A Long Walk

Scorchio! This was Met Éireann's short-range forecast for
4pm today (29th May)

Scorchio! The island is currently enjoying a very nice, mini-heatwave with temperatures soaring up to 26 and 27ºC. All our friends are delightedly taking pictures of the lanes outside their farms and commenting how different they look from when there were 7' snow drifts only a few weeks ago.

A pleasant surprise in the polytunnel. I don't remember
planting this.

My diary tells me that we have not had any rain since about 3rd May except for one wet night on the 21st, between us shearing our sheep and then doing Sue and Rob's. The ground is as dry as dust and those sheep, which must be very relieved to be 'naked' spend most of the day sleeping under trees in the shade.

Of course, our Help-X volunteer, Laura, who hails from the South of France, is a bit disparaging of our 'heat'; she is more used to 40ºC as 'hot' but we let her away with that as she is still a brilliant help, an absolute boon, a very easy to please guest and very pleasant company. Her current jobs-of-choice are anything to do with mowing and keeping the garden bits spick and span.

This much-abused broom is finally doing colour

She will push that mower for 5 hours and only take breaks when you bully her inside for tea and cake or lunch. Today she was on 'edges' with the shears , edges of lawn, sides of raised beds, all round bases of young trees. We are in danger of looking like manicured parkland.

Laura's new admirer - the male turkey
follows her everywhere. Here she is
actually bring tea out to us but it looks
like she is fetching him some!

She is also what they would describe locally as "a mighty one for the walking". If not pushing a mower for all those hours, she likes to do at least 10 km per day. She walked from here to Ballaghaderreen one day (neither of us have ever tried it - it is a 15 minute car ride!), she climbed Holy Mountain 'Croagh Patrick' one day prior to coming here, having done a 10 km walk in the morning and then on Sunday managed a 4 hour, 20 km one.

Sorry poor photo (bad phone) but can you just
see the 3 foot roundel target 450 feet away down
this path? Nor can I. 

Archery has moved out of doors again for the Summer and our shooting field is almost exactly 20 km from here, south of Castlerea. Laura expressed an interest in coming to see what we were about but asked could she then walk home. We explained that it was 20 km up (gentle) hill and down dale and would take her all afternoon but, no, she knew all that and wanted to do it anyway.

Another fun target for the new outdoor season.
You have to shoot this life-size fox at 40 feet but
THROUGH the car tyre. In front of the stand is a
little owl-model at 20 feet if you need a warm-up.

I suggested that after 2 hours of archery, I would be driving past her on the way home, so I could always rescue her if she'd had enough. Well, I did pass her and stopped to offer a lift but she just smiled sweetly and declined, saying she'd see me later. She eventually wandered in home at ten past six, not a bother on her, as un-tired and un-ruffled as when she had set out. Oh to be 22 again.

3 of Shtumpy's new babies. 

Meanwhile we are enjoying a bit of a population explosion among the baby chickens. In the last post I described our 6 successful hatchings from the grey hen 'Cat Basket Lady'. Next up was our ace Mum with the deformed foot, 'Shtumpy' who managed 2 hatches last year and kept all her charges alive despite her 'disability'. She has just hatched 4 babies from 6 eggs and is now starting to bring them off the nest and show them the ropes.

Laura cooked us this superb apple tart.

This will, we hope, be followed by the 14 duck eggs in the incubator, due 'out' Thursday or soon there after. These are a mix of Sue and Rob's Muscovy ducks (the big meaty, bi-colour birds who are half way to being geese) and our last Khaki-Campbell eggs from just before the final female was out-foxed, plus a few KCs from Sue and Rob to make up the numbers. I don't know what % success to expect here - our KCs have been very low and these are the first Muscovies any of us have tried - but if we get all 14 we will be feeling a bit over-run. Fortunately, it is most unlikely. We may be lucky to get any.

Finally, an even sillier hatch story, and not my finest 'management' hour. Out in the goose-field/orchard, we have a 4' x 2' x 2' nest box intended for ducks, which we call, logically, "The Duck House". This was adopted by one of the hens (Donaldina) 12 days ago to go broody in, so I found her 8 eggs to sit on and promised to lock her up each night safe from the fox. As time went by I suspected that another hen (or more) was nipping in there each morning, bullying Donaldina off the nest and laying her own daily egg into the clutch.

When the politics goes the way you want it to....

I did not get an opportunity to check while there were no birds in there, till today. TWENTY eggs!!! The poor hen can barely spread her 'front' out enough to cover them all. The experienced chicken-keepers among you will also have spotted another problem looming. All the eggs are similar colour (so it's probably one hen repeat laying) so I cannot tell which are the original 8.

Montana putting on a good show.

Come June 7th, Donaldina will have brooded those 8 for the full 21 days but the others for fewer days, so the 8 will hatch (if we are lucky) leaving the nest full of part-developed embryos. If we rescued them to the incubator we might then get one hatching on the 8th, one the 9th and so on. That would be a tricky clutch of babies to manage. Ah well. We shall see. We will cross those bridges when we come to them.

Shtumpy's first hatch,.

There is just one tiny fly in the ointment of our warm days - last night we suffered our first theft from the honesty box. It has been there for months and never an egg or a single cent stolen (as far as I know). Last night, though, some toe-rag cleaned out my money tin and left the dozen eggs in there. It was just 20, 10 and 5 cent coins, total value no more than €1.30, so we'd guess kids, but we don't get any passing kids (on foot anyway) so we'll probably never know. Ah well, guys, who ever you are, don't go spending all that at once now.

Half Way There

New feature in the nearby village - this splendid stone unveiled
on Sunday.

I was posting last time about the Celtic Festival, 'Lughnasa', the start of the Harvest. This used to be held on the morning of August 1st but inevitably got hi-jacked by the Christian church and now moves with the 'last Sunday in July' and is famous locally for the huge (10,000+) "pilgrimage" hike up local Holy Mountain, Croagh Patrick or "The Reek" (764 m or 2507 feet in old money). Down in Kerry they have the popular 'Puck Fair' which has to do with crowning a wild goat caught for the occasion among all the more usual modern show/fete attractions.

Castlerea's brass band play us in. 

Here, you'll know that archery instructor Con, holds his Lughnasa Celtic Games but for our nearby village of Lough Glynn, a much more local and recent celebration. They chose that Sunday to unveil the new Centenary Garden, memorial to the signatories to the "Proclamation of the Republic". My UK friends may not know this piece of Irish history and, being no historian myself, I would hesitate to describe events here - if you would like to know more then go off and research Easter Rising or 1916 Ireland.

There was a good turn-out of local politicians. On the right is
one of our TDs (=MPs), Michael Fitzmaurice (Independent)

Very (and inadequately) briefly, a huge step in the journey of Ireland from British Colony to Independent State took place at Easter in 1916 when a small band of Irish men and women rose up under arms and took over some bits of Dublin, most famously the GPO building. From the steps in front of the GPO they proclaimed the new State and themselves as the 'provisional government'. Obviously there could be no hope of these few revolutionaries winning this one and the British Military crushed the uprising quickly enough including shelling the GPO with Howitzers.

The CE scheme which Liz helps to administer, gets the credit here

The 'rebels' surrendered and were carted off to jail. It is widely said that most of the country were not involved and thought that all the events far away in Dublin were just the acts of 'poets and dreamers'. Then, however, the Brits made a bad move and executed all 7 signatories to the proclamation plus 9 other leaders. Suddenly those "un-involved" folk were very much involved - these lads (and lasses) might be poets and dreamers but they are OUR poets and dreamers. A huge movement kicked off which put Ireland through dozens of events and stages, a War of Independence and a Civil War and the establishment of the new fledgling state in 1937. There, see! 100 years of very complex Irish history in 2 paragraphs. HUGE apologies to anyone reading this and shaking their heads in disgust and disbelief.

Chivers and Chip are getting curious

Anyway, what ever the case with the following events, this year is the Centenary of that Proclamation and our village did it proud. A marching band from Castlerea played it all in (and stayed around to play the hoisting of the tri-colour and the National Anthem), The MC made a short speech, the beautiful stone was unveiled, an aged Monseigneur did the blessing bit, 2 local school children read out the Proclamation itself, 2 of the 'Tidy Towns' committee ladies hoisted the flag and a local lass sung, very well and unaccompanied, popular local patriotic song "The Woodlands of Lough Glynn". An impressive turn-out lined both sides of the road (at least 200 including 5 local politicians) and clapped, cheered and sung the National Anthem appropriately, before the event broke up for photographs and a goodly spread of refreshments in a marquee set up at one end of the garden. We thoroughly enjoyed the event.

At the "smutty sausages" with Sue. 

Our other main event over that weekend was  a 'Sausage Fest' over at Sue and Rob's. They have a decent sized, powerful meat-grinder and sausage stuffing machine which we have been planning to use shared between us to make sausages and Sue had checked her freezer(s) and found a mountain of pork joints she had forgotten about.

We got quite good at it with time and produced
some quite professional looking 'links'.

If you have never done sausage making then you may not know what a rich vein of 'toilet' humour lurks there what with the need to keep everything wet and slippery, to carefully slide huge lengths of sausage skin up (we used natural gut, rather than the modern 'plastic' stuff) and then to draw full sausages off the end of the filler spout, squeezing the continuous bead of meat into individual sausage lengths. Well, there is if you have that 'naughty school boy' inside you trying to get out. We had a great laugh with it all, almost crying with laughter at some stages. Phnarr phnarr, tish tish. We got the job done though - pushing about 15-20 kg of mix through the two sizes of 'blade', making 2 different mixes (Cumberland and a Lincolnshire with added apple) and stuffing half of each into skins all in about 90 minutes. Teamwork.

Beef is the traditional Lughnasa fare.

We broke for a lovely lunch (Thanks, Sue and Rob!) of baked spuds, salad and (of course) both flavours of sausage, followed by 'Millionaire's Shortbread' and then had a masterclass in goat milking. I struggle with that, being unused to the small teats on a goat (compared to the good 4 hand fulls on a cow! ) but Rob assured us that they were as slow and rubbish as we now are originally. They used to take an hour for each of their 3 goats with the bucket getting sent flying by the animal's hoof, or Sue getting impatient with the goat. They now work as a team with one of them sat either side of the milkee doing just one teat each and taking no more than about 15 minutes per goat. The goats have also learned to love this process and stand co-operatively as long as there are a few bits of fresh carrot in their bucket of grub. They get about 9 litres from the 3 animals (total) per day.

365 Picture - a dog walker in Creevy townland.

But why my 'Half Way There' tag? In this house, July 31st may have been Lughnasa but for Liz and I it marked an important milestone on the 365 photographic project, our photographic record of the village's (and surroundings's) everyday life captured by local photographers. The project had launched on 1st Feb 2016, so 31st July was the half way point. It is going OK but it has, of course, had its ups and downs. Most importantly, we have not missed any days. We have a dozen or more contributors so we now have around 700 pictures. You can see some of these by clicking on the links to 365 "Year so far" from the village website (LisaculInfo.ie) where there are also a couple of thematic albums (Bio-diversity, the Village Play etc) up there on photo sharing website 'Flickr'. My role is as 'backstop' to make sure that there is at least one (preferably 3 plus) shot(s) for every calendar day, so I was delighted to pass the half way marker and start taking August pictures - it feels a bit like the run-in to the end, even though that (31st Jan 2017) is ages away and 700 more pictures.

Anniversary Tourists

By the beach at Louisburgh, Croagh Patrick behind us.

The 3rd of November saw us hitting a major milestone and a happy event, our 20th Wedding Anniversary. We had decided a while back to celebrate this with a nice breakfast, a scenic drive, a picnic and a candle lit steak supper. We knew we were taking a chance with the weather but we just amused ourselves with the possibility of having to that British thing, a picnic in the car by the side of the road with the wipers going occasionally to clear the rain off the windscreen. When the 2nd of November presented us with a vicious Westerly, a gale of wind and driving rain squalls we wondered whether the joke was about to become reality but no, the 3rd dawned bright, blue skies, warm sunshine and not a breath of wind. We were on!

The beach at Old Head

Breakfast was that family favourite, boiled eggs and toast soldiers, always improved by having your own, deep yellow yolked free range eggs. Then we were showering and preparing the picnic, again, family favourite "Hang Sangwidges" and various salads plus some chocolate cake for 'pud'. With the car loaded, dogs an' all, we headed off west to find some scenery. Castlebar we have been to dozens of times, especially while building the house, but we'd never been past Castlebar and on towards Westport and all the lovely mountains and coast of North Mayo.

The shore of Doo Lough. 

As you approach Westport you can soon see the famous, cone-shaped 'Holy Mountain', Croagh Patrick, scene of many a pilgrim hike in the Summer, with an option to do it in bare feet if you are feeling particularly martyr-like. We are determined to do the climb soon, but not in bare feet. It is reckoned to take about 2 and a half hours to the summit, none of these Irish peaks are 'that tall' and "The Reek" is only 764 m. It is a tourist magnet, though, so we will try to avoid the known pilgrimage days.

From Westport we headed on West into ever smaller lanes, determined to reach 'Roonagh', the small port from which you catch the ferry out to Clare Island, famed in one of our favourite 'Sawdoctors' songs. We needed to let the dogs out for a comfort stop, so Liz found Old Head on the map, a small headland with a beach just east of Louisburgh. After Roonagh, we headed back to Louisburgh and then southwards into the mountains aiming for the gorgeous Doo Lough Pass and Doo Lough itself for our picnic.

Not everybody faced with a Lough in November in North County Mayo gets the urge to paddle, but I did and Liz grabbed the camera and took these pictures. The bed of the lough here is a lovely smooth scree of rounded, flat stones, perfect for skimming across the surface of the mirror-smooth water, so I could have gone barefoot, but I had my 'crocks' with me, so I kept those on. The dogs seemed to like the belly-deep (for them) wading, It wasn't that cold.

We swapped drivers at this point and I took over the maps to guide Liz down past the lough and on down to Killary Harbour (a 15 km inlet of the Atlantic), round the head of that to Leenaun and then south some more climbing over the minor road between the 'Devil's Mother' (mountain) and Ben Beg, grinding up the incline and dropping down a beautiful hairpin bend road and over a lovely bridge to Lough Nafooey. On to Lough Mask by which time we were a bit touristed out, so we were happy when Liz got onto some bigger roads, for the drive back eastwards through Ballinrobe, Claremorris picking up the N17 to near Knock airport and the lanes home. It had been a beautiful drive and a lovely, enjoyable day.

With all the livestock sorted we were able to crack the wine open and get our steak supper organised, whereupon the power died on us, so we would have had to eat by candle light even if we'd not planned to. Luckily we have a gas hob, so cooking was not a problem. We had a lovely evening chatting and reminiscing in the romantic ambience and, in fact, when the power was restored at 8 pm we chose to turn all the lights off anyway and carried on with just the candles. Cheers and here's to the next 20 years.