Gallowglass

One aspect of Irish life which regularly impresses us is the quality of their road-side art and sculpture. The nearby town of Ballaghaderreen is ringed by lovely wicker-work cattle, milk churns, men, huge urns, a big fish as well as various arches and arbours or shapes made out of woven willow. It is all very dramatic and interesting to see as you drive about, but they have now exceeded even all this by commissioning an impressive, 16 feet tall sword-wielding warrior in a bright (chrome?) stainless steel to stand by the west-bound side of the new bypass.

Locals will know that this guy has actually been there a while and is not, technically, still 'news'. He arrived in May this year; it is just that I have never yet got around to nipping over to take his picture. It is not a piece of road we would drive; we come and go from Balla-D rather than whizzing by from west to east.

As seen from the East-bound carriageway. 

He is, in fact, a "Gallowglass" warrior. Says everybody's tame expert, "Wikipedia", "The gallowglasses (also spelt galloglass, gallowglas or galloglas; from Irish: gall óglaigh meaning foreign warriors) were a class of elite mercenary warriors who were principally members of the Norse-Gaelic clans of Scotland between the mid 13th century and late 16th century." If you were an Irish regional king or warlord and you really wanted to win that fight with your neighbour, you would hire these guys to strike fear into your rival's army (and presumably duff them up a bit).

This clematis has decided not to climb my convenient ash
 poles this year, but to scramble instead, through the Lady's Mantle.

I love this piece of sculpture which I imagine cost the town a fair amount. He is on a nice rise in the ground and I keep meaning to pick a nice sunset evening and go get him silhouetted against the colours of the sunset. If you want to see him, next time you are coming in through Frenchpark and you join the by-pass, don't come off at the first exit to Cooney's, Tibohine and Ballaghaderreen, but carry on to the next exit. He is just after that first exit on your left.

This one is going to be for me! Liz completes
this lovely cabling pattern on the front panel
of the latest jumper.

Out on the Sligo house project we progress. Having pretty much finished the house, so we have moved outside back onto the 'hard landscaping'. This is all about making a garden and yard around the dwelling instead of it sitting in the middle of a building site (usual stuff - piles of rubble, stone, scrap wood, old, dead wheel barrows, a big yellow digger, dead cement bags and so on). Some of it is the stone wall building, so K-Dub and I are back remembering the old skills of stone laying, cement mixing and lugging stuff about. This rather handily uses up the piles of stone and avoids us having to double handle it. It's come from the demolished walls of the house and been stacked around the house while the house got itself built. Some of it went back into the house on the new walls and bigger gables but the rest is now being scavenged up for these garden walls. Very efficient.

Branching out from the straight knitting, Liz has now enrolled
onto some crochet lessons. This is the first, ever, test square. 

We both love this stone - Sligo stone is some manner of stratified sandstone which comes out of the ground already in flat slabs and pieces. Most of it is between about 1 and 4 inches thick, so it is like long or broad bricks which means you can lay it in a bond like brickwork. Our stone here in Roscommon is in rounded boulders about the size of your head, so impossible to lay into walls - walls here were always poured between a sandwich of timber shutters as a mix of boulders and concrete or cement. They are thick and strong but nobody would ever call them elegant, neat or beautiful.

Our friends came a-visiting with their huge St Bernard who
rides in state in the back of their capacious 4 x 4. 

Just down the hill from where we are working a proper professional stone mason is doing a gorgeous job with his stones all chipped away to size and perfect fit. His wall will be smooth like the pyramids with tiny thin joints. We are in awe of that skill but we are, even so, well pleased and delighted with our efforts. Neither of us claim to be stone masons and we know we can do this well only as a result of the lovely "pre-prepared" (by nature and by previous wall -builders!) stone we are lucky enough to have lying about the place.

Prada. Beautiful dog. 

There, by happy chance, a whole post about crafts, skills and working with your hands.

Lights in the Sky.......

The bees are still nice and active on 1st Dec - it is very warm at 13ºC

At 20 past 8 on Sunday evening, a clear night with a near-full moon, I saw something I have never seen before, a streak of colour-changing flame shoot across the sky. It went west to east and from my perspective seemed to travel from roughly over Knock Airport, to over Frenchpark. It was faster than any aircraft and completely noiseless. It was flaming green to start with but the flames changed to bright red briefly before it winked out and was gone. It was over so fast that I realised that I had no reference point to help me know its height, distance or size. My most likely options were a meteor track (but I have only known meteors to be one colour (bright white/yellow) and always they are a sharply 'drawn' single streak; I have never known them with raggedy 'flame' shaped tails) and a firework, but you generally get a 'whoosh' noise with fireworks.

I had only seen it because I happened to be outside at that time 'patrolling' the dogs for a wee and a poo and had emerged from round the polytunnel looking that way. I was sure no-one else in the area would have been similarly placed and that my meteor would go unrecorded or doubted. It is perfectly possible that I have gone ga-ga out here with these crazy turkeys and bizarre Guinea Fowl and am now inventing alien abduction stories. Meep meep. Nanu nanu. Ah well, in for a penny, I posted about it on FaceBook and got the expected run of comments around whether I was "on the homebrew again" but then was delighted to hear that our friend Rob (he of the piglet catching adventures) had also seen it. He'd been looking out through a French door waiting for their St Bernard, 'Prada' to come back in from her pee/poo stroll in the garden. Then more and more people were commenting and it soon caught the attention of an Irish Astronomy group.

Others of my Facebook friends commented that they were sure meteors could 'do' colours and one (Thanks Pete P) found this spectrum of possible colours. My green may have come from magnesium and the reds from Nitrogen, Oxygen and Neon 'plasma' emissions. It seems that the colours depend on size, height and velocity of the burning object in the heat of atmospheric entry and can also go in phases with different components burning off as the temperature changes. Replies to the Astronomy group had it visible from Killiney, Dublin, Donegal, Mayo and Sligo so I suspect that our thinking it was a Knock/Frenchpark thing was just our low perspective. It was high enough to be seen by anyone across the Irish Midlands. It may also have been a chunk of space-debris returning to earth.

Ah well. They don't last for ever and this washing machine
was so old it didn't owe us anything. We bought it in Kent
we think at least ten, maybe 15 years ago. 

Amusingly, I had just finished posting my witty comments about alien invasions and how the cats are outside so they would deal with it, shut down the computer and gone to bed when all hell broke loose - dogs running around barking, cats yowling. Aliens? Well, one alien anyway, after a fashion. Local wandering stray dog, Bobby had chosen this evening to pay us one of his visits and our dogs had detected him wandering in circles round the house and yard. Regular readers will know that this collie (see 24th Feb 2015 post) is a sweet, painless lad with not an ounce of malice in him who will stroll happily between the chickens and past the sheep with no intent to kill or chase.

Goldie still has plenty of grass. 

Our problem is that the sheep do not know this and to them he is a strange dog, so he can set them panicking and running about which is not ideal if they are pregnant. Not ideal anyway - they can still hurt themselves running at fences or trying to jump over the barbed wire. So we were back on the phone - we have the guy's number by now and we are on first name terms. He apologises profusely and zooms round in his 4x4 to collect the dog who by then I have 'at heel' down at the front gate. I am in my dressing gown and fleece jacket with a head-torch on. The dog's brother apparently has no such wanderlust and stays at home. It is only Bobby who strolls off across the bog-land and pops up either here or at another house just along the ridge top.

Looking promising for Christmas. Polytunnel spuds.

Meanwhile I have almost finished harvesting outdoor spuds and decided to go into the polytunnel and try an exploratory dig. I was delighted to find that the Sarpo Mira planted in there in August are now 'done' - lovely big, mainly clean tubers devoid of any slug or other damage. I do love a baking potato so tonight I tried them as jacket-spuds with beans and a bit of left over belly pork. Lovely and very promising for Christmas. My pic shows 1.9 kg hauled from the first plant (plus a little white 'British Queen' volunteer). Plenty more in the ground. Superb.

Good night then - watch out for UFOs. You never know.......

Day-Glo Green Pollen

Not the best picture but you may be able to make out green
pollen baskets on 2 of these returning workers.

Part of the pleasure of beekeeping to me is the simple act of relaxing and watching the bees come to and from about their foraging work and we are always reassured when we see the pollen baskets on their legs laden with pollen. Pollen is high protein food (well, an ingredient anyway) for young growing larvae, so when you see pollen being brought in you are reassured that Her Majesty is inside and laying well. I was taken by surprise this week when I spotted that some of this pollen (which I knew could come in all colours depending on flowers foraged) was a bright orange-red and other bees were bringing in pollen of a very bright green. Neither of these colours had I seen before.

Favourite flower with the bees this week is our huge and spreading
blue geranium "Orion". 

A quick flurry of research on the net and a few questions to beekeeper contacts on Facebook revealed that other Irish beekeepers were also getting the red and the bright green. It also pointed me at some websites where colour charts have been set up for you to match your pollen with and marry that to your known list of plants currently in flower within the likely forage radius (about 2.5 km) of your bees. The green, which is described as 'very bright' by most beekeepers and "almost day-glo green" by one is thought to be coming from Meadowsweet (Filipendula ulmaria). That works for me - we have loads of it here; it follows from Queen Anne's Lace (Cow Parsley; Anthriscus sylvestris) and the Ground Elder (Aegopodium podagraria) in all the verges and hedgerows.

Saving the goose pinion feathers - my fellow
members of the Longford Beekeepers use them
as 'bee brushes' in their hive work.

The bright red is more of a problem. It is thought to be from either Field Scabious (Knautia arvensis) or the 'Henbit' dead nettle (Lamium amplexicaule). I have seen some of the scabious down on the bogs when I am out dogwalking but so far not with bees on the flowers, but the dead nettle, if it is round here in quantities big enough to get the bees interested, has eluded me so far. Never mind - it is all fascinating detective work and good to know what is going on with the bees in my local area. I have seen plenty of purple pollen being collected, of course, but that is from the deliberately planted stand(s) of Phacelia tanacetifolia just yards from the hive; you can see individual workers nip out from the hive, buzz around the flowers (it takes them half an hour at least to load up, so I don't follow the same bee around, but you get the picture) and then nip home to unload.

Out in the big wide world, the "Gang of Four"

We have had a nice warm week, all be it interupted occasionally by showers, so we have been progressing the 'rearing' of our various baby birds. The first hatch turkeys are now big enough, and the young Guinea Fowl settled enough for us to be confident letting them out of the rabbit run to go fully free range without the young cat Soldier, who scared us a bit when we tried this a week or so back, hunting them.

Not a bad job, sitting in the sun supervising the first exploratory
ramblings of the 'Gang of Four'

We do this on a warm dry day when we are all caught up with jobs and can afford to sit for an hour or two watching the birds take their first tentative steps out into the wider world. In this case, too, some first try-outs of the wings - these guys seemed delighted that you could actually take off and do little practise flights up to about 3-4 feet, not anything they could really do in a rabbit run only 45 cm high. They were perfectly behaved in the event.

I'll sit this one out, then. Goldie's daughter Nugget chilling.

The 2 guineas and 2 turkeys have settled in as a solid tight-knit group, whom we call the 'Gang of Four' and they stay together when exploring and meeting any other of our birds. We did wonder whether the guineas might naturally gravitate towards love-lorn widow-bird 'Min', and the turkeys to their biological parents, Tom and Barbara. No sign of that so far. Min is still a loner, shouting her 'buck wheat buck wheat' mating cry from any echo-y corner, so we guess the young swains are still too young to be giving her back the right answers and chat-up lines. They may be hens, of course. Tom and Barbara acknowledged the presence of new birds but Tom has looked disdainfully at them and Barbara has given one a small nip to get it off "her" food.

Pirate adopts my woolly jumper as a bed when I leave it on the
wood store 'deck'. 

No matter, they have now been out for three days and are dead easy to round up at night; they are suckers for a bribe of finely diced tomato. I go out there at about 6 pm with tomato in my hand and they all spot me and race to follow me home. I let them out again when I do my first feed-and-release rounds at 7 a.m. So far they have stayed in the yard, but I expect they will venture further afield as their confidence grows. Soldier? He took a quick look at these more beefy birds and decided that they were some kind of chicken and therefore best avoided. He'll wait, he says, for the second hatch birds to be "offered" to him when they are still not much bigger than the sparrows he thinks are his birth-right. Obviously, I jest here. We will offer him no such prey - he scared us too much last time.

Purple sheep foot prints on the concrete can only mean one
thing - we have been at the pedicures again. 

Those second-hatch birds are now in their third week, so they have been moved 'up' from the small plastic brooder crate to our 'patented' 2nd stage, 2 big cardboard outers from supermarket potato crisp packaging glued face to face. These boxes make a pen easily big and deep enough for 2 growing turkeys. They are still under heat at night but on warm days we turn the heat off during daylight. This morning, in the bright sunshine, we even gave them their first look at Roscommon grass and sunshine in another rabbit run. We rescued them back indoors when a shower darkened the sky.

4 kg+ beef rib roast from our 'new' beef butcher. 

So, you'll know that we are pretty much growing our own chicken, lamb, pork and sometimes also goose, rabbit and now guinea fowl and turkey, but we have not so far done anything about beef, which we still have to buy like any other shopper. Thank you then, Sue, for a superb tip-off about a proper old fashioned beef-butcher with a shop in the village of Frenchpark, not 20 mins drive from here. This guy grows and despatches his own animals and hangs the meat for 2 weeks before cutting it for you, which he does to order in the front of the shop.

Half of one of this butcher's steaks.

He is also famous locally among those in the know for his 'bones-for-the-dogs'. He cuts his joints and steaks etc to suit the Irish customer - those customers prefering their cuts well clear of any bone, membrane and sinew, so the bones and scraps left can end up very meaty. Sue gave us a lovely square-foot of rib cage to demonstrate, which had the dogs chewing happily for 2 meals and showed us a 'trimming' which you could have fried off as a perfectly good, if a little thin, steak. His prices are also excellent compared to local (e.g. supermarket) suppliers - we came away with a big rib-roast (about 4 kg), a huge steak which easily did 2 of us, and a whole heart all for €40. That's about £28 for my English readers - I think you'd struggle to beat that in a Kentish butcher.

Good work, but a turkey-challenge?

In the craft department, Liz finished a lovely red and white striped jumper. This is cunningly knitted so that the broad stripes match at the side seams but also from the back/front into the arms. I take my hat off to her. Unfortunately, since she started this garment, we have discovered that our male turkey, Tom does not go a bundle on red and white clothing and has actually attacked Liz once while she was wearing red and white PJs. She has, then, a beautiful jumper which she cannot wear outside here during turkey breeding season. A shame but not a massive problem. Liz is so often down at Silverwoods babysitting various family members that she keeps a mini-wardrobe of clothes down there. The PJs and the stripey jumper will be moved down there at the next opportunity and will not trouble Tom again. We also need to be advising any visitors, I guess, not to wear such things, lest we have to bodyguard them from car to front door like 'celebs' at a Film Premiere.

Shears, Ribs and Bee Stings

Sue's ewe, 'Pink' back in March, when the lamb was new.
Shaggy enough then, never mind in July

A big ugly weather system rattles on through and does for our warm July weather. It's a cracker - a deep 'Low' with three fronts (warm, cold and occluded) all centred on us like the three-pointed star of a Mercedes Benz logo. We get 48 hours of strong, blustery winds from all round the compass and a rake of squally showers. It's not quite enough to pin us down indoors but it definitely feels a bit un-necessary for mid July. It is all accurately forecast, though, so it does not stop the main event for this post, a bit more sheep shearing.

Amusing "half a job" shot shows how they can change
'size' when sheared.  These pics by Rob.

This was 'Pink', Sue and Rob's semi-pet ewe who got missed last year so now had 2 years worth of fleece (and dags) wrapping her up like a 4 inch pile carpet. 'Pink' because when they got her, she had a big pink spray-on flock-mark on her rump. Now she was seriously shaggy and daggy and in need of a clip. Many thanks to Sue and Rob who allowed me to practise on their precious sheep; they got a free shear but this was only my 3rd ever sheep, 4th ever try (our 'Lily' took 2 'bites') and my first try at doing someone else's animal. If you mess up your own sheep you can hide them in the back field and never post pics on Facebook, but if you mess up someone else's, it's all a bit more public. I was nervous.

Not a bad job - just the one tiny nick and no bleeding!

Pink is also trained to a head-collar so might give us a chance to shear her up the right way, standing on her own feet, which has got to be a lot less stressful for the animal than all that wrestling and up-ending them. If Rob could secure the front end and whisper sweet nothings in her ear, I could work away at the daggy end without her leppin' about. Her back end was completely obscured by the long and thick wool on each 'buttock' which joined together like 2 thick daggy, dread-locked up curtains, completely hiding the delicate bits which I must try to avoid cutting at all costs (udder and vulva) but with Rob holding her I had a hand free to part the 'curtains' and could slide the clippers in and around safely. Sorry if you're having yout tea!

I'm the sweaty one recovering here. Sue, the "client" definitely
looks like she is weighing up the job quality. She pronounced
herself very pleased and praised the result generously. 

Anyway, it all worked and I soon had her back end completely clear and was able to strike some 'blows' all up the spine and round the flanks and belly at which point we stopped as Rob was going to get sheared if he stayed where he was. Hence the amusing "half sheared" shot above which is a stage you'd never see on a "proper" shearing job. We took a breather, then Rob was able to move back and just hold head and collar, with Pink increasingly used to this idea, so I could get up her shoulders, forelegs, brisket and neck. Job done. Everyone gathered then to say nice things about the result before we moved Pink back to the field where the ram welcomed her home and she now looked smaller than her March-born ram-lamb . There is just a mountain of daggy fleece to pick up and clear away. It had been a good afternoon.

Towser ripping into a big raw beef rib. 

While we are 'on' all things Sue, she has also found a lovely beef butcher in nearby village Frenchpark. This guy apparently slaughters and butchers his own animals and hangs them for 2 weeks in between. The meat looks lovely and is cheaper than town and Supermarkets but even better, the guy cuts joints to suit the Irish customer which means well away from the bone and membranes surrounding them. His 'scraps' and bones for the dogs are therefore the meatiest we have ever seen and Sue showed us a 'trimming' that was so meaty and non-bony that you could have actually fried it for a steak for your own plate. She passed us a sheet of ribs a foot square and the dogs had (bits of) that for supper - much shlurping and ripping till the ribs were 'handed back' to us stripped "to the bone" like some dry white sun-bleached skeleton in a Western movie.

Common spotted orchid on the verge
actually ON the nearby bridge.

There are apparently around 30 species of orchid native this Island and plant spotters vie with one another to try to find them all. Even good experienced spotters only manage around ten and I am sure I've only ever seen (and definitely identified) one. That is the common spotted orchid (Dactylorhiza fuchsii) which we found, to our delight, on the local bridge; actually in the verge on the bridge structure, that mess of old leaves and bits not trodden by the passing of car tyres but on top of the tarmac. Anne (who knows more about these things) tells me I might also find the greenish white 'Lesser Butterfly Orchid' (Platanthia bifolia) on my Kiltybranks (bog) meanderings but they are off to a special known site near Sligo town tomorrow to try to spot a few more. We were up in Sligo today but only for shopping.

Ouch - don't grab a bee when you go to pull up that
flowering weed!

Meanwhile, 'note to self'. If you are weeding near the hive in the sunshine, do go careful how you grab up those fistfuls of weeds. Don't go grabbing up a bee with them or she will sting you on the thumb. I have now been stung 4 times since we had bees and while I am delighted to find I am not a 'reactor' with all that anaphylactic shock drama, I get the sharp 'stab' followed by a mild tingle on the day but then a painful swelling overnight. Not enough to stop me handling the sheep shears but not nice.