ANOTHER LIFE:EACH MORNING at the same hour, in service to Met Éireann, I go out to lift the funnel from the rain gauge in the lawn, take the bottle from under it, and pour a day's raindrops into a calibrated glass tube shaped somewhat like a long crystal condom. After many years, I can glance at the bottle and guess how many millimetres have fallen, and sometimes (not often) I am, bizarrely, correct.
There are days when the measuring glass needs to be filled twice over – 25mm make an inch – and others when the shiny meniscus of the water hovers scarcely above 0.1. On recent mornings, several little golden beetles have been swimming in the glass, so that, holding it “upright between the thumb and first finger”, as instructed, and “with the surface of the water level wth the eye so as to avoid errors of parallax”, I can see their little legs paddling frantically to stay afloat.
I pour them out carefully, of course, but there are also mornings when, the sun flashing through the glass, I take a gulp of clear water as a toast to Gaia. Some theorists, perhaps rather way out, write of water as “a living substance”, with energies and motives all of its own, and as people are two-thirds H2O I feel no need to argue. Living with it so intimately, from its first approach across the ocean, dissolving islands as it comes, to a final surge of the hill stream from our kitchen tap, I still find it both wilful and deeply wonderful.
The Government’s plan for water charges, household meters and so on reminded me how long it had been since I followed our stream to its source. It is not, of course, “our” stream in any but the idiomatic sense, any more than the farmer through whose stripe of fields it runs would dream of denying his neighbours its benefit. Ours is just one black plastic pipe burrowing in and out of the hillside to drink from some ferny pool among the rocks.
To climb beside the stream, prompting a small scatter of sheep, is to mount into the past. Flat boulders carry little pyramids and bracelets of stones, gathered by children in clearing the land and cemented now in a matrix of windblown grit and lichens. Then comes a corrugation of lazy-bed ridges grassed over in rounded hummocks: real giants of ridges that need a leap, one to the next.
Before the Famine, the hillside held 350 people in 50 cabins where half a dozen families live now. One farm, its old house complete with bog-deal purlins and outshot bed, held on to its lacework of drystone walls right up to the tiger years and its erasure for a new holiday home. Even on the high land of Land Commission striping, there are foundations sunk among the rushes and tumbled remnants of walls that go nowhere.
This corner of Mayo was left bare in the last Ice Age, so one is left to guess when the glacial till, with its burden of boulders, spilled downwards from the ridge. On the way to the mountain fence, the modest summer stream chuckles at the bottom of wide ravines 10m or more deep.
Even in white-water flood, of which we have seen many, such excavation seems excessive. Yet where the stream crosses a corner of our acre, banks once knee deep now come up to our shoulders – this in a trivial few decades.
The purity of rain gathered up from the Atlantic should seem guaranteed, even spiced by salts and algal sulphides snatched up to make clouds. The stream sparkles through drifts of cuckoo flowers and bright blue forget-me-nots, and to drink from its water ought to be an Arcadian privilege. But beyond the mountain fence, on short-cropped commonage, sheep droppings can exceed even the legendary density of dog poo in Dalkey. Deep pools on the way are fringed with khaki-coloured filamentous algae.
Grant-aided by the county council, fine filters and ultraviolet screening in a box outside our kitchen window guard us from E.coli and cryptosporidium.
The source of the stream is gathered in from a score of mossy rivulets in a pocket of bog below the ridge. I didn’t quite get there, after all, as a fresh supply of juicy raindrops made it prudent to turn back.
But, so long as the stream keeps flowing, I don’t quite see how we and our neighbours can be metered and taxed for leading it through our houses on its way to the sea. Sheep shit notwithstanding, I treasure our do-it-yourself water supply and the link it sustains between us, the sea and the sky.
The stream sparkles through drifts of cuckoo flowers and bright blue forget-me-nots, and to drink from it ought to be an Arcadian privilege
Eye on nature
For the past few months there have been no sheep on our land. Today when I walked up the land I found wild orchids and a variety of wild flowers.
Lynda Cunningham,
Maam Valley, Co Galway
The photographs you enclosed were of heath spotted orchid and flecked marsh orchid.
I lived in the Burren and enjoyed its flora and fauna. Imagine my surprise when I discovered a glorious pyramidal orchid in my suburban garden. Might I have brought it back on the soles of my shoe?
Mary Keane,
Rathfarnham, Dublin 14
I twice watched swallows darting and diving around a hare as it raced across a field, apparently chasing or harassing them. Were they hunting insects that the hares were disturbing?
Damien Boyle, Castleknock, Dublin 15
Most likely.
We found a double red campion, growing among thousands of singles, on a wooded walk near Rosscarbery. We first spotted it in 2008, and have seen it every year since then, but it does not multiply. We marked it and took seeds but only ended up with a mass of singles.
Gill and John Boazman,
Rosscarbery, Co Cork
Sports like double flowers can be caused by stress on the plant or by a spontaneous genetic jump. If it was genetic the seeds would reproduce double flowers.
Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo, or e-mail viney@anu.ie. Please include a postal address
