have enough spawn to sate all their appetites and still have enough babies coming through as froglets in the autumn. This is our pond's first true generation.

First primrose of 2015 also opens on Eclipse Day.

We also finally have, what feels like a fortnight or two behind most of our friends, some first 'wild' primroses in our Primrose Path. We have had a few cultivar primulas and the like doing their thing in flower beds, but these are the fully naturalised population which I am sure is just wild and spontaneous; I can't see TK Min out there planting them or gathering them in from the laneway, though I may have the lad wrong.

The daffs out front, planted last year, are starting to put on a good show

Also doing well are the trench full of daffs we planted as bulbs last year; a 25 kg net of bulbs and several follow-on 5 kg bags. They make a nice landmark now as you approach the house - we will be able to tell guests "it's the one with all the daffodils". We also planted a few up the drive and these are doing well also. Of couse, we are looking at them and thinking we might extend the rows along 'that bit of frontage' or fill in the gaps 'there'. We will have to see.

The bees are out and about.

The bees are now wide awake in the spring-like warmth. Certainly on Weds (18th) and Thurs (19th) when the early bright sunshine quickly burned off the light frost and mist, the workers were out in their dozens and there was quite a 'roar' from the hive when you were up close. Temperatures got up to 13ºC on those afternoons and the bees gave every impression of being happy to finally be allowed to break up the winter cluster.

Raking out the spent winter coat. Pirate loves it.

Also shaking off his winter blues is the rather plump cat, Pirate,  formerly known as skinny, emaciated, half blind, death's door stray cat. When the sun shines we hook open the door to his private domain, the cosy, quiet utility room. He knows when he is onto a good thing, and spent most of the last few months in there, asleep, putting on weight, recovering from his traumatic first year of life.

You WILL be a slim cat, Pirate. I remove another cat's worth of
dead coat.

We may have over-done the starving feeds. One of the Westie breeders I love and respect saw a picture of him and described him, subtly as "a bit well covered" (sorry JF!). We have since cut down his food a bit (only one tin a day now) but thought that part of his bulk was the visible effect of very thick fur, some of which had to be winter coat. This proved to be the case and when I put the 'rake' style brush to him it was coming away in great mats and tufts on the tines of the brush. Pirate loves all this fuss and attention and purrs loudly in his own snuffly way, bending his body and lifting legs the better to let you get at his waist, belly and armpits. I took enough off him almost to create another cat. He will be a lot cooler now, I should think.

Carrick Millennium Choir - a picture from last year.

Finally in our list of spring celebrations, our annual indulgence in a bit of culture, the Carrick on Shannon Millennium Choir's Gala Spring Concert. This is the particular 'baby' of our good friend Vendor Anna who, she tells us, practices and rehearses the singing all year long ready for these events. They are an impressive choir and put on an excellent show. Anna will surely not mind me saying that they look and sound superb. They look the part, the ladies in irridescent purple/blue outfits and the gents in the tux and bow-tie. They are staged beautifully and lit well, the conductor/coach definitely knows her stuff and the small orchestra (piano, drums, fiddle, Irish bagpipes, accordion and woodwind) do them great service. They lay on a rich mixture of  religious music (we had Ave Maria, Exsultate Justi and Cantique de Jean Racine), Irish (e.g. 'There is an Isle', 'The Isle of Inishfree', Danny Boy and 'Mary from Dungloe'), film and 'musicals' songs (Razzle Dazzle and a medley from My Fair Lady), the odd 'Negro' spiritual style song (in this case actually written by white American Stephen Foster, "Hard Times Come Again No More") and the choir's own romping, purpose-written anthem "And Sleep is Sweet in Carrick Town" (Ailie Blunnie). The show lasts about 2 hours with an interval. It is a cracking good evening and we love it. Well done Anna and thank you so much for the pure pleasure.

Black Spruce Down

We couldn't have arranged for it to fall as well if we'd done
it with professional equipment.

Well, there was an interesting night. We don't want to see too many more like that one. We do loathe those winds just North of Westerly, that come howling in across Vendor Anna's 5-acre field. It was not meant to be anything special; the AA-Weatherwatch boys were only predicting a 'Yellow' warning for Connacht and we have survived 'Orange' ones with no damage before. To cut a long story short, then, this one must have featured some mighty gusts of wind at around 7 pm while we were indoors eating supper because it has toppled one of our huge black spruce (Picea mariana) trees, this one between 55 and 60 feet tall (approx 17 m) (well, 'tall' last night.... 'long' now, I guess!) and with a bole circumference of 1.67m (5 feet 5") down in the pig area / Secret Garden.

The root plate lifted the corner of the pig ark by 2 feet.

We did not hear the falling of this tree and I only found it at 10 pm when I went on a last thing damage check and spotted that the pig ark seemed to be canted up at a jaunty angle. I thought that the wind might have lifted the roof section away from the base and went in to check, spotting the trunk in my torchlight, a massive grey shape where none should have been. The trunk lies diagonally across the Secret Garden with the top hanging over the rain gulley but just falling short of reaching the rather new (and expensive) sheep fence.

The fallen trunk lies diagonally across the 'Secret Garden'
with the top hanging over the rain gulley

We had had an evening of noisy gusts and of trees thrashing about and I had found more than the usual number of broken branches and twiggy bits on the drive and front lawn (and hanging off the post and rail fence) on my pre-supper dog 'patrol'. On an 8 o'clock patrol I found the roof of the young Buff-Orpington's mini-coop lifted off and flung against the wall of our normally very sheltered yard. That gust must have come straight down the cattle race. Liz helped lift the heavy roof frame back into place and give the 4 confused, huddled birds no more view of the sky. We also noticed that the yard was strewn with tins and plastic bottles - our recycling bin had gone for a Burton even though that too is protected on the east side of the house. A big offcut of plastic sheet had also made its way from the compost heaps, into and across the yard, and neatly parked itself by the Tígín door. It was some crazy kind of windy.

A new garden seat?

It was only when I decided to do a final final patrol at 10 pm after the dogs' "Last Out" that I spotted the pig ark thing. We went to take a closer look. Obviously there was nothing we could do in the dark about the tree, but the poor pig ark was groaning and creaking where it was now hanging from its two diagonal corners. I can just about drag it on its sledge runners one side at a time, so I pulled it down to flat ground where it could have a more comfortable night. I had visions of it breaking its back  like a sailing barge which has got jammed athwart (there's a good word!) a tidal creek as the tide goes out.

A flurry of more snow over the weekend had these tulips
back to looking wintery.

We were lucky really - nobody or nothing got hurt and no damage was done to fencing (or the pig ark). The tree fell neatly down into the garden and (we found today) actually landed on a concrete cavity block, neatly propping it a few inches above ground to make sawing easier. Also this morning, when I took the spare stashed straw bales out to make the ark lighter to move, I found a neat little nest with a clutch of young-Buff eggs. It is actually a tree we had been looking to take down anyway but without a contractor and risk of annihilating fences we could not see how to safely drop it. Mother Nature found a way.

New gap - red arrow

I love a good maths problem, so I decided to try to work out how much of the wood would fit into my wood store, which takes 2.4 cubic metres. Schoolboy maths then, says that the volume of a cone is Pi * radius squared * (height/3). Well this tree is 16.7m high and had a base radius of  0.2625m, so the main trunk alone will generate 1.205 cubic metres of wood. That'll do nicely. I just need to cut it up. No pressure.

The geese enjoy the new sheep drinker.

Of course, all that happy stuff is now. Last night we didn't know any of this, we just knew we were faced with a riotous stormy night with scary gusts shaking the house and a high potential for more damage, injury to livestock and more trees falling. No peaceful beauty sleep for either of us, we both tossed and turned, waking up at the slightest rumble or rattle, worried what they might signify. It was a relief when daylight finally arrived and with it calmer winds and a chance to go out and find that no new damage had actually happened. We had survived another one. What a relief.

Bobby the collie, picture borrowed from my blog post 27th
September 2014

Perhaps we earned ourselves some good 'karma' by the dog "rescue" we had done earlier in the evening. Readers may recall the appearance of a multi-coloured shaggy collie dog back last September, who turned up all loving and friendly (but devoid of any ID). He vanished again and we were only able to tell the owner who came driving along in a 4 x 4 that he had been here. Well this time he was as friendly and as unconcerned about chickens and rabbits but when he wandered into view of the sheep they spotted the unfamiliar animal and panicked and ran (to be fair, the dog did not chase them). Polly is very heavily pregnant at the moment and doesn't need that kind of stress no matter how self-inflicted, so we knew we had a problem and we could not just leave the dog loose to wander off. Rumour has it that passing stray dogs to the Dog Warden just ends up with a destroyed dog.

Liz tries out some 'basket weave' knitting.

Time for some 'detective' work; load soggy doggy into your car (nice wet seats!) and drive around in the gloaming till you find someone to whom you can ask "Do you recognise this dog?" Luckily my first ask was Mr McG and he knew the dog and where it lived so I was a few calls at 'the wrong house' from my happy re-union. The dog is called Bobby and is a well known wanderer who comes across the valley (OK the 'bog') from a house we can see from our own garden, about a mile away roughly NE of here. The owner was a lovely lady who I now know a bit and have swapped phone numbers with in case Bobby should come a-wandering again, which we are almost certain he will.

A calmer night tonight, all being well.

Aches and Pains.

No, not chain-saw injury, but rat damage!

I ache like an aching thing. I must be getting too old for all this physical stuff. (OK, not serious really). I had a good old session mucking out JF Bob's cattle barn again yesterday and then today Liz and I were over at Vendor Anna (and Paul)'s place beyond Carrick on Shannon attacking the overgrown hedge we started on back in November before Christmas, the snow and our hosts' 3 week escape to find some Canary Island sunshine all intervened.

Breakfast of Champions - boiled goose egg and toast
'soldiers'. 7 and a half minutes, boiled to perfection.

The muck-shoveling is quite physical but not a problem. It's the hedge that takes it out of me, as it's full of thick, chain-saw sized trunks which need taking off at "roughly head height", so I spend a good part of the day hefting the saw up and holding it there while I make the cut, or clambering around trying to tie ropes on even higher so that Liz can put some tension on the stem and stop it falling into the telegraph wires and onto the lane. I hope I don't sound like I am complaining - we LOVE all this stuff; one of the things that attracted us to this small-holder life in the first place was the chance to do some serious gardening and spade work.

A first egg from the young Buffs (right)? We now have no
idea what the egg on 13th Jan was, maybe a sputter from the
Guinea Fowl?

And we get fed. of course. Any job which involves getting fed is better than any job that doesn't and Anna knows the way to our hearts with her delicious lasagna and apple crumble. No, not on the same plate! So a good time was had by all and the hosts now have a much improved panorama down across the River Shannon from their front door. There were just two uprights that the 'Health and Safety' Manager (Liz) would not let us touch and these had grown up to form a 'Y' wrapped around all three cables running down the lane. These though, Paul thinks the phone people should be willing to come and sort using a man-up cherry picker, especially as we've done all the hard work for them.

The fire hood gets a second polish.

So, 9 o'clock this morning saw us loading all the gear into the car, but we needed to head for the chainsaw main dealer in Boyle (East Brothers) first as I needed chain and bar oil for the machine, a new 4 mm round-file (for sharpening), a new chain (the existing one was well past its sell-by) and, annoyingly, a new pair of posh, kevlar, safety gloves. My 'old' pair (only 3 years old) had survived all the abuse I've dished out in my inexperience in 3 years of using the most dangerous piece of kit on the 'farm'. They were well used looking and soiled but had no nicks or cuts, tears or even undone stitching. Then at some point between me taking them off last week and stashing them, as usual, in the shelf in the shed in my chainsaw hard-hat, a rat has eaten great holes in the old leather of the palms. Thanks, rat! I hope you were one of the ones Blue has recently 'terminated'. So we needed to buy a new pair; simple enough except that my hands are quite big (XL) and all the XL shelves were empty except, by coincidence, for 'Stihl' gloves.

New brush-cutter / strimmer

While we were in that Alladin's cave of man-toys, we also accidentally bought a brush cutter / strimmer. This is a piece of kit which you need for the margins of your territory, where my little lawn mower dare not go and where you cannot allow sheep or rabbits to keep the herbage down. We've borrowed one in the past, to knock back the rushes in the East Field, but we hadn't bought one for ourselves. Every year Liz glowers at the nettles which grow in our 'woods' and I glower at the brambles along the side of my veg patch, at the rushes which grow in the field and the docks and plantains which erupt from the orchard turf, unchallenged by the geese. The geese would not top off a plantain even if they were down to the clay everywhere else. So we bit the bullet and asked the man if he might have a machine tough enough to tackle briars, docks, plantain and rushes but light enough to be managable by Liz (she insisted on being the main destructive force in this department so did not want a hulking great 'professional' machine that only I could lift). We therefore have, sitting in the living room on the sofa waiting for its first outing, a Stihl FS55, a 2-stroke with the 'handlebars' fitting and a shoulder harness. I think I can probably predict what we are up to tomorrow, more physical stuff!