GoBag

We didn't have rain for about a month from midMarch to midApril. That meant that the ground has been super dry and load-bearing which was a blessing because we had Works going on at Caisleán Blob. From another viewpoint the lack of rain meant that the hills were 'tinder' dry with the gorse Ulex europaeus coming into flower over a bed of dead bracken which has been desiccating in the breeze since late last Summer.  I was up at 0500hrs on Saturday 12 Apr 25 and was surprised and undelighted to see an orange glow to the NW behind the house. The whole face of our hill was ablaze. I was cautiously hopeful because the wind was blowing the fire back on itself and might soon run out of fuel. By lunch time, when I yomped up the lane as far as the Mountain Gate, the wind had turned  and brought the fire to the very edge of the common; with smoke billowing  across the track between our heathland and the incipient forest planted 3 years ago.

By the morning of the following day the fire had burned through pretty much the entire 200 hectares of our Common; certainly everything we could see from the mountain gate was  A Study in Grey  [as L] a camo-parent not to be confused with Arrangement en gris et noir n°1  aka Whistler's Mother (1871). The 3 y.o. forest with its waist-high treelets in a wet valley bottom survived untoasted. They say that brush fires occur spontaneously; or from broken glass lensing the sunlight; or from lightning strike. But those causes are vanishingly unlikely in Ireland in April even if there has been very little rain. 

The county  fire brigade  had been mobilized to our valley all week. Nobody doubts the courage and community spirit of the fire brigade! But it's one thing to go blue-lights and sirens through suburban streets and unreel the hose in front of a burning semi-detached. Another level of fitness and commitment is required to struggle uphill, loaded with PPE and trade tools [Pulaski], through rocks and bushes towards a distant gorse fire. I gather they are on a watching brief - prepared to write off the dry heath, the lark's nests, the blueberries, the invertebrates - but ready for action if forestry or buildings are under threat.

 The Beloved had committed to spending the Saturday in another county, so I was alone with my ruminations. We've been woken in the middle of the night with fire crackling outside the the bedroom curtains. That was totally unexpected and we had only a few minutes to decide what to save if the wind changed direction and rained embers down on our home. This last weekend, I packed a Go-Bag in case we had to leave home in a hurry.  In 1993, I saved the computer, which was then a largely irrelevant and expensive toy. It was only later that I realised that the family photos were irreplaceable. In 2025, we have all moved our electronic world front and centre. All the recent family photos are stored as electrons rather than highly flammable paper. The Go-Bag received the backup hard-drives; the current laptops; the password list!; wills, birth certs and passports. That's all! ymmv, but I won't have time to re-read the wall of books which I look at as I type: so they can go . . . or stay as I go. The rest is just stuff and clutter.  To put that in context (and it reads a tad paranoid) I thought of the strip of forestry planted as carbon offset by the ESB in 2019. Those trees are now 2-3m tall poking through an understorey of bushes and briars. The 15 hectare lot snakes down from the mountain gate ↑ all the way to the County Road:

That forest comes to the very edge ↑ of the farm, about 40m from our bedroom window. Between the ESB plantation and our window there is a jungly copse of miscellaneous flammable trees and bushes. In my mind it was all a bit too close for comfort. Although looking at the actual map, I appreciate that it would be a very determined, goal-directed, Bob-hating fire to get from the blue arrow to the pink one and then jump at my throat while I lay sleeping.

Previous ruminations on The Heather Blazing: Sep 2024 - Apr 2022 - Apr 2020