Nature Notebook

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

Ten days ago the first signs of blue in the green carpet under the trees from Mangerton Road to the jaunting car entrance to the National Park.

Within days that whole stretch was a richly luxuriant carpet of bluebells at their best these days – as I found out last Monday (April 17). Ann Bronte captures the mood.

A fine and subtle spirit dwells
In every little flower,
Each one its own sweet feeling breathes
With more or less of power.
There is a silent eloquence
In every wild bluebell
That fills my softened heart with bliss
That words could never tell.

That day along a sunny road
All carelessly I strayed,
Between two banks where smiling flowers
Their varied hues displayed.

But when I looked upon the bank
My wandering glances fell
Upon a little trembling flower,
A single sweet bluebell. 

O, that lone flower recalled to me
My happy childhood’s hours
When bluebells seemed like fairy gifts
A prize among the flowers,

Those sunny days of merriment
When heart and soul were free,
And when I dwelt with kindred hearts
That loved and cared for me

After an hour wandering among bluebells in Muckross I went to the wooded area in front of the Knockreer Gardens, Killarney’s other great centre of bluebells. But these were, at best, at an earlier stage.

In the neglected formal Knockreer Gardens lush rhodendron and in the background the intriguing handkerchief SPELLING tree and close by luxuriant azalea.

The high panorama from Knockreer uniquely shows the essences of Killarney – woodland, mountain and lake.

Coming down from the formal gardens pockets of fully white-flowered wild garlic – a foretaste of our wild garlic/dawn chorus walk on the Hyde’s Bay/Library Point which will be the subject of next week’s nature notebook.

– Frank Lewis

PS

Last Sunday the photo of this huge flowering cherry on the shore of the Upper Lake, inside an unofficial lay-by a short distance on the Kenmare side of the stone tunnel. I was hugely excited because I thought I had come across a record crab apple tree … but on reflection …

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Cardiac Hill lives up to its folk name.  

But frequent stops are trebly justified … the ever widening views, wonders of nature like the Douglas Firs that are very significantly higher than anything else, the grove of eucalyptus and the mosses.

Finishing the hill and turning left/north along a level path.  After a little while there are more steps – now wide and more regular, the going is easier. 

A little way along the northern route, across the northern face of Torc mountain, a panorama of the entire perimeter of the Middle and Lower Lakes showing Muckross House east of the Middle Lake and the Tomies/Purple/Glena mountain ridge falling preciptuously on the western edge of both lakes.  

Across the mountain the changing vistas of both lakes and the mountains. Much of this unique viewing was opened up in recent years with the clearing of dense thickets of rhododendron.  

A dry stone beehive hut has a well in front. This was not the home of an early mendicant monk. It was built to shelter workers who opened up this trail about 50 years ago.  

Coming off the mountain the path widens to a dirt road through conifer woodland.   Going left at a T junction. A little way along we chose to go right, shortly crossing the well named Owengarriff (abhann garbh/rough river) with its tumbling cascades.  After crossing the bridge take an immediate left.  

Now along by a deep ravine cut by the passage of ice between two million and 14,000 years ago and the rushing waters of the Owengarriff since then. The way is pleasantly shaded by oak, arbutus and holly.   The path falls, with occasional glimpses of lake and mountain, down steps to Torc waterfall.  

From first light to dusk there is a constant flow of people coming to Torc Waterfall.   It is said that one of the Herbert landlords here unsuccessfully attempted to divert the waterfall to get at the treasure that legend says is hidden in a chamber behind the falls.

The final leg is parallel and above the public road (the N71) with the mountain ridge to the right of straight ahead. The dirt road has been cut through dense rhododendron with regular views of the Middle Lake and the Lower Lake in the background.  

The circular route ends, after two and a half hours, at the car lay bye at the back entrance to Dinis.

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For several weeks now hedgerows have been bursting with masses of the tiny white flower on the blackthorn, that shines out against the darker wood of the leafless shrub tree.

At the moment the luxuriantly yellow flower on the spring furze is at its abundant best.

Last Sunday morning from the Governor’s Rock Headland on Ross Island before 7 the huge body of Lough Leane water was mirror still.  In those minutes around sunrise the grey blue monotone landscape looked like a scrubbed clean new world.

Less than half an hour later the brightly coloured boats on the water in front of Ross Castle were a distraction from the background emerging green of the foliage and the blue in the sunlight sky.

We were on Ross Island in preparation for a dawn chorus walk that will broadcast on Radio Kerry from 9am to11am on Saturday, April 29.

– Frank Lewis