Nature Notebook

COVERED IN PURPLE HEATHER & CREVICES HIDING ROWAN TREES LADEN WITH RICH RED BERRIES

The tall rowan at Gallan EIle is heavy with red berries at the moment. It’s Irish name caorthann comes from caor which means both a berry and a blazing flame.

Connected with witchcraft from ancient times the name rowan is said to derive from the norse word runa meaning a charm. The tree was often planted ouside houses and in churchyards to ward off witches.

It’s alternative name of mountain ash is probably because it grows higher up mountain-sides than any other native tree, not infrequently clinging to a rock face after sprouting in a crevice from seed dropped by a bird.

The red rowan berries are made into a jelly that is eaten with game. Rich in vitamin C they were once made into a drink to prevent scurvy. Bird-catchers once used the berries as bait to traps to catch thrushes, red-wings and field fares.

The rowan’s strong, flexible, yellow-grey wood was once widely used for making tool handles and small carved objects, and was sometimes used instead of yew for making long-bows.

At the moment our uplands are at their most colourful with whole strertches of mountain-side cloaked in the royal purple of ling heather in full bloom, as shown here on Mangerton mountain.

The heather is named from the Anglo-Saxon meaning ‘fire’, and remembers the importance of heather as a fuel in earlier times.

The origin of its botanical name Calluna comes from a Greek word meaning ‘to brush’. Stems of heather were tied together to make brushes and brooms. Stems were also woven into baskets, and heather was used for thatching and as a bedding material.

Heather is evergreen and provides food for many wildlife. The tender young shoots are the main food of red grouse. Birds eat their ripe seed, and the flowers provide nectar from which bees much sought after honey.

These days when the ling heather flower is strongest the bell heather blossom is fading. But the bell catches the eye first because of its deeper shade of purple.

Frank Lewis

In the day of all the sunshine a week ago it was great to jump into Muckross lake at Dundag. There are those who say fresh water is never as good as salt. But Dundag is closer, there are no jelly fish, no danger of being dragged out by currents, here it is sandy underfoot and the water is warm … and where else could you get a setting like that – the mountain amphitheatre, the weather sculpted limestone caves and the rich cloak of woodland.

After following in the footsteps of Pat Moore in Asdee (Nature Notebook 18 7 ‘17) I had promised we would swim on Littor Beach but we went on to Ballybunion. Spectacularly colourful cliffs and great expanses of silver beach. But it was at low tide and the prominent red flags really did mean it was dangerous, the drag of the tide was frightening. Swim in Ballybunion – but not at low tide. And luxuriate in the soothing mineral rich experience of a seawood bath.

In Muckross last Saturday with four and three quarter year old grandaughter Sarah and American nephew Brian of more advanced years. The richness of the blossoms in the rock and water gardens is now at its most luxuriant.

The boat trip from the Dundag boathouse is a special experience. Across one of our deepest lakes under the shadow of Torc mountain. Refreshing soup and sandwich in Dinis and home by the endlessly varied limestone shore that would delight and depress any sculptor. A fuller notebook on all of this in the coming weeks.

Three or four swims at high tide on Banna in recent weeks the exhiliration of being pounded by great waves is always more enjoyable, and safer, if you are well within your own depth.

– Frank Lewis

‘WE KNOW YOU’LL LIKE THE WAY WE LIVE IN THE VILLAGE OF ASDEE’

We began in a farmyard where the Irish Dail of the modern era had their first meeting.  Then, in the centre of the Jack Walsh Memorial Park, we heard of Asdee’s sporting heroes – in gaelic football, soccer, handball.

The grandfather of the famous outlaw Jesse James emigrated from Asdee.  We heard how cursing saved a young Asdee curser and local musicians played Irish airs.  At the Community Centre  we heard of efforts to revitalise Asdee and the Drama Group dramatised a hilarious tale involving the Pension Officer.

At the fairy fort on Pat Moore’s family farm we heard of the Asdee Italian district and the strange goings on of Moloney at the Wake.

On Wednesday last (June 7) at lunchtime there were orchids in bloom at every turn of the road on Ross Island, a place that always has some new surprise.

Wild Irish red deer in the garden at Gallan Eile are a mixed blessing. Evidence of a 10,000 year heritage. There on the front lawn at 5.54 on Friday morning. Any advice would be welcome on how to fill and successfully seed the deep holes they left in the banks.

The foxgloves, with Mangerton mountain and a blue sky in the background, looked their most majestic on Saturday morning at 7.30.

Further on up through the woods evidence of the inexorable advance of rhododendron. Magnificent now with their regal, football-size, blossoms but as they advance they threaten all other flora.

Just before 9 the rhododendron purple added to the great panorama over Middle and Lower Lakes.

On the way back the number of dead larch cause pause for thought.

The dozens, maybe hundreds, of orchids in the grassy break in the woods with Torc Mountain in the background.

On Sunday it was overcast but there was no rain as we walked from Gallan Eile through the woods the flow in Torc Waterfall was already easing off. The circuit along lake shore via Muckross House – and lunch – on the original Queen’s drive to Gallan Eile.

– Frank Lewis

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Now nature is at its most active.  Something new is in bloom every day.  And the clarity in the late morning and early evening further highlights this sense of being alive.

The bog cotton first showed its showy white head about a week ago.  In earlier times it was used to stuff pillows and mattresses and was renewed annually.

– Frank Lewis

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FOXGLOVE OR FAIRY BELLS?

At the moment 262 foxgloves are in full bloom along the western or lakeside stone boundary at Gallan Eile.  Four years ago Siubhan counted 98

The plant makes a demanding statement. Look at me!

Each stem can have between 20 and 80 flowers.

An avenue of honour or line of protection, or celebration of welcome with individual foxgloves up to two meters tall.

Our boundary is six foot high, with stones gathered from rough land retaining precious soil.

In the 18th century the recently introduced potato flourished in these high mountain paddocks.

Between the mid eighteen and nineteenth centuries Ireland’s population doubled forcing cultivation of these marginal areas.

By the mid nineteenth century eighty percent of the people of Kerry lived in one roomed mud cabins and survived on a diet of three meals of potatoes a day.  For the month of July, between potato crops, they lived on cabbage.

When the potato was wiped out by a fungal disease in the mid 19th century Ireland lost up to a quarter of its population.  Over a million people died of starvation and a similar number emigrated to Britain, the US and Australia.

It is unlikely the foxglove got its name from the belief that its bell-shaped flower made suitable gloves for foxes.

It is suggested the name might come from the Anglo-Saxon gliew – a musical instrument with many small bells – and fox could be a corruption of ‘folks’ meaning the ‘little folk’, or fairies. This might explain why I grew up calling foxgloves ‘fairy bells’?

The foxglove is very poisonous. It can be used to produce the drug Digitalis which in very small doses is used to treat heart complaints.

– Frank Lewis

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Is this the oldest yew in Killarney?  It is said yew can ‘grow for a thousand years, mature for a thousand years and is a thousand years dying’ and then it regenerates from its roots.  Earlier generations were very wise in choosing to plant yew in graveyards as a symbol of life.  In a sense it is everlasting, head gardener from Garnish Island, near Sneem, Seamus Galvin, told us.

It was 5.20 last Sunday morning (April 23), an hour before sunrise, as we stood around this witness of past millennia. We were out to hear that very special feature of nature, the dawn chorus, which is at its height an hour before the sun rises. Within minutes the first birds were beginning to sing, perhaps woken by our torches.

On the track over Hyde’s Bay there are several sets of crumbling steps that might have been developed as part of the landscaping of the two great Killarney estates in preparation for the visit of Queen Victoria in 1861.

Now we were beginning to see the ghostly outline of lake, headland, island and mountain. The bird song got stronger and stronger.

Acres and acres and acres of beech woods carpeted with the white wild garlic flower which now is in full bloom. Leaf, flower and root of this indicator of ancient woodland can be eaten.

All morning the birds sang. Story teller and initiator of the Kerry Camino Mikey O’Donnell told of finding old birds’ eggs collections in attics.

Distinctive ‘JG 1940’ and decorative ‘MTM’ carved into the smooth grey bark of big beech trees, remember a time when most boys – and many men – cut out their initials – particularly at a stage in life when they were linked amorously to another.

Killarney Walks guide Michael O’Connor told of the mining that went on on Ross island from 4,500 years ago and at its most extensive in late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Library point is named for the layered rock underneath, that resembles a collapsed line of books. Killaney boatman Donal ‘Ducks’ O’Donoghue swears boatmen see the leaves of the books move in strong wind.

From Library Point 23-acre Innisfallen Island that has the extensive remains of a monastery that was a famous centre of learning, where the oldest contemporary account of the history of Munster was written. The Annals of Innisfallen are now in the Bodlian Library in Oxford. The cone-shaped O’Donoghue’s Prison where it is said that the chieftain of Ross Castle chained his naked prisoners.

Donal remembered with feeling the 28 miles of rowing of earlier years – to get the punch line you will have to listen to Saturday’s radio programme!!

Wild garlic soup and wild garlic pesto bread prepared by James Coffey, the executive chef at the Park Hotel in Kenmare, revived us on Sunday morning under the two great Monkey Puzzle trees at he Earl of Kenmare’s picnic place on Ross Bay. Imagine Cromwellian stories sailing by here 365 years ago. 13 year old Kerrill Healy from the Killarney School of Music on the Killarney whistle played the plaintive ‘Caoine Ui Dhomhnaill’.

Around the corner from Lord Kenmare’s picnic place the most extensive carpets of wild garlic is in full bloom. This extends from Ross Bay to the western shore of the Library Point headland.

Our final stop last Sunday morning was in swamp woodland. Alder and sally are the ideal woods for sluices and other underwater structures. The yellow wild iris will blossom shortly.

After three hours we finished our walk with Killarney School of Music’s Padraig Buckley and 17 year old Fiona Fell on Killarney Whistle with the chirpy ‘Maxwell’s Bonnet’.

– Frank Lewis

PS