IT WAS about this time of the year, Lady Day in August, that we once heard a nightjar in the Phoenix Park. So far as I know, it is the most northerly sighting of that lovely bird. It behaved exactly as it should, perching along and then athwart the branch of the tree, churring as it did; just as night fell and the moths began to come out to provide the crepuscular night jaw with its dinner. I have not, seen it since.
Once I put up two corncrake there, surely the closest to Dublin city centre they have ever been. Pheasants are commonplace, especially in a few choice acres where I go and virtually nobody else does.
There are sparrowhawks and falcons and the occasional king fisher and, on certain odd summer days, the swallows swish by one's feet and dart over the shoulder as if they are performing high speed inspections.
In winter the oystercatcher, a handsome little nun of a bird, comes in great flocks to browse con the grasslands, arriving together, squeaking news of somewhere suitable to graze as they wheel in from Poolbeg, their alternative home.
The indifference of most Dub liners to the presence of this park is one of the great wonders of the age. For it is a paradise, each season of the year, and each day of its season. On wet days in winter it is sublime, because it belongs only to the few souls prepared to brave the winds and the rain; and then you can walk its grasses and its woodlands firmly of the opinion that it is your estate.
Signs of Life
There is not a day in the year when the signs of life are not evident in the trees of the park; no sooner are the last of the leaves gone than the buds of the new season present themselves, holding out hope as night encroaches upon daylight, advancing in both directions towards noon, leaving a few hours of daylight around the centre of the day.
That day when day is barely day is as far removed from this day, Lady Day in August, as we are today from what seems like only yesterday's spring fevers of April when the swallows arrived. Between now and the shortest day of the year lies the last residues of summer.
The swallows will be going in, about a month just as autumn advances. The park is an unbelievable paradise in the autumn; more conkers to be found than all the children in the world can want, and a spectrum of colours, for which there are no words; and the stealthy advance too of the wintry smells of loam and soil, abolishing the fresh green smell of growth.
In midwinter, the park achieves an odd glory; because funnily enough, trees are often at their best without leaves and seen in the long straight light of the winter sun, they became magnificent pieces of architecture, gleaming blackly against the vast skies which tower over the park.
Sun, Sky and Cirrus
That is one the great and haunting beauties of the Phoenix Park - the vast vault beneath which it lives. Those who live in the city forget the spectacular scale of the arch which joins the horizons. For much of the year it is overcast; but virtually every day will provide some break in the clouds, when a huge theatrical production will be presented by sun and sky and cirrus, columns of sunbeam and wisps of cloud and odd, nameless colours whirling before vanishing for all time, to be replaced by fresh, freshly minted colours which will soon vanish too.
It is impossible to tire of the numerous walks in the park; merely to follow a route in the opposite direction from usual is to see fresh wonders - the delightful skyline of Dublin, the green of Rathmines townhall, the numerous church spires and steeples; or the Dublin hills, surmounted by the Hellfire Club, as visible from the park as the park is visible from it.
And both places have been attracting the kind of visitor which neither needs - gangs of youths drinking through the night, and leaving hundreds of beer cans behind them. I visited the Hellfire Club the other day it is in a disgusting condition. Is it ever cleaned up? Like Phoenix Park, the Hellfire Club is one of the places tourists to Dublin visit - what a marvellous image they must take away with them.
I do not know what to do about these people. If they took their beer cans with them when they left, I would say, do nothing. Leave them be. They are doing no harm. But it is not that simple certainly not in the park, where there has through the summer, especially during the dry season, been an increasing amount of fire setting. Freshly cut and dried hay has been burned; so have trees been set on fire.
Empty Vessels
What to do about the worthy gentlemen who get up to these capers? I haven't a clue. Maybe a period of late night patrols by intrepid gardai or Army Rangers - for it is certainly not a job I would do - could curtail the late night revellers. Or at least make them take their empties with them.
They, at least, are anonymous I am sick of complaining about the plastic tape left by the grooms of the polo players. Is it not time for the Park authorities simply to say, No polo unless you leave the fields clean? New money might not recognise duty; but it will certainly understand the meaning of homelessness.
The park is more than a park. It is one of the great archaeological digs through Irish history. It was an abbey, and where there was an abbey, there were probably a well and a holy site before it. The tenants of the abbey worked the strip farming system, and the undulations left by their agriculture ripple over the playing fields even now.
The choicest homes in Dublin in time became the homes of the papal nuncio and the American ambassador. I am unlikely to be president; and even more unlikely to be US ambassador here. A frightful shame. To compensate all those who love the park and will never live there, could not some publisher commission a Book Of The Park, with essays on the history and the buildings, the wildlife and the plants, of Dublin's great jewel? Please?