Five years ago, I wrote an 800 word potted Life of John Tyndall. It's not the first place people go to find out something about the man who worked out why the sky was blue: my Blob is half-way down the 6th page at Google. When a new biography of Tyndall was published in the Spring, I asked The Institute's Library to order a copy in case any of our students were interested in Victorian science, politics and mountaineering to all of which Tyndall contributed. The book by Roland Jackson is waggishly entitled The Ascent of John Tyndall to acknowledge five decades of Summer days he spent in Switzerland climbing mountains and scrambling over glaciers . . . but also his rise from very humble beginnings along the River Barrow in Co Carlow to rubbing shoulders with the the elite in London. When I got the note to say that the book had been shelved, I promptly went in to borrow it.
It has taken several months of elapsed time, but now I have trudged through 450 pages of biographical detail to emerge, battered by info but rather better informed, at the end of the text. 80 (!) pages of notes and references and a 16 page index complete the book. It is informatively illustrated with in-text pictures and a folio of glossy photographs in the middle. I say trudged because it is heavy going, being quite Victorian in its attention to detail.
A thread which weaves through Tyndall's life and therefore the book are the meetings of the X-Club an invitation-only dining club which started in late 1864 and met once a month for the next 30 years. The group was brought together by Thomas H "Darwin's Bulldog" Huxley and Joseph "Kew Gardens" Hooker, and included Tyndall, Busk, Frankland, Hirst, Lubbock, Spencer and Spottiswoode. More than half of these hot-shot men of science have dropped out of the narrative of movers and shakers in the current story of how modern science grew out of alchemy, engineering, hunting and flower collecting. They wanted to talk science in a social setting like our meetings of the Wexford Science Café. Late 19thC England was a world where educated men knew Latin and Greek, Plato and Shakespeare, but were hazy in their knowledge of logarithms and had no use at all for a sextant. Those tools were for 'mechanics' not the gentlemen of independent who made up the Victorian scientific establishment = The Royal Society. Team-X were mostly :poor and hungry and wanted to create a world where 'Scientist' was a profession with a salary. Tyndall was one of the few who landed such a job at the Royal Institution where he was paid to give lectures on science to Joe Public. Whenever a meeting of the X-club is mentioned in TAoJT it is accompanied by a roll-call of attendees. These data are a credit to the author's mining of the historical record but one could wish that such detail was removed from the narrative and put in a table . . . or just left in the kitchen with the potato skins. Same for menus: "We had soup, fish, choice mutton, roast chicken, a delicious salad and three or four kinds of wine . . ." just shows that Victorians of means were intemperate in their feeding habits.
Another thread through Tyndall's biography is particulate matter in the air; so much so that, born 150 years later, he might have been labelled Miasma Man. His current scientific credit lies in his explanation of why the sky is blue - it's the dust particles scattering the short wavelengths innit? But he had a long and noisy association with light-houses and fog-horns and how sound waves are affected by the water droplets in the air. Notably he was able to demonstrate in a lecture theatre the scattering of light by the Tyndall Effect with a nifty piece of apparatus. He was the first to propose that peculiar alpine mists that haunted valley bottoms were most likely due to clouds of dust and pollen and not to do with water-droplets. He spent many years investigating infectious organisms in the air in a dogged fight against the prevailing lazy explanation of spontaneous generation. One effective way he found to sterilise air was to capture it in vials coated with glycerin: soon enough all the floating bacteria-laden debris would touch the sides and be taken out of circulation like Br'er Rabbit and the tar-baby. His poor long-suffering wife had to help him transport sealed vials of old vegetables to Switzerland every Summer where they would open them on pure mountain peaks and outside the hotel kitchens to not how quickly putrefaction took place. She killed him in the end, accidentally giving him a huge tot of chloral hydrate instead of his morning draft of magnesia-for-the-bowels. She outlived him by 47 years, cherishing his memory and hoarding his papers, thus preventing a timely biography which might have cemented his position in the pantheon when his memory was still fresh.
He was famous in his day as a good-pair-of-hands, dreaming up hardware to demonstrate physical phenomena. He thus served as an important interface between theoretical and experimental physics. The theatre and the props made of brass & glass & wood made him a rock-star on the lecture circuit. When Aoife McLysaght and Alice Roberts launch the 2018 Royal Institution Christmas lectures on 26 27 28 December BBC 4, they are walking in Tyndall's footsteps. To reprise the "those who can do, those who can't teach" theme, it is likely that Tyndall's skills and inspiration as a teacher had more impact on the rise and rise of science than all his experimental observations together.
Monday, 24 December 2018
Sunday, 23 December 2018
H for consent
Ho Ho Ho. Santa's making his final inventory; oiling the reindeer and buffing the runners on the sleigh.
- Ho Ho Ho by Sia
- Hypnotism - IT'S FAKE they cry
- Honey from Nepal
- Helwegen
- Hell & Back - a 10k X-country run at Kilruddery House
- Hislop, Ian; on dissent
- Hail thou ever blessed morn. It's almost Christmas
- Habanera, Carme, Bizet, avec les paroles
- Haulbowline project: remediating a toxic waste dump in Cork Harbour. Blurb
- Heist. Package porch pickers pranked.
- The Hum. Low frequency west country burrrrrrrrrmmmmm.
Saturday, 22 December 2018
Shameful College
Don’t listen to her Bob. Remember those who can, do;
those who can’t, teach. GB Shaw. Man & Superman.
It's not strictly true, some brilliant and creative people are incapable of conveying to others how to do likewise. Doing and teaching require different toolkits. On the other hand, genius is not normally distributed: people at the left-hand of the bell-curve of brilliance are . . . just people. Whereas that left tail in the teaching profession comprises people who are getting a salary for teaching albeit not very well and at the very edge of their competence. It's likeQ. What do you call the chap who graduates last in medical school?
A. "Doctor".
Years ago I was co-opted onto a committee tasked to approve the launch of a new degree course called Industrial Microbiology with Bioinformatics. Having spent the previous 15+ years working at the frontiers of bioinformatics, I was qualified to judge whether the college launching the new degree had the competence and commitment necessary to support their project. In agreement with the stated policy of the HEA [Higher Education Authority] IM&B was a bolt-on degree, the college having run a plain Industrial Microbiology degree for several years. We on the Appro Committee asked how the college had made room for the bioinformatics module in what was presumably a full course. "Oh we will phase out the module on business organization." When the original IM course was put together, a case had been made that teaching Industrial Microbiologists the elements of double-entry book-keeping was essential because some of the students might find themselves running a campus company or a start-up based on their final-year research project. Abruptly, when a more glittery gem presented itself, the essential became yesterday. My cynical crap-detector told me that the BizOrg module was a make-weight to give teaching hours to some under-used faculty member in the other department . . . with a post-hoc future use requirement created to justify the fact that generations of students were being short-changed.
"No degree is the new degree"
Task 1. Plan and cost a tour of concerts: you are a group of four musicians and a sound-engineer booking gigs for 400 seats in Wexford, Cork, Dublin, Athlone, Dundalk, Roscommon, Waterford and Tullamore. Estimate a time-line and the costs of transport, accommodation, insurance, food, publicity material and bribes.
Like FilmBoy O'Maven above, one of the students has spent the last several years touring about the country earning an honest crust entertaining people at weddings and birthdays in pubs and hotels:
"Sorry, but you're not going to find a 400-seater in Tullamore" and then (more reality station):
"When we do the gig in Cork, do I have to stay in a hotel, or can I go home to my own gaff?"
He's neither stupid nor insensitive, and he noted a frisson of annoyance pass across the lecturer's face. Doubtless the unfortunate older chap wanted to say "It's only a game, you young blaggard". But he dared not thus undermine the whole charade that he was transmitting information to the students that would, at any stage in their future lives, be useful. Far too much education involves that sort of deceit.
"Sorry, but you're not going to find a 400-seater in Tullamore" and then (more reality station):
"When we do the gig in Cork, do I have to stay in a hotel, or can I go home to my own gaff?"
He's neither stupid nor insensitive, and he noted a frisson of annoyance pass across the lecturer's face. Doubtless the unfortunate older chap wanted to say "It's only a game, you young blaggard". But he dared not thus undermine the whole charade that he was transmitting information to the students that would, at any stage in their future lives, be useful. Far too much education involves that sort of deceit.
Friday, 21 December 2018
Liqueur liquor
I was having a bit of a sugar rush last week talking about sucrose, glucose, fructose [and ethanol]. It is physico-chemical peculiarity of the two monosaccharides that, although they have the same C6H12O6 chemical formula, they have a rather different structure and consequently rotate polarised light in opposite directions. The reason why this happens is way beyond my ability to explain.
We have a taste for sugar because, in our evolutionary past, such easily digested calories were hard to come by and those who had receptors on their tongues that recognised sugar molecules made better choices in their diet, grew a little fatter, got off with the opposite sex more often and left more offspring in succeeding generations. Their taste-insensitive cousins ate a lot of bark and wasted away. Our perception rates fruit sugar fructose highest: If sucrose tastes 100%, then fructose tastes 150% while glucose seems only 75% as good. As you know, food engineers have long been gaming the system with other peculiar chemicals - cyclamates, saccharine, aspartame - which fit the taste receptors even better than nature's intended and make us swoon with sweetie delight. The dreaded HFCS high-fructose corn syrup makes considerable in-roads to the American Maize Mountain, by processing milled corn with a frightening array of chemicals and unnatural enzymes to produce a viscous liquid called HFCS-42 which is 42% fructose. This is added to an eye-watering variety of beverages, processed foods, cereals, and baked goods.
I may get back to HFCS later, but today we are making liqueur chocolates. The ability to make something that has a liquid centre hinges on another difference in the physical chemistry of the three sugars of which we treat. Some solids will dissolve in some liquids. You know that if you've ever put sugar in your tea or made a cake or salted your porridge. Scientists are wonks for quants, so they like to measure exactly how much of solute [the solid] A will dissolve in solvent [the liquid] B. They quickly worked out that this solubility was temperature dependent: that teaspoon of sugar disappears in a flash in hot tea but requires a bit of a stir in cold water. It turns out that you can dissolve a lot of sugar in water at room temperature (20ºC) a litre L of water, weighing 1000g will take:
Fructose: 3750 g/L
Sucrose: 2040 g/L
Glucose: 900g/L
This says that if you lurry in 2kg of granulated white sugar into a litre of water it will all dissolve [needs a good stir as you may imagine]. If you add a little more you'll have a thick paste which you can treat as a solid for the purpose of Making cherry liqueur chocs, factory style. Similar eye-glazing choc-factory in Canada. Form your chocolate into little buckets. Fill with a suitably flavoured sugar paste - a little alcohol doesn't go amiss, but doesn't at all at all help get the sugar into solution. Then cap off with more chocolate. Voilá! You have hard candies covered in chocolate. But note in the film when they spray invertase into the filler mix of sugar and cherries. As we saw last week, invertase is the enzyme which converts each molecule of sucrose into 1 of glucose + 1 of fructose. The fructose, avid for water, goes back into solution making the interior a) sweeter b) gloopier. The glucose doesn't help on either of these food engineering axes but the average solubility [(3750+900)/2 = 2325] is more than the original sucrose-only paste. The process takes a few days at least partly because <chocolate alert> you cannot warm it up too much to speed the process along.
You can do this at home.
We have a taste for sugar because, in our evolutionary past, such easily digested calories were hard to come by and those who had receptors on their tongues that recognised sugar molecules made better choices in their diet, grew a little fatter, got off with the opposite sex more often and left more offspring in succeeding generations. Their taste-insensitive cousins ate a lot of bark and wasted away. Our perception rates fruit sugar fructose highest: If sucrose tastes 100%, then fructose tastes 150% while glucose seems only 75% as good. As you know, food engineers have long been gaming the system with other peculiar chemicals - cyclamates, saccharine, aspartame - which fit the taste receptors even better than nature's intended and make us swoon with sweetie delight. The dreaded HFCS high-fructose corn syrup makes considerable in-roads to the American Maize Mountain, by processing milled corn with a frightening array of chemicals and unnatural enzymes to produce a viscous liquid called HFCS-42 which is 42% fructose. This is added to an eye-watering variety of beverages, processed foods, cereals, and baked goods.
I may get back to HFCS later, but today we are making liqueur chocolates. The ability to make something that has a liquid centre hinges on another difference in the physical chemistry of the three sugars of which we treat. Some solids will dissolve in some liquids. You know that if you've ever put sugar in your tea or made a cake or salted your porridge. Scientists are wonks for quants, so they like to measure exactly how much of solute [the solid] A will dissolve in solvent [the liquid] B. They quickly worked out that this solubility was temperature dependent: that teaspoon of sugar disappears in a flash in hot tea but requires a bit of a stir in cold water. It turns out that you can dissolve a lot of sugar in water at room temperature (20ºC) a litre L of water, weighing 1000g will take:
Fructose: 3750 g/L
Sucrose: 2040 g/L
Glucose: 900g/L
You can do this at home.
Thursday, 20 December 2018
when I get older losing my . . .
. . . hair marbles?
I was talking to my mother in England; she's 98¾ and living in her own gaff in one of those megacute Olde Englyshe villages: a pub, a church, a village hall, a cricket ground, a little river, a manor house, a postman, even a railway station. When they moved there on my father's retirement in 1983, there was also a shop-cum-PostOffice, since closed. They had a pact that when one of them pegged out, the other would downsize and declutter to more suitable accomodation in the market town where they preferred to shop. Never happened! The Old Man died in 2001 but inertia and familiarity took root and my mother is still looking after herself in the same house she's lived for 35 years - which is by far the longest time she's lived in the same house.
There is a community in the village and they look after their own, as we found last year when she needed drops in her eyes several times a day after a cataract job. But everyone has their own life and, being English, they have their boundaries. The family were concerned that, if a fall were to occur <which heaven forfend>, and the alarm pendant failed, then she might be lying at the foot of the stairs for a couple of days before anyone noticed. Then again, things come in the post, which her failing sight doesn't make easy to read and small-small t'ings need doing for which it is not worth asking a neighbour to come over specially. Accordingly, my sister, who lives in the same country and visits every week or so, found an agency who would sent An Effective round every evening at about 1800hrs. And it was so; the new regime has been motoring along for a couple of weeks. Having that regular injection of assistance [and chatter and care] should be enough to keep the current domicile in place and functional for a while yet.
When my mother stopped driving 12 years ago [failing sight mainly], she gave up the car and adopted a taxi-company. Typically, she'd walk across the village green empty-handed to the once-a-day bus-stop [it was axed in the Spring of 2018], potter about town buying spinach, trout, raspberries and whatever else she fancied and then call a taxi to carry her loot home. It worked fine, the taxi-driver would carry her groceries into the kitchen table for her. In December each year, the taxi company would give back the lucky penny to their loyal clients: they stood everyone a Christmas lunch including, of course, a lift from home and back. A similar thing happened last week with the Care Agency: they picked up all their clients - including newbies like me Mum - and took them into the County Hall for a cup of tea and a mince-pie.
My mother gave me a report: obviously the people at the tea-party were not a random cross-section of the population - there were no Goths or single parents or surfer dudes; or anyone under the age of 60. But they were - here she was a bit at a loss for words - normal . . . by which she meant not obviously demented. That was a welcome change from her wide experience of visiting pals in nursing homes. "But", she added, "everyone had their own reason for signing up with the agency." One of her new friends [co-clients might be a better descriptor], for example, requested and required someone to come round every morning. He was wheelchair-bound and could look after himself but some days he'd wake up all cosy in bed and think a lie-in would be nice. He feared that might be the beginning of a slippery slope of indolence and sloth [chap sounds like a protestant] which would leave him, far to soon, covered in bed-sores and waiting for the end. He therefore called in the agency to ensure that, no matter how bleak the day, he would get up and get dressed.
That reminded me of a 10 Point "motivational" conferring address given a few years ago by Admiral William McRaven. He called this piece to graduates Change the World by Making Your Bed and drew lessons from his experience going through Boot Camp as a US Navy Seal. As well as a brutal, deliberately de-humanising, shouty, physically exhausting, sleep deprivation hell, elite forces Boot Camp has peculiar pernickety standards. One of those is a requirement to make your bed to exacting standards [no duvets need apply] every morning. McRaven reflected that this deliberate practice was good for moral because - eventually - you started each day with a small achievement. Banking that before breakfast was likely to lead to further morale boosting successes through the day . . . and give you a clean bed to fall into that night.
I was talking to my mother in England; she's 98¾ and living in her own gaff in one of those megacute Olde Englyshe villages: a pub, a church, a village hall, a cricket ground, a little river, a manor house, a postman, even a railway station. When they moved there on my father's retirement in 1983, there was also a shop-cum-PostOffice, since closed. They had a pact that when one of them pegged out, the other would downsize and declutter to more suitable accomodation in the market town where they preferred to shop. Never happened! The Old Man died in 2001 but inertia and familiarity took root and my mother is still looking after herself in the same house she's lived for 35 years - which is by far the longest time she's lived in the same house.
There is a community in the village and they look after their own, as we found last year when she needed drops in her eyes several times a day after a cataract job. But everyone has their own life and, being English, they have their boundaries. The family were concerned that, if a fall were to occur <which heaven forfend>, and the alarm pendant failed, then she might be lying at the foot of the stairs for a couple of days before anyone noticed. Then again, things come in the post, which her failing sight doesn't make easy to read and small-small t'ings need doing for which it is not worth asking a neighbour to come over specially. Accordingly, my sister, who lives in the same country and visits every week or so, found an agency who would sent An Effective round every evening at about 1800hrs. And it was so; the new regime has been motoring along for a couple of weeks. Having that regular injection of assistance [and chatter and care] should be enough to keep the current domicile in place and functional for a while yet.
When my mother stopped driving 12 years ago [failing sight mainly], she gave up the car and adopted a taxi-company. Typically, she'd walk across the village green empty-handed to the once-a-day bus-stop [it was axed in the Spring of 2018], potter about town buying spinach, trout, raspberries and whatever else she fancied and then call a taxi to carry her loot home. It worked fine, the taxi-driver would carry her groceries into the kitchen table for her. In December each year, the taxi company would give back the lucky penny to their loyal clients: they stood everyone a Christmas lunch including, of course, a lift from home and back. A similar thing happened last week with the Care Agency: they picked up all their clients - including newbies like me Mum - and took them into the County Hall for a cup of tea and a mince-pie.
My mother gave me a report: obviously the people at the tea-party were not a random cross-section of the population - there were no Goths or single parents or surfer dudes; or anyone under the age of 60. But they were - here she was a bit at a loss for words - normal . . . by which she meant not obviously demented. That was a welcome change from her wide experience of visiting pals in nursing homes. "But", she added, "everyone had their own reason for signing up with the agency." One of her new friends [co-clients might be a better descriptor], for example, requested and required someone to come round every morning. He was wheelchair-bound and could look after himself but some days he'd wake up all cosy in bed and think a lie-in would be nice. He feared that might be the beginning of a slippery slope of indolence and sloth [chap sounds like a protestant] which would leave him, far to soon, covered in bed-sores and waiting for the end. He therefore called in the agency to ensure that, no matter how bleak the day, he would get up and get dressed.
That reminded me of a 10 Point "motivational" conferring address given a few years ago by Admiral William McRaven. He called this piece to graduates Change the World by Making Your Bed and drew lessons from his experience going through Boot Camp as a US Navy Seal. As well as a brutal, deliberately de-humanising, shouty, physically exhausting, sleep deprivation hell, elite forces Boot Camp has peculiar pernickety standards. One of those is a requirement to make your bed to exacting standards [no duvets need apply] every morning. McRaven reflected that this deliberate practice was good for moral because - eventually - you started each day with a small achievement. Banking that before breakfast was likely to lead to further morale boosting successes through the day . . . and give you a clean bed to fall into that night.
Wednesday, 19 December 2018
Food burden
Damme, it used to be simple. You'd have a limit budget with which you had to feed the family, so you bought a large sack of spuds because they were cheap and filling; and then you eked out the rest of your food budget on a tin of beans or a packet of sausages to act as condiment to calories as recommended by Thomas Jefferson. The Market should work so that the commodities that were most valuable would have the highest price because demand would ensure that. Then came 'organic' and you were made to feel like a heel if didn't pay extra for something so labelled.
We had just about nailed this other dimension to food economics - there wasn't a particularly clear relationship between price and organichood. - when my sister came to visit and told us we should worry about the air-miles . . . as well as the O-word. That started us looking at the country of origin and refusing to eat new potatoes in the early Summer because they all came from Cyprus or Egypt. As I say, it all got too much for my little brain and I went back to price. If regular milk is 75c and organic milk is 100c, and it is, then I save the 25c towards giving myself a clock when I retire. And the hell with thin milk, fat-free milk, and other adulterated products where you pay the same price and don't get all the ingredients. And I certainly don't buy other white beverages made with seaweed, palm oil, emulsifiers, and soy | almond | rice | oat. I tell ya there's a killing to be made with Genuine Irish Potato Milk.
Now The Beloved has pointed me at yet another dimension of food-guilt. As well as the organic, fair-trade, forest-friendly, kosher, nut-less, milk-less, gluten-free; we now have to get all WIGged out over the Warming, Index of Global. It hasn't yet appeared on the labelling but the BBC has a helpful starter pack to see just how your self-indulgence over pork, coffee, wine is quietly destroying the planet. According to this BBC app, I should be putting almond 'milk' in my porridge:
. . . but it ain't gonna happen. You can jump out of the global warming frying pan and find yourself plunged in a toxic maelstrom of carcinogens from these made-in-lab commodities. I'd rather skip the white stuff altogether and have my porridge protestant plain.
We had just about nailed this other dimension to food economics - there wasn't a particularly clear relationship between price and organichood. - when my sister came to visit and told us we should worry about the air-miles . . . as well as the O-word. That started us looking at the country of origin and refusing to eat new potatoes in the early Summer because they all came from Cyprus or Egypt. As I say, it all got too much for my little brain and I went back to price. If regular milk is 75c and organic milk is 100c, and it is, then I save the 25c towards giving myself a clock when I retire. And the hell with thin milk, fat-free milk, and other adulterated products where you pay the same price and don't get all the ingredients. And I certainly don't buy other white beverages made with seaweed, palm oil, emulsifiers, and soy | almond | rice | oat. I tell ya there's a killing to be made with Genuine Irish Potato Milk.
Now The Beloved has pointed me at yet another dimension of food-guilt. As well as the organic, fair-trade, forest-friendly, kosher, nut-less, milk-less, gluten-free; we now have to get all WIGged out over the Warming, Index of Global. It hasn't yet appeared on the labelling but the BBC has a helpful starter pack to see just how your self-indulgence over pork, coffee, wine is quietly destroying the planet. According to this BBC app, I should be putting almond 'milk' in my porridge:
Tuesday, 18 December 2018
Waterblind
D'ye live in these [Western European Archipelago WEA] islands? How was Storm Deirdre for you? It was wet wet wet for us. It rained from wee-hours Saturday 15/12/18 for 24 hours. I got up at first light and, with my azada and a shovel in gloved hands, I went to clear the drain that runs up beside the lane to our house. It's important to do this in the rain because then you can see where the debris is getting accumulated and scoop it clear. I was thereafter confident that the water would run away below us. In the early afternoon it eased off a little and I peeked out of the gate to see water roaring down the drain from above. I wasn't surprised: Storm Deirdre delivered about 50mm of rain in 24 hours. Usually 24 days would have to pass to accumulate that much precipitation. 15km East of here, the River Slaney burst its banks at Enniscorthy [again] and flooded the shops along the quay.
It was no time to creep back under the duvet and hope that things would be okay. Therefore, I shucked myself into my rain gear and plodded up the hill with my tools. Sometimes a mighty back-hoe is the tool of choice - ripping and tearing and dumping stuff in and out of the way: but they make a terrible ragged mess which will be particularly vulnerable to subsequent water damage. Sometimes a more focused Little-Hans-at-the-Dyke attack is better. In 1997, after we suffered the first destruction of our access road from a surfeit of rushing water, I button-holed one of our neighbours as he drove up the lane to talk about a solution. I pointed to a heap of 2-inch-down or Clause 804 gravel in our yard and said he could have as much as he wanted to make berms across the lane above our house. We agreed 4 places where a small intervention would turn any water off the road surface and into a big drain that would take it elsewhere. The next few times he went up the mountain to view his sheep, he brought up a front-loader full of aggregate and dumped it at the appointed places; and smoothed it out with a shovel while I was driving a desk up in Dublin. Over the years, these humps have settled down and grassed over and are, for intermittent flash floods, as good as concrete.
My Deirdre task was to make sure that the exits at each of these escape chutes were not clogging up.
Berm001. The lowest berm was holding firm but the ruts of the roadway above were inches deep in running water. As the slope is about 1:10 there is a lot of kinetic energy in the moving water and pebbles were bouncing along in the torrent - the twigs and fallen leaves or spikes of gorse Ulex had already been swept clean and down. My problem here is that, three years ago, we installed a long 30cm ⌀ plastic drain-pipe to carry the spill-water downhill. The plastic pipe is super slick inside but it's a long flattish journey for all the debris and I am concerned that it is slowly filling up. When it rains enough to flush things through, more crud is coming down from above. I only put in the pipe to stop my neighbour-above from swinging his tractor and trailer into the open drain every frigging time he turned into his field. The collapsed drain was invisible to him but I'd go up periodically to shovel the debris clear against the next flood.
Berm002. I went up to barrier two knowing in was a lost cause. A while back, the same neighbour had decided that there was no advantage to him in allowing water to spill into his field 3 or 4 times a year . . . as insurance that there would be a lane to drive up to that field in the future. This is ironic because the 1997 flood stripped the topsoil and a generous dressing of artificial fertiliser from his newly created pasture and dumped it all in a heap on the county road. That Spring he'd been clearing and smoothing that 4 hectare field having knocked and buried and levelled all the walls and drains and ditches that had separated the 5 smaller fields which he'd bought at auction. After the storm and the loss and destruction he confessed ruefully: "The village idiot stood on the ditch and called out 'Sean, Sean, where's the water going to go, Sean?'" He had to get the back-hoe back on site to restore the drains that kept the mountain catchment delivering itself into the top of his 4 ha field and leaving 5 minutes later from the bottom corner.
Berm003. Like Berm001 this was holding its own and performing at specification. But like Berm001, there was a lot of water being turned aside here. With some trepidation, therefore, I quickened my pace to find out why so much water was travelling.
Berm004. Aha! When I arrived, water was brimming behind this dam and spilling over into the road-bed to gather speed on its way down hill. I started shovelling sods and mud up on top of the berm but these were getting carried away as soon as they were thrown up. I was alone, increasingly wet & out of my depth in water and resources. So I stopped and looked at the situation sideways; in particular at the place where the lake behind the berm headed East and into a capacious drainage channel. Water wasn't making its exit. I plunged into the lake and started to pull crud from the holes in the wall through which the water was meant to drain. Out came twigs, leaves, brambles, gorse, matted grass, old bracken: with each clot, mud and small stones came out with cloooargh sound. It was like a bath draining: the outflow increased dramatically and the level of the lake fell 20cm in about five minutes making the remains of my pathetic earlier shovellings look like sprinkles on a cake.
This is The Mountain Gate aka The Iron Gate; just to show what blurfed out of the drain this last weekend. The largest stones are as big as a baby's head. Also note the ominous sign on the gate. Forestry Operations are 15 hectares of scrubby hillside which is even as I write being grubbed up and stripped of bushes and ditches to plant Sitka spruce Picea sitchensis. The rain isn't going to stop because they planted some trees and a lot of exposed top-soil is going to start travelling until the tree-roots spread out and start holding things together. Tricking about with running water can be fun but only if you box clever. Being water blind [Fr. aveugleau ?] or staying on the sofa watching telly when it is hosing down outside is just laying yourself open to more expense and trouble later on.
It was no time to creep back under the duvet and hope that things would be okay. Therefore, I shucked myself into my rain gear and plodded up the hill with my tools. Sometimes a mighty back-hoe is the tool of choice - ripping and tearing and dumping stuff in and out of the way: but they make a terrible ragged mess which will be particularly vulnerable to subsequent water damage. Sometimes a more focused Little-Hans-at-the-Dyke attack is better. In 1997, after we suffered the first destruction of our access road from a surfeit of rushing water, I button-holed one of our neighbours as he drove up the lane to talk about a solution. I pointed to a heap of 2-inch-down or Clause 804 gravel in our yard and said he could have as much as he wanted to make berms across the lane above our house. We agreed 4 places where a small intervention would turn any water off the road surface and into a big drain that would take it elsewhere. The next few times he went up the mountain to view his sheep, he brought up a front-loader full of aggregate and dumped it at the appointed places; and smoothed it out with a shovel while I was driving a desk up in Dublin. Over the years, these humps have settled down and grassed over and are, for intermittent flash floods, as good as concrete.
My Deirdre task was to make sure that the exits at each of these escape chutes were not clogging up.
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