There are letters and letters. And then there are letters from Tom Nisbet RHA. Written in a delicate hand and worth framing. The most recent runs as follows - and follow it closely, you must.
Dear Y, - I needn't tell you that I am one for the waters and the wild or that, on occasion I have made a few bob on the pools and the Littlewoods but talk of our unspoilt countryside is a load of rubbish.
It may be exciting to some to cut away turf and discover an old log road, uncover prehistoric graves anywhere from Cabinteely to Carrowmore or dig shards out of Viking middens, but, to me it is further melancholy evidence that there is not in all Ireland an acre untilled, where no one was buried and nobody killed. Happily the grass national product blankets a lot of desecration.
Incidentally it is contradictory to complain about the bungalow blitz and have preservation orders slapped on Norman's keeps. Mud cabins on western bogs may have paid Paul but Paedar won't be robbed of his dethatched bungalow with its Spanish arches and all mod gonnes.
Times have changed, the west's awake and watching television - nothing is remote except the control. - Yours in pitchers, Tom Nisbet.
All change now. Y resumes, wondering is the quail market gone. Both birds and eggs used to be fairly widely on sale, the birds on restaurant menus. Perhaps we are going to the wrong eating-places, but certainly the eggs are not often come across. That is, unless you know someone who is still in it for his own satisfaction and that of his friends. At lunch four hard-boiled quails eggs, with mayonnaise and encircled with asparagus. Not only that, but on leaving, a platter of the same eggs, uncooked. What a treat. Quail in the wild are rare in Ireland. Cabot in his latest book, Ireland: A Natural History, writes that quail were found breeding in the Clonburren meadows and are strongly suspected of breeding in small but regular numbers every year in the callowlands, nesting early June and the first young on the wing mid-July. Twelve separate birds were found in 1995 calling there. But elsewhere rare.
