A Weighty Tome

Event poster for the Spring Day

I am sneaking this post in before the normal 'due day' (Tuesday) because a) I have plenty to say already and b) I am likely to be too busy tomorrow evening what with the arrival of our Help-X volunteer. Reason 'a' has largely to do with Elizabeth playing an absolute blinder and finding me a lovely day's entertainment on Saturday. This took the form of a day of walks and talks "celebrating Spring" based in the 'village hall' buildings of nearby Kilmovee village.

Yomping through the woods

What had caught her eye was the involvement of our main man at the National Biodiversity Database, Liam Lysaght; it turns out that his brother was setting it up. After what feels like 6 months of wet and Winter, the weather came up trumps too and the day took place in lovely warm sunshine. However, there is no point in re-inventing the wheel, so it is easiest if I just reproduce here the text of a review I offered to write for the Kilmovee website. Here it is.

Mammal Atlas (cover)

Many, many thanks today to the team at Kilmovee for organising the excellent ‘walks and talks’ event, “A Celebration of Spring”. This was a brilliantly assembled event full of interest and healthy exercise on a gorgeous Spring day which had arrived hot on the heels of a long, wet March and April – a welcome break.

Mammal Atlas (Fox pages open)

We started in the ‘classroom’, the village’s Thatch Roof Building attached to the Village Centre with fascinating presentations by Liam Lysaght of the National Biodiversity Database on the need for that resource, by Chris Huxley on bird migration and by Lynda Huxley on the conservation of swifts, swallows, house martins and sand martins.

The ever-more-massive lamb, Bábóg. Compare this pic with
the size of her 6 weeks ago.

Our first walk was down to a woodland around 20 minutes south of Kilmovee which was pure joy in the sunshine ‘armed’ with our assembled experts in many ecological areas – bird song, Summer migrant and other birds (we were quickly ‘shown’ willow warblers, swallows, blackcaps,  mistle thrushes and chiffchaffs and even a buzzard came zooming through with a hooded crow in hot pursuit), butterflies and bees, plus botanists to point out wood sorrel, anenomes, greater stitchwort, pig-nut and the not-quite-ready bluebells.

A 4th bag of Lamlac is needed.

There are some impressive ancient beeches in that wood too, which had us hankering for a local historian to tell us some of the past of this site.

We adjourned back to the thatched cottage for a superb lunch of soup, soda bread, sandwiches and biscuits plus, of course, tea and coffee.

Not the tidiest drinker. Bábóg gets sprayed liberally on at least
one side of her face with milk.

Refreshed, we were back into the ‘class room’ for a lovely, relaxing, post-prandial talk by local poet and writer, Terry McDonagh who is also an expert on local, famous, 1700s poet Anthony Raftery, blinded from age 10 by smallpox and the “last travelling bard” famous for his poems about Spring.
The final entertainment was a walk out to the local stone-built and excellently preserved ‘Cashel’ – a ring-wall 2m thick and 2.5m high on private land just outside the village.

Duck eggs in the incubator start 'pipping'

Delightfully, the village is currently host to a stone-mason training course with 8 or so lads all learning the ropes just beside the thatched building. A 1000 year old stone cashel would be right up their street, so they were invited to join us as we got a look round the place and an excellent presentation by University Historian, Dr Yvonne McDermott (GMIT). Dr McDermott had done us a brilliant job but it was nice to receive some input at the Q+A from the lads coming at it from the actual builders’ point of view.

Very recently hatched - still wet.

All together it made for a thoroughly enjoyable day and if anyone was thinking about going and then decided not to, you missed a real treat. There is talk of this possibly becoming an annual event – mark it in your diary. Thank you very, very much to the whole team at Kilmovee and to all the speakers and volunteers who made it all so good.

...and that was that.

3 out and dry, now moved to the brooder box for food, water
and the warmth of an electric 'Mum'

Friends of the Blog will know that my main involvement with Liam is through recording all my flora and fauna sightings onto the Biodiversity Database, which I have been doing now for as long as I've known it existed. They may not know that this data gets used by the team there in a whole host of ways, one of which is to produce periodic books and atlases mapping the distribution of the sightings. They had advertised that a mammal atlas was coming out in 2017 and I'd added it to my 'Dear Santa' list but we had had no luck finding a copy. The chance to actually finally MEET Liam in the flesh seemed like an equally good opportunity to obtain the book - he would surely bring me a copy down and I could pay for it there. He even autographed it for me.

It is a lovely book full of fascinating information and all that data. I get a special wee thrill when looking at the maps knowing that most of those little (10 km) squares around the north end of County Roscommon are my own data/sightings. In the back of the book is a full listing of all the 2500-odd people who contributed data and there are the names of the Woman of the House and myself.

A weighty tome. My new sheep book.

While we are on books, I also came by a new sheep book on the recommendation of a sheep expert who I respect mightily, Tim Tyne who wrote my all time favourite sheep-for-smallholders book. When it arrived I wondered quite what I'd done. A weighty tome indeed - 690 pages hard back and weighing 1.7 kg, it looked worryingly like a medical dictionary. I spend enough time now fighting off people who think sheep are just single track animals looking for new ways to die; was I going to end up like one of those Wikipedia/Google self-diagnosers who show up at the GP claiming to have bovine tripanosomiasis? You'll be pleased to know it is a whole lot better than that and written very well to explain sheep issues to farmers who are not fully trained vets.

All 9 sheep have their noses down. Well rested grass on the
front lawn is filling up their bellies. We'll have them weaned
in no time!

Meanwhile, you will see from the pictures, that the ducklings have started to hatch. We have 3 so far from a set of 16 eggs and they are doing very well. More on them in the next post.

Aunt May's Chest

Ooo-er! No we haven't gone all school-boy smut. That is merely the (tongue in cheek) name for a rather lovely piece of heirloom furniture which you will meet in this post, along with some of its colleagues. The Aunt in question is one of Liz's long-dead relatives.

Liz's first pic to the 365 Project.

But ho for 'Imbolc', 1st of February, pagan first day of Spring, St Brigid's crosses and all that malarkey! We did actually make some crosses but readers of the previous post will know that the 1st of Feb was special to us this year as it was 'launch day' for Liz's Lisacul 365 photography project. We both wanted to get out there, take some pictures and fire them into the project's email in box  to make sure that the machinery was all working and that anyone enquiring of the website would see signs of activity. Liz took this rather stylish shot of her cross. I pinged in (rather predictably?) some livestock photos.

A predictable sheep?

The project is going to be an interesting one to manage because so far it has been set up with no deadlines for getting your pictures in - the team wanted no-one to be restricted by being too late or unable to get to an email by a certain date. The result is that while we know that the 'traffic' through the site since Liz's radio interview has been gratifyingly heavy we have no idea how many people are clicking away photographically out there. Worst case, I guess, would be someone thinking they would click away all through the project year and then have a big sort out and bang in their chosen 366 shots in Spring 2017! I suspect that some will wait for the first selections to be announced and to be posted to the site before thinking, "Hold up! Mine are better than those! I better get them sent in" Anyone fancy being on a 're-selection' group?

Deefer-dog enjoys the new cushion(s)

But what of this 'chest'? We have in our collection of furniture, a pair of small 'easy chairs' - bare wood frames with webbed backs and a simple cushion sitting on a webbed 'hammock'. They are my favourite chairs and the ones I use most despite the fact that they were free of charge and came with the Faversham house, having been stashed in one of the garden sheds as junk. Back then they had what were once rather nice tooled leather backs but had become perished and torn. We did not have a lot of furniture back then and we had a chum who was learning upholstery, so we asked her to take them on as a project. They came back in a nice shade of dark blue with nice restored padded cloth backs and matching covered cushions.

Auntie May's tiny dresser. It doesn't reach to my
shoulder height.

20 years later they were looking a bit well 'loved' with holes in the cushion covers, worn out beading, collapsed sponge blocks and badly stained fabric. Step forward Liz and the sewing machine for a first go at home upholstery. First though, we needed a trip to excellent local upholsterer and supplier of 'stuff', TX Upholstery of Carrick on Shannon where we were intrigued by them using a small, very quiet, gentle reciprocating saw to cut out our sponge blocks. Back home Liz already had some nice black and silver(y) fabric picked out and in fairly short order had knocked out 2 lovely cushion covers to go round the new foam. We are not sure what will happen about new backs for them as the material only just went the cushion covers, but they are lovely and comfortable once again and have quickly been re-adopted by the dogs.

One of a nearly matching bespoke pair of book cases

All this furniture-bashing got me to thinking that we have arrived at a lovely collection of pieces in this house of which we are very proud and with which we are very happy. Liz phrased it best when she said "It feels as though we have spent our whole lives accumulating the furniture for this house". Most of it is real wood, some stained but none painted, so it looks very right in this farmhouse environment. None of it was a priceless antique from some fancy-pants shop. None of it quite matches, so you'd never think we bought the house empty and THEN decided to furnish it. It came in fits and starts, some of it 'finds' in Kent (Chatham and Faversham), other stuff family heirlooms which we have only had since moving in, other stuff old-looking but actually new or bespoke built for us and finally the out-and-out new like the recent IKEA bookcases. That's probably true of everyone who has muddled along buying bits every now and then with no clear definite final vision.

Kitchen dresser with the 'other' alcove bookcase to its left
 (and the obligatory sleeping cat, of course).

My favourite pieces could well be the bespoke 'nearly matching' pair of book cases made to fit the unequal alcoves either side of our fireplace in Faversham, or possibly our wedding present kitchen dresser which came from a very close friend of the family up in Portmarnock (Co. Dublin). We also have a lovely oval mirror which came from my 'Nana'. I know that Liz has a great affection for the heirloom piece which gives this post its title, an old dresser which came to us via some time at Silverwoods.

Triumph of function over antique(y) charm. IKEA came to
the rescue when we just had TOO MANY books. 

I love that it is tiny, like a 2/3 scale model of our other dresser, reflecting that people (and houses) were much smaller back in the day. It does not even reach my shoulders. It is stained very dark, which we were once going to strip off and give it a lighter look, but a little way into the stripping/sanding we decided we liked the part-restored (distressed?) look and so it got a reprieve.We have another lovely old family piece, a chest of drawers upstairs. Somehow all these various items come together to make a comfortable, well furnished home. Now I must just evict a dog from my favourite chair.

Spring in Rocommon

Dad has his first go at shuttering up and mixing concrete. This was the run of cables and pipes from kitchen to utility room (the former "office"). The walls of the house here are 50 cm thick and it wasn't realistic to drill through from utility room into the dining room, so the run of 2 cables, 4 water pipes (hot tap, cold taps, hot feed to radiator, cold return from radiator) and the waste pipe from the utility room sink were run outside the house at the base of the wall, then in through the kitchen wall which is a sensible thickness. The waste actually then falls down below the new concrete floor and unites with the kitchen waste to go out to our sewer/drain on the west end of the house. These pipes and cables were fixed to the wall at heights to give the waste a fall (slope). Dad then erected shuttering made of wood and old slate and poured concrete in to enclose the whole and protect it from the weather. The cable is of a special grade (NYM-J) which can handle being buried in concrete.

The other pics here show general spring-ness. Haggis is at the back door gazing out, we think wondering when the job will all be finished and he can finally lie down and sleep in front of a warm stove. There is a picture of the front door with its tete-a-tete daffodils in their pig-mash boiling cauldrons. The other picture is of the Tígín looking in the outer door and through to the yard through the other door. In our dreams the yard is a lovely sunny place, especially in the morning. Finally free from mud it is flattish and covered with pea-gravel, populated with nice terracotta pots of flowers and herbs, plus maybe a decorative piles or groups of the big boulders we have dug out of the house floor and apron. A white painted metal café table and chairs provide the breakfast coffee support. The resident coal tits, wrens and chaffinches nip about and the dogs laze in the morning sunshine.

Ahhh... soon.
Deefs

Suits Me.

There is a story going around that "prison suits me". That I'm a much calmer person for the change to downstairs sleeping, away from the humans. Not so neurotic, feisty, clingy, easier to live with. Either way it looks like the new regimen is here to stay, if only because the humans are getting quieter, more restful nights sleeps (also free of unwelcome warm wet enhancements, if you'll pardon the expression).

Some nice calm pics then, of the garden in Spring, some cherry blossom (we have a "Black Glory" variety tree), silver birch catkins and a shot up the garden from the woodlandy bit. The soft green looking, low-growing herb centre-bottom of the picture is sweet woodruff.

As if Cambria wasn't enough, Dad got involved in the rescue of another old decrepit sailing barge yesterday afternoon, the SB Westmoreland but, again, I'd refer you to the Cambria Trust website and the 'Volunteer's Views' tab which Dad writes.

Project Erroll meanwhile, expands out into some tentative internet house-hunting, first in Co. Laois and in Co. Offaly (we now know places we'd not even heard of a week ago - Rhode, Birr, Moneygall, Ferbane and the Slieve Bloom Mountains) plus, lately into Co. Longford but that might be a bit too far away from the Silverwoods current haunts. The gang are also toying with the idea of a yurt for the 'garden'.

Look after yourself

Deefs

Aye aye Chicken Pie (3)

...see also Nov 28th 2008..........

"Baby M", the Silverwood's 3rd eldest was 3 yesterday, so I suppose, technically, should no longer be called "Baby M", but instead "Little Fella, M".

Happy Birthday to you
Happy Birthday to You
Happy Birthday, dear Mmmmm
Happy Birthday to Youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

We try to talk to him on the phone, but as is the way with 3 year olds, he cannot cop that we, here, cannot see the toy train (Called "Emily" - is that one of the Thomas-the-Tank crowd?) he is holding up and waving about near the phone.... "Look! Train... Emily!"

He is also a bit confuzzled around the fact that when he sees us it is usually for a Narrow-boating holiday, so he thinks we all own and live on the boat... "We go your boat?" He still responds, though, to the nonsense Dad catch-phrase, "Aye Aye Chicken Pie" and starts discussing what he'll have with his chicken pie - peas (yes), dip-dip (=ketchup) (yes), carrots (noooooo) etc

Ah well. Spring is here. There are frogs cavorting in the big pond and spring bulbs leppin' out of the ground all over the garden. It's warm and sunny, so the sloppy mud of last weekend is drying out nicely and Dad can spend some time digging up at the allotment. At lunchtime, we are all out on the terrace, where the "patio furniture" cushions are back out of storage. We dogs are positively basking in the warmth, even though it's a fairly washed out wintry sun slanting down. Mum and Dad tell me that one of the first things that impressed them about this house was the sun-trap terrace in their first February.

Have a great weekend
Deefer