Decadance

In our family the birthdays are all crammed into the last third of the year - except for me as Son of Somer Solstice. We mark these days with cards and a meal together for the adults rather than presents and cake whc are still traditional among the not-yet-voters. And the meal together is optional because half the family live in a different country. But lookit: The Beloved was born in 1955; The Boy in 1975; Dau.II in 1995; and Gdau.II in 2015 and this is 2025. Sometime over the Summer we all woke up to this alignment of the quinquennium and reckoned it was worth a knees-up sometime between mid-Sept and mid-Dec.

And so it was that a 70-50-30-10-decade Tea-dance with a glass of fizzz was organized for the afternoon of the Hallowe'en Bank Holiday Monday. We rented a room in stately Mount Congreve which is a about 15mins from the centre of Waterford or Tramore. We've been to their caff a few times, but it was only this Summer that we stumped for entry Tix to wander through the desmesne. Ambrose, last of the Congreves, was mad about the gardening. Living to the age of 104 and i/c the estate for more than half of that time, he was able to see his arborial plantings reach maturity. And the complex of walled and kitchen gardens is extensive, varied and rather wonderful. Bring a book and sit on one of the benches listening to the beezzzz fumbling the flowers.

The catering was a separate ticket but the whole event was much cheaper than a wedding. They say that you should arrange wedding receptions without mentioning the word 'wedding' lest the bill doubles. 

We saved a mort o'money on one item four items on the ticket because Dau.II has been baking and decorating cakes since she was tall enough to get her nose above the kitchen table. It is definitely not about the money because Dau.II has Standards which are far above those of most people in the business who have spent 3 or 4 years in catering school. The initial plan was to make cakes of different sizes to reflect the different ages of The Principals but that was soon ditched because it is obvious that 10 y.o. eyes are bigger for cake than those of someone with a bus-pass. Whatevs: these cakes, separately or together,  give the lie to never eat anything bigger than your head. Just wield a cake-slice and take your time. 

• Hazelnut, pear and cardomon
• Lemon meringue with 'guests'
• Chocomalt and Maltesers
• Red velvet wi' cream-cheese frosting & capybara  

In real-life, of course, you'll share your cake with the couple of handfuls of true friends who have had your back for decades. Some of these pals were unavoidably tied up promoting World Peace, but most of those invited made the trek from all over the Western European Archipelago WEA. It was a like a wedding (or a funeral) insofar as we all got to meet people whom we haven't seen for twenty "my, haven't you grown!" years. And many [partners, offspring] of whom we'd never met before.

Funerals? The principal MIA was Pat the Salt, the ancestor of all the decadancers, born 1925, who died last year in the same week as this year's festivities. Errrm, I guess that makes me The Patriarch[y]. As I type, I am wearing one of Pat's sweaters - maybe that will serve as patriarchal robing?

When good men do nothing

I have a younger friend who is, like me, a passionate believer in the EUropean Dream. As a youngster he was happy to articulate his side of any argument about the politics, economics & social benefits of hugging Magyars and Spaniards. In college he widened (or narrowed?) his political horizons to consider the inequities and inefficiencies of Ireland and asked which of the available political parties had the organizational infra-structure to get things done. His analysis decided that Fianna Fail was far-and-away the most Effective machine and so he joined the party. In May 2002, two weeks before the 2002 General Election, our entire lab was on a train to Cork for a scientific meeting. Our Kevin bailed out in Portlaoise and returned to Dublin because the Fianna Fáil website had collapsed and he was the only person in the country who knew how to fix it. We used to tease him about being the next Taoiseach but three.

I've just finished earbooking Running From Office by former TD and Minister Eoghan Murphy. Murphy was a middle class kid who could have leveraged his network and straight white privilege into a comfortable life with two cars in the drive and enough money for beer and skittles. In his 20s he working abroad as an effective UN apparatchik when the 2008 financial crash, the bailout, the Troika set fire to Celtic Tiger. He could not look on from the sidelines and watch his country get flushed down the t'ilet. His family had no party political affiliation, so he was free to choose what colour shirt to wear. Unlike Our Kevin, he cast his lot in with Fine Gael FG, the other right-of-centre party who have carved up the political turkey with Fianna Fáil FF since the foundation of the State 100 years ago.

The subtitle of Murphy's book is Confessions Of Ambition And Failure In Politics. And confessional it is. The quality of political discourse in these Post-Twitter days is so debased, that people all over the Internet are damning the book as a self-serving, self-pitying, pathetic excuse for the fact that there are still homeless people [Murphy was Minister of Housing (. . . Planning, Flood defense, Pandemics, Local Government and Elections) for several years]. We don't have a TV, and indeed I've recently stopped listening to the wireless especially The News. But I remember at the time clocking Minister Murphy as someone who was not merely marking time and blaming others but was having new ideas about how to house the nation . . . and all her dusky dispossessed dependents. 

Politics is the Art of the Possible [Politik ist die Kunst des Möglichen, Otto von B.] and there is so much inertia built into any parliamentary democracy that it is difficult for any one person, as Minister of Whatever, to achieve anything at all let alone deal with a major systemic embedded long-standing political issue like Health or Homelessness. It is otoh very easy for shouty hurlers on the ditch to prevent progress towards a more just and equable society. Lord NIMBY stalks the land holding up the Children's Hospital, Water Infrastructure, Refugee processing. Meanwhile Lord NIMBY's lieutenants are being spiteful and ad hominem on-line about politicians. That's poisonous enough, but now NIMBY's minions think it's brave to spit on the children of politicians or go by night and shit on their family doorstep.

Eoghan Murphy fought his corner on behalf of us all for 10 years but then cried Enough! before he had a total breakdown. He went on to other things which will benefit from his drive and realpolitikal chops. My opinion is that, as with Othello and Charlie Haughey, he did the state some service.  It is no harm to the health of the nation that Murphy chose to create photo-ops of him surfin', wild-water swimming and trekking [he covered 2 weeks of The Camino back in the day]. Better than being performatively seen bulging out of a funeral-and-events suit at Teh Ploughing. So Murphy is gone for now: who among Ireland's young-and-fit will next take up thankless cudgels on behalf of us old-and-not-so-fit and the dispossessed? Also on the reading list But What Can I Do? Why Politics Has Gone So Wrong, and How You Can Help Fix It by Alastair Campbell.

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" Not an Edmund Burke quote. And while we're on the pol quotes page “Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made”  Not Bismarck but John Godfrey Saxe (1869) so I don't need to rustle up the original German statement.

The Far Side

Eeee, when I were a nipper maybe ~11 y.o., I was introduced to the conventions of Ordnance Survey mapping. 

• contours close together said "hill"
• blob ⬤ surmounted by + is church with spire
• otoh filled square ■ surmounted by + is church with tower
• coniferous forests were kiki🌲while deciduous / broadleaf forests were bouba🌳
• T was telephone box [remember them?] - PH is pub - PO is Post Office 

With these tools in my carton, the next step was to create fantasy islands with footbridges, gravel pits, houses, power-lines, railways and their stations. It was a Bobby-no-Pals occupation, true; but engaging and harmless. I blame my pal Gibbo for giving map-play a darker more destructive dimension. That's by way of back-story to explain my interest in islands . . . of which there is an index [N = 70!] hereabouts.

I am not alone in paddling my sofa around distant alluring islands. A similar obsessive is Judith Schalansky who was born 45 years ago in Greifswald DDR, so an Ossi as a young child who couldn't travel beyond The Wall until it came down abruptly in 1989.  Schalansky has written a whimsical book about her interest in The Far-off and Sea-girt:  Atlas der abgelegenen Inseln. Fünfzig Inseln, auf denen ich nie war und niemals sein werde (2009). Here auf Deutsch is the N=50 list with links

So when Dau.I the Librarian had the English translation float into the Returns box, she reserved it for 'er dear old Dad and sent it to our branch library down-country. Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands - fifty islands I have not visited and never will. Translated into English by Christine Lo (2010). Here's the island list-of-links in English. I guess a) someone had to create some extra Wikipedia pages for the less well-kenned ocean-pimples b) some islands never made the cut because Schalansky couldn't rustle up even 300 coherent words about them.

For each of  the final fifty, four pages have been allocated 

1. data! Latitude and Longitude; the several and sundry names; the area; the human population, if any;  distances to a selection of other places; a telegraphic and quirky time line of its discovery and subsequent events
2. a lovely map on a 1km:5mm scale. Part of the absurdity is to represent, say,  Tromelin [80 hectare] the size of mung bean in a wash of blue  && Easter Island 160 sq.km bleeding into the gutter margin
3. & 4. A 300-400  essay about some peculiarity of the island's geography or history  . . . because it would be an impertinence to attempt a comprehensive narrative of who did what to whom over 500 years.

One of the peculiarities of this our blue planet is that all the land is crammed on one side map [as R] source and the CC licence. So only a few Europeans can claim that someone else is living exactly on the other side of the world. The Antipodes Islands in the far South Pacific barely graze the coast of Normandy, for example. Most of a flipped New Zealand would be in the Western Med, although Christchurch [43°32′S 172°38′E ] maps close-but-no-cigar to Nice [43°42′N 7°16′E]. Irish people must be content with Campbell Is, NZ [52°32′N 10°51′W] an uninhabited 112 sq.km which is antipodean to a patch of Atlantic Ocean ~60km West of Loop Head, Co Clare [52°34′N 9°56′W].

My fantasy island [above R] takes its perimeter from one of Schalansky's Fifty Favorite Islands. Hazard a guess, which? Answer below the fold.

Domhan beag

In the September of 2006, I rendered a small service to an elderly US Citizen. I was leaning on the farm-gate with a straw in my mouth when a people-carrier containing a family of USCs came up the lane a little hesitantly. They, six adult sibs and their mother, were on an Irish roots tour and believed that their people might have been buried hereabouts before the family upstakes and left for America in ca. 1880. Their data was better than mine on the genealogy; but I knew where to park their bus and for good measure said that the matriarch, or any of the party, was welcome to use the 'bathroom' when they came down the hill after their historical explorations. And it was so. That Christmas I was included in her Holiday Round-Robin and the following Christmas the holiday RR included a bit of teasing (I paraphrase) . . . that Bob - he's been a better son to me than [not all of ] my sons. All good fun. 

Over the next twenty (20!) years, each one of the adult children from the '06 people-carrier has come by for tea, or lunch, or both, or a pee, bringing their own children; and the younger generation have occasionally come visit on their own as they make their separate pilgrimages to The Ould Country. On one memorable occasion Jim was on a coming-of-age road trip with Jim Jnr. Their visit coincided with the unfortunate death of one of our ewes. We were chatting in the yard after their arrival when the truck from "the fallen animal service" backed into the yard. Oh maybe we can help? offered Jim because that's how the family was r'ared. As the back-gate of the truck clanged to earth, we were assailed by a wall of noisesome smell, a buZZZing cloud of flies & the enormously bloated carcass, legs pointing every which way, of a not too recently dead cow. The Jims retired as gracefully as two city-boys could when Mother Nature presents her more piquant parts. As so often, a cup of tea revived them a short while later.

Last week, Jim Snr.'s youngest brother Dan [whom prev] was on a lightning trip to Ireland to use-it-or-lose-it some 2025 annual leave. He had lost a day stateside when a flight was cancelled and so had to re-arrange a rather tight schedule. That meant that he came to ours twice - on Tuesday for lunch . . . and Thursday to climb the hill behind our house - which, as we've since established, is also behind the house of his ancestors. I am back to my May fitter-than-fatter regime of powering up the hill to The Fork of the Cross (An Gabhal na Croise) [as R]. What with lunch-and-all on Tuesday, I didn't get going on my yomp till dusk. 

Most unexpectedly, I encountered my neighbour below - much further up the hill than he is usually to be found. As we walked down together he confessed that, working from home behind a tight hedge on the county road he got to hear A Lot of quite indiscreet gossip. Why, just that afternoon a large blue Audi had stopped on the road and the driver had got out to have big chat with a pedestrian who was a) wearing a cowboy hat and b) pulling a small yappy-dog. You've been here longer than me, said Neighbour, do you know who the doggone wannabee cowboy might be? I ran though some incorrect suggestions and we left it there. But I did admit to knowing who was driving a rented blue Audi that afternoon.

Thursday noontime, after a cup of tea  in the morning with a possible 5th cousin, Dan rocked up ready to roll up some heathery miles to become the first of his generation to pass St Fursey's Altar to the Summit >!taRAAA!< of our Cnoc. And it was so; && we detoured South to visit the Holy Year Cross; && we descended on a different route to make a satisfying  3 ↩ mile x ↗1,000↘ ft circular yomp of it . . . with plenty of time to pause <puf> <puf> <puf> to admire the view; natter with another couple of walkers at the summit; natter to each other about this and that. 

On the way down Dan threw out:  Oh I almost forgot: as I left you after lunch on Tuesday, I had to go slow because of a fellow walking a dog and, as we do, I rolled down the window to say excuse me and how d'ye do. And (of course) I introduced myself and it turns out we share a surname. Wait. Stop, I said, curtly interrupting him, did your new relative have a cowboy hat and a yappy dog? Of course he did. Because Ireland and its entire diaspora have only 4 degrees of separation it is An Domhan Beag [small world] as The Boy found out in Poland two weeks ago. Dan's new Rellie also shared cell phone numbers for some other potential family members across three counties. Doubtless there will be some comparing of DNA bases at ancestry.com.  The Cousins and The Summit:

an rás don áras

Tomorrow, Fri 24 October 2025, the Plain People of Ireland will be out to vote for the Next President after half a Dau.II lifetime of President Michael D Higgins aka Mícheál Dónal Ó hUigínn; b. 18 April 1941 - former Minister [Lab] for Arts Culture and the Gaeltacht.  When MiggleD was elected in 2011 he was 70 and swore upon the Sacred Chalice of Tara that he would only strut the stage for a single seven year term in his seven inch boots; and then give way to someone different. But no, he got too comfy on the Presidential sofa and nominated himself for a second term in 2018.  He is now 84 and, whatever his live forever druthers, the constitution compels him to lay down his sceptre. He's been fine. He has pushed the boundaries of Presidential speaking rights and political independence in good ways. And I am happy to have a fellow academic and intellectual represent Ireland - whatever other faults you might have as a professor, you're unlikely to be as thick as pig-dribble.

In May this year, a bit ahead of the commentariat, I posted about the [odds against] candidates for the Top Post in this our Republic. The list looked like the usual motley crew of out-to-grass politicians, pundits and personalities. y'have to ask how?why?wha'? it is that so many party politicians get backed for a formally apolitical post. Four months later, in the last month before nominations closed, even less salubrious creatures emerged from the shadows with hopes for The Crown: 

• Sir-Bob-I-took-the-Soup Geldof [prev]; 
• cage-fighter Conor McGregor [prev]; 
• Bertie "The Envelope" Ahern [prev] [May 10-to-1] got delusional about his Right to the FF nomination in September
• Gareth Sheridan [May 100-to-1] got backing from two CoCos
• Maria "Referendum Níl+Níl" Steen got 18 members [2 short! phew] of the Oireachtas to back her right to a line n the ballot
• Michael "HoherMarsch" Flatley [prev]
• Johanna "Weatherwax" Donnelly!!
• Tony "Lockdown" Holohan [May 200-to-1] [prev]

I could go on, but I'd be getting down beyond the barrel-scrapings. You have to wonder why anyone would put themselves in the media spotlight for obsessive adverse scrutiny and blaggarding. As with Adi Roche [bloboprev Chernobyl dogoodnik] who was smeared out of the 1997 race because of [unfounded] allegations against her brother. Or in 2011, David Norris whose campaign tanked when a 9 y.o. interview was dug up to encourage voters (not slow in these matters) to conflate being gay with paedophilia.

Fianna Fáil, failing Bertie Ahern, chose to shunt ~€500,000 towards the election of a GAA-populist outsider called Jim Gavin [R_abbit-in-headlights source & Licence]. But the normally effective FF Machine failed in their due diligence on his financial, moral, social, genetic back story. His campaign was not going great when journalistic due diligence revealed that Gavin as a not-quite-legal landlord had bilked a tenant of €3,300 in 2009. Collapse of GAA.FF party, He's still on The Ballot, he's very sorry he ever forgot about the rent, he was a man, take him for all in all, so you can still vote for him unlike the wannabees above.

We're left with Catherine Connolly [Ind. woz Lab] and Heather Humphreys [former Fine Gael Minister: like MiggleD, was Minister of Arts Culture and the Gaeltacht. Either of them could do the job without bringing shame upon us all. They are neither of them quite eligible for Free Travel so they are younger than the current incumbent was when he started. I've been quite the fanboi for Connolly since I found her speaking the truth to power on YT in 2021. And my radical Dau.I and Dau.II will also be voting early and often for the only candidate of The Left. But really, is this the best that 5 million citizens can come up with? Maybe we don't want somebody too Inspirational in the Áras?

Resistance is useless

Years ago, my neighbour above was hooshing sheep up our lane "by hand". Make that many years ago because hooshing is now done by/with/from his 4x4 and a lorra honking of horn. But at that earlier encounter there was time to pause when I remarked on the fact that the last straggling lamb seemed to have only 3 legs. Apparently his 5 y.o. youngest son, trying to be just like daddy, had gone into the barn picked up a syringe full of antibiotic and injected the contents into the meaty part of the lamb's left thigh. The leg had 'gone septic' and 'dropped off' but the lamb had survived and there we were.  This was in the last 20th century when farmers were exempt from any sensible measure of control w.r.t. the doctoring of their livestock. This was on small [5 y.o. apprentice] scale and huge [profligate use of penicillin as a growth promoter for battery chickens].

We've been in the farrrming biz for 25 years and one of the handiest tools in the chest is a topical antibiotic spray [R] to give the illusion of control when surveying and treating damaged feet. Sheep Ovis aries are designed to hop across a rocky terrain, grazing on grass and forbes and shrubberies. The related goat Capra hircus is more of a browser [shrubberies and bushes and trees] than a grazer - but they also prefer / need a rocky under-footing. Without regular abrasion and sand-papering, the claws of sheep over-grow, and split and break and get infected. And grass, if the slightest bit too long, will deliver paper-cuts between the toes which also get infected.

It is probably not a good idea to be so flaithulach with antibiotics in the environment. At the most recent visit to the Vets for matèriel against the autumn dosing it was revealed that the terramycin spray could only be dispensed by prescription, whc fair enough, and The Vet would have to visit at least once a year to allow such prescription with a clear conscience. Accordingly two days later, The Vet made a Passing Visit [cheaper than a call-out], viewed the sheep at close quarters and allayed our concern about a lump on the lower jaw of one of the ewes. Job Done, see you next October.

 

Props to the Arts Block

For a small country, Ireland is prolly punching above its poundage for progressive political pushes. When he was Health Minister, the current Taoiseach Micheál Martin banned smoking in pubs. The sky did not fall and my Friday night sweater stank of me rather than Rothmans. Then in March 2002, the government introduced a 15c levy on plastic shopping bags. The landscape became demonstrably cleaner overnight. Bangladesh was first to ban bags but implementation was sketchy, over time everyone else followed. For the Arts Block, C.J. Haughey created the elitist Aosdána in 1981 which allowed starvin' creatives to claim their cnuas instead of TB and an early death. Because we knew a tuthree Aosdána we got to eat oysters and Guinness at the official opening, on 21st May 1991, of IMMA the Irish Museum of Modern Art = Áras Nua-Ealaíne na hÉireann in the Royal [veterans] Hospital Kilmainham. Apart from the, like, Art, IMMA is a) free-in and b) just up the hill from Heuston Station if we're early for the train home.

In 2022, stipends for creatives were given a wider, less exclusive boost by Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media Catherine Martin [no relation, political or familial, to El Jefe Micheál Martin!] with the Basic Income for the Arts scheme which The Blob covered at launch in 2022. I wondered at the time, if I struck a theatrical pose in a smock with two paint-brushes behind one ear, I could get my Arty snout in the trough. With, say, my "Water Under the Bridge" [R] part of my ongoing Ahoy bday card daub collection. No? I don't think so either.

The current Minister for Arts, Culture, Communications, Media and Sport Patrick O'Donovan is wondering why Tourism and the Gaeltacht have been lifted from his portfolio. But he's gone foot to the floor on Basic Income for the Arts because The Data show a 39% RoI for RoI [Return on Investment . . . Republic of Ireland]. Min. O'Donovan is going to double the number on the BIA payroll. He's a scientist [Chemistry, UL] so will know that doubling the recipients will not double the RoI. I have to applaud the fact that he commissioned >!data!< a survey which was returned by ~17,000 people which might / should inform policy / further roll-out. For example: should poor artists or successful artists be privileged in their dole or should the glittering prizes be allocated at random as in the pilot?

How select eligible recipients?
	Answers	Ratio
Needy	8090	47.08
Have record	6464	37.62
Random	2455	14.29
NA	175	1.02
TOTAL	17184	100

 But The Man  reported the ratios to 2 significant figures 47.08% rather than a readily understandable good enough number like 47%. You can give us the 47.08 because ExCel does the math with a click and a sweep but it is unnecessary and blurs the take-home.

Shelter

It never rains but it pours? The only time a browse shelves in a library nowadays is if I get to the Wexford Science Café early enough to have a pee [it's 50 mins from home and just after tea time] andif there remains still 5 minutes before The Off. For example, I snagged Tamed : ten species that changed our world (2017) by Alice Roberts from the 590.9 shelf just before the Wex Sci Caffeine meeting in September. Usually, I hear about something, discover that it is on a library shelf somewhere in Ireland, then 'place a reservation'. 

In a parallel universe, I restless swipe through borrowbox looking for something anything for an earbook. 10s of thousands of books published in English each year - and so many of them cookbooks or path$-to-million$ or brutal descriptions of murder in the guise of detective novels. But I try to keep both media bubbling along: it's illegal to read deadtree books while driving but they are nice to get under the duvet with.

Then last week I finally landed both
Rough Sleepers (2023) by Tracy Kidder about a month after asking for it
AND 
Bothy: In Search of Simple Shelter (2024) by Kat Hill bobbed to the surface on borrowbox. 
They both deal with minorities [homeless people in Boston vs hikers on a shoe-string in Scotland] whose mission, every day, is to find somewhere safe to sleep that night which offers minimal services and redefines what is meant by comfortable. 
Coincidence? I think not!

Rough Sleepers is another fly-on-the-wall reportage by Tracy Kidder. I first came across his The Soul of the New Machine (1981) which won him a Pulitzer (and whc Bloboprev). The next two books follow the fortunes for a year-in-the-life-of a) a construction crew House (1986) and b) an elementary school teacher her pupils Among Schoolchildren (1989). That was the 80s, Kidder wrote a number of books after that, but I didn't have /make much time for reading books after / because I got busy and productive at work in the 90s. 

I nearly stopped [as in fling across the room] reading Rough Sleepers a couple of times as the central theme of the book gelled around a supposedly charismatic homeless fellow called Tony Columbo who becomes an accretive sinkhole for [dozens of] other folks' care and attention. I try not to indulge in victim-blaming; and I know it's a journalistic trope to give structure to the book by concentrating on one story. Because homelessness is the shame of our times and can seem insurmountable from any other perspective. But some people are really high-maintenance.

The hero of Rough Sleepers is their carer Dr Jim O'Connell who worked their patch for more than 40 years. Dr Jim is/was fond of  quoting from Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus. Sisyphus was condemned to roll a stone uphill each day only to have it tumble down hill as the top is approached in the evening. Homelessness is like that. But Camus concludes «La lutte elle-même vers les sommets suffit à remplir un cœur d'homme. Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux». aka "The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy." Exec.Summ [YT 10min]. tl;dr? Just shut up and listen to the people you care [soak feet R] for/about.

Bothy also concentrates on a single person - the author - and their travails. Ignoring Sisyphus, Bothy might be the antidote to RLS's "To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive." Because, for some people [getting to the] Bothy is destination driven more than the journey. Bothies offer rudimentary shelter in remote areas, there is no warden to take bookings, so getting there first secures a roost. In this sense it is like the unbookable refugios of the Camino de Santiago. When I was on the walk, anxiety about the next bed [starting as soon as you turned out of the current one!] fuelled a lot of crazy behaviour - getting up before dawn, not caring about waking everyone else, not pausing for beer or chat, walking too fast. But Kat Hill expands on the charity [kindness of strangers] of bothies: leaving more fuel than you consume; trekking out trash; leaving a bit of pasta. But as with Tony Columbo in Boston, we get perhaps a little TMI about abusive past relationships. ymmv maybe its my blunted affect again. Then again, Bothy's message is that embracing some rural simplicity can be transformative. If you're already perfect, why bother getting your feet wet in a peat hag?

Before her Bothy years Dr Hill was an academic historian: poring over old, scraggy hand-written mss in to ferret out the truth about old religious feuds. One evocative aspect of Bothy is the research into bothy guest-books, some of which go back 100 years and have been archived off-site. Entries in these records are optional and give great insight into the minds (and artistic talent) of these ghosts of the past. One entry at Corrour on the Lairig Ghru was made by Charles Drinkwater in the Summer of 1939 full of post-Appeasement hope for the future and promising to return next year. In 1940 he is back - on leave from the army but still hoping to return. Thereafter silence. Kat Hill is not the only trained researcher in this affair and I popped off to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission CWGC to see if therein lay an answer. Seemingly yes. Pte Leonard Charles Drinkwater #14721196 of the Ox & Bucks Light Infantry was killed 17th February 1945 and is buried in Germany never to ramble no more. The pity war distilled.

We've been in the wilds of Scotland before with John "Last Hillwalker" Burns. Burns and Hill got together for a podcast last year: which I found . . . rambling? Hill also cites with approval David Gange and his Frayed Atlantic Edge. Outposts by Dan Richards [blob] is also adjacent to the theme of sleeping off-grid. And my trip to Cape Wrath with The Boy was wild and wonderful.  

Footnote: In discovering the sorry end of Charles Drinkwater, I noticed they had an option for Civilian Dead and found the record for Pat the Salt's mother who died in the Cardiff blitz in March 1941 - aged 46. She left  a dozen children, who all survived WWII although their home was 'beyond economic repair'. There is no CWGC record for Pat's father PJ because he died in 1945 from wear&tear and/or pneumonia and that doesn't count. When Pat returned from WWII he and his two older brothers had a string of orphan siblings to keep fed and clean&tidy and ready for school.

Mały świat

Like his grandfather and gt grandfather before him, The Boy is a restless soul. Wanderitis skipped a generation with BobTheSofatist. The Boy's second job after leaving school was with the infant Ryanair: slinging bags, batting in planes, driving the t'ilet truck. One of the perks was heavily subsidized travel on Ryanair and affiliate Airlines. He made several trips to Aotearoa on company discount and spent a year there on a young person's working visa in '05 and '06. While working in Christchurch he got to be pals with everyone a young Dub called Simon and they've been friends now for 20 years. The second weekend in October, Simon and The Boy and a couple of other now Daaads were on their annual Boy's Ownly escape . . . in Katowice, Galicia., PL.

Simon mentioned that a [collateral?] ancestor of his was famous for 15 minutes all time as the first automobile fatality. Checks in Wikipedia revealed that Mary Ward, aka Lady Bangor, the deceased, was a well regarded scientist, cousin of scientists and collaborator with scientists. The Boy expressed amazement that she wasn't mustered in The Blob's list of [Irish] Women in Science. That's the thing (to the nearest whole number in any average month) nobody in my family reads The Blob. But they almost always complain about the [lack of] content or point out typos harrrumph!

The account of the fatal auto-accident is quite explicit on the cause and nature of the injuries but vague and elliptical about who was at the tiller (this was 1869! before the idea of a steering wheel had gelled.  It looks likely that either 15 y.o. Charles "Turbinia" Parsons or his 19 y.o. brother Richard took a corner in Parsonstown =  Birr too quickly and pitched their cousin Mary out of the steam-car and ran her over. Written up in The Atlantic.

Those Parsons boys and their passengers had set off on the fatal jaunt from their home Birr Castle where their oldest brother Lawrence Parsons, 4th Earl of Rosse, was Fear an Tí. About 140 years later at a moderately fancy opera-adjacent event in Wexford, I met Brendan Parson the 7th Earl of Rosse. The Earl was charming and affable and on being introduced to me mentioned "I think one of your chaps married one of our chaps back in the 18thC". I knew this to be true in about that much detail but took the trouble to look up the deets later. It's a reasonable supposition because my grandfather Wilfred the Harbourmaster had grown up as the youngest son in a Big House about 12km due S of Birr Castle. Turns out that "Our" Alice had married Lawrence the 2nd Earl in 1797, and their son William the 3rd built the Leviathan telescope in 1845, which was the largest such implement in the World for the next two generations. I advised The Boy to fess up  Powiedz Simonowi, że jest ci przykro. Which is about as silly as Justin Trudeau or Tony Blair performatively apologising for oppressing The Gays.

Mały świat = Small world 

Collateral damage

Now that I R retire and have cut down on The Blob, I have more time to read books. Like everyone I have my prefs [non-fiction, travel, biogs] but will read anything which comes recommended. And I am usually: I've started so I'll finish about it. And, of course, Borrowbox the Bringer of Earbooks has opened up whole extra vistas for absorbing information while off my sofa.

I grew up in another century where grown-up books tended to be walls of text but my offspring and their pals get through A Lot of graphic novels. They told me I should read Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton; but to be careful - it might be too much stress for me. Beaton grew up in Mabou, Nova Scotia on the east coast of Cape Breton: facing across the sea to PEI. Born in 1980, it seemed sensible to take on some debt to put herself through college. But when she popped out of the education mill with an Arts degree, she found that the parchment could not be parlayed into any sort of a job. And local service jobs didn't pay enough to leave home let alone pay off her student debt. One place which was booming with hardship-money employment was the Oil Sands of Alberta. It's about as remote and hostile as Uranium City, Sask. where my doctoring pal Mac took his family in the 80s. 

The economy of Cape Breton was built on coal and fishing and both these industries died a death, as in Newfoundland, at the end of the 20thC. So only the infrastructure [teachers, nurses, shop assistants, bus drivers] jobs were left. Accordingly young Kate followed neighbours and family to Fort McMurray, AL.

I liked this vignette of being forced to watch The Health & Safety video again. The primary purpose of which is so that Management show a fig-leaf of care for the survival of their Workers.:

I fainted dead away when I had to sit in the same room as the H&S video [I couldn't watch!] as part of my chain-saw handling and maintenance course in 1999. At about the same time, the Company PR department announced that 8,000,000 person-days had passed without a 'serious' accident. This was met with hoooots of derision by the work-force; who felt that the definition of 'serious' had been finagled to produce this positive statistic.

And the Ducks? They are a metaphor for the collateral damage meted out on workers in the pursuit of profit. A large flock of migrating ducks had chosen to rest on their journey on a fine looking lake - which turned out to be a toxic tailings pond. The response was not to stop using tailings ponds (that's an effective method for meeting legal /environmental requirements) but to stop ducks landing on the ponds (with scarecrows)  it's called fixin' the glitch. Same with fragile humans working under adverse conditions with frighteningly powerful machinery . . . make sure everyone sits through The Video. Blame for accidents can then be shifted to victim.

Likewise misogyny and sexual assault. Who did what to whom in bunkhouses? The Company treated that as a private matter  - beyond corporate control. Kate and her sister and their friends had a much more compassionate view of why men behaved like predatory shit heads when away from their families for months at a time and there was nothing to do but drink. They ask how their dear old Dad would turn out if economic necessity forced him to drive a dumper truck in N Alberta. It's a question we could all ask about ourselves when we rush to judgment about the actions of the dispossessed.

We must suppose that The Oil Sands worked out for Kate: she stuck at it for two years, thrifting away a portion of her pay and bonus until she'd cleared her debt to the state for getting an education. And her cartoons about the Hard Life developed into an income stream independent of coal and fishing. But not everyone is sufficiently focused to come out on top - spaffing each paycheck up the wall and owing their soul to the company store. There's got to be a better way which is more generally applicable.

Lost & phoned (part III)

I was on about how good my eyesight was and how not-so-good it is. Also how hard it can be to find 2 sq.m. of beige cow in 2,000,000 sq,m. [200 ha. = 480 acres] of brown dry heath. Of course it's a bit easier because a) there are 15 cows that hang out together b) they move about in a way quite distinctive from dry heather blowing in the wind.

Way way ago at the birth of The Blob, I lost me phone - it fell from my shirt pocket while changing a flat tire on the way to work. It took two days and 5 people to pass that parcel until it came back to me. The blessing (and curse) of living in a connected rural community! Five years ago, my all black smart-phone fell out of the same pocket when I stumbled into a gryke up on our 200 ha. of red hill. I knew it had happened within a couple of minutes but it still took 20 minutes for me and my neighbour M (of the cows) to find t'bugger down among the heather roots. Since then, I attached a bright yellow lanyard to the phone to make it more visible. 

Because things happen in threes [3s] if you have 12 years to play with, I lost my  yellow Nokia  at the end of September. I was up and out before breakfast, like the Good Shepherd, to count [N: 13 + 4 =17] the sheep. Unlike M's cows, our sheep disdain to herd together. The four new Charolais, for example, lambs are toooo refined to mix with our rag-tag flock of mongrels and will often be in a different field. And who thought it was a good idea to buy a black lamb which disappears in the shadows of any hedge, ditch, wall, dyke or copse ? I am requested&required to take my  Nokia   with me when out and about - lest I have an I R Old seizure. I did the outdoor man shepherd tasks and came home for tea and medals toast. Then I thought it would grand entirely to go for bracing yomp up t'hill and patted my pockets for the  Nokia . 

It wasn't there, so I cast about in the kitchen, on my desk, down the woodshed and behind my sofa cushions. The phone was ri♬gi♬g but not within earshot. Only 30 minutes had elapsed, so I had a pretty good idea of where I had been bo-peeping the sheep. Accordingly I re-traced my steps with my eyes sweeping arcs on the ground as I progressed. I paid particular attention to the boundary wall [L] where I had crossed from one field to another for a shortcut. For good measure I counted the sheep once more for luck.

When I got back to the house, the Beloved emerged from her own busy life and offered to call the phone while I checked the polytunnel and the woodshed agane! In my head I was making contingency plans for writing the phone off and changing my whole identity [the shame!] for an 083 number. But it was Sunday, so I could hardly implement any such protocol. Of all the people I know, I am the least attached to my phone, on which I get through about €30 of credit in a year and I did live for 30 years as a grown arsed adult managing without one entirely. But I'm not a luddite and do recognise there is a reason Germans call their cellphone a handy.  But, it was Sunday, I R retire, I canned the idea of going for a recreational yomp uphill and re-re-traced my morning sheepwalk.

When I scanned the boundary wall the first time, it was under the hypothesis that the phone had popped from a pocket when I scrabbled through the bushes and/or jumped down off the wall. The second time, (possibly because I had tested and rejected that hypothesis and approached the task with a clear hheart and open mind) I saw ◎◎ the  Nokia  in plain sight on the wall. Can you? it is two pixels wide [L].

And the scale of that problem? Compared to cows? The four fields where the sheep currently graze are 11 acres in total. That's 4½ hectares or 45,000 sq.m. The phone otoh is ~10cm x ~5cm or 1/200th of a sq.m. ratio 9,000,000 : 1. Finding a phone is only 9x harder than finding a single cow. Answer to Where's Wally Nokky below the fold.

Spot the diff

In WWII, my father was known as cat's eyes because of the acuity of his night vision while hunting enemy targets in his MTB. By his florid viz, he was aka Two Poached Eggs in a Bucket of Blood but that's another story.  I inherited this trait and up until my mid-40s my eyesight was really good - out on the hill, down the microscope, or star-gazing, all three. Things have slumped since then but I'm still withng the 'normal' range for my [venerable] age. My solid neighbour M has taken to running her cows on the mountain because she can and because free food. We were chatting in the yard the other day, and I asked what the head count was. I added that, if I was up the hill, and I saw her galloways, I'd text her a count and location, to save her an extra trip, like. The hill is 200 hectares (or 10x more if you include the unfenced contiguous uplands) and that's a lot of hide-and-seek territory without you have a pair of dogs, a quad-bike and/or a rather fancy drone.

I've re-started my May 2025 mountain-yomp regime again after the Summer: round trip up to The Fork and back; takes less than an hour if I'm not distracted . . . by counting cattle.

I walked straight past 'em on the way up: destination-driven is a terrible thing when there are 40 shades of brown and ditto green to delight and distract. On the way back downhome, otoh, with a different perspective and less baggage, I found M's cattle in the midst of Mackey's Walls which is one of their habitual haunts. So I stood up on a rock and counted them . . . 11, 12, 13. Two missing! Dang. So I stepped off the path into the soggy field, walked down to the County Border and found one more having a vacation in Wexford. hmmmm, I climbed up on the ditch and scanned the near terrain. Mackey's N wall seemed to be topped by a clump of beige but without my glasses I couldn't determine whether it was dead gorse, a dead fox or a peculiar stone. I resolved to bide-a-wee and a few seconds later a second clump of beige lifted up beside the other one: clearly a cow's head; so full count, job done and home for tea and medals. 

When I reported in to M, she replied that she'd worked out how her cattle were escaping off the mountain and wending their way back toward the home-place . . . where they are filling the roadway from ditch to ditch with 'evidence'. It is fun to imagine our many recreational walkers avoiding the obstacles picking their way on tippy-toes. According to M part of the mountain wall had collapsed to the West of Shannon's Knock. Accordingly the next time I was aYompin' I turned left at the mountain gate to see how much work it would be to repair the wall. There are four (4) strands of barbed wire on ancient posts above the wall and some of this has come loose. But the rough, rolly, rocks had slumped and shed to make a gap beneath the wire which would be no-trouble-at-all to a sheep - and probably negotiable by a determined cow. BEFORE:

I had gloves, I had time, and set about counter-acting the forces of gravity and time. When I'd exhausted the supply of easily accessible / liftable rocks, I dusted off my gloves and walked away. AFTER

It's like one of those spot-the-difference puzzles which used to appear in "the funnies" of newspapers when we were children: tiny, barely perceptible changes. I might come back later to pick stones up from the other side of the wall. But the heat is off because I was at The Wrong Hole in the wall. The cattle-passing hole is further down and clearly built to accept a gate:

Standard practice nowadays is to throw a Euro-pallet into these exit-gaps and tie it off with baler twine, so my 'skills' at dry-stone wall repair are probably redundant. 

Triage Sudan

Not having had my fill of Maskalyk, I snuck into the local branch [part-time] of the library and borrowed his first book Six Months in Sudan A Young Doctor in a War-torn Village [2009].  In 2007, he went to Abyei at the border between Sudan and South Sudan as a volunteer with Médecins sans Frontières MSF. Like me, at the birth of The Blob, he elected to blog about the transition between clean sheets and sheet ice in Toronto to the squalor and red dust of Africa. The book excerpts from that blog and riffs on its themes in a more considered, grammatical, less immediate manner.

Every day and every dollar, MSF lives the dilemma of "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day vs teach a man to fish and he feeds himself for life". By setting up a mission in some remote place trampled by all four horsemen, they allow the local government to bail out of their responsibility to/for the local people. 

In one example incident, the family of a sick child from a distant village gather, beg, hock, and spend all their resources to deliver her to the MSF hospital; and arrive ten minutes too late to save her. They now have nothing, less than nothing and ask if that idle land-cruiser could be used to carry their beloved tiny corpse to a pace for burial. MSF, fearing the thin end of an infinite wedge, refuse this charity. Their mission = Médecin, and they have to be strict in their delimitation of what they are prepared to do. But it is Maskalyk, fresh from futile chest compressions on the girl, who must be the mouth and face of "Policy". It is demoralizing and probably makes people wake up screaming years later . . .
"you want to drive every patient where they want to go . . .drip all of the blood into this patient bleeding in front of you even though it means there might be none for the next ten, but today you have it, and today is his lucky day and tomorrow you will worry about tomorrow. but we don't, we are measured, and careful. it is what tomorrow's patients expect of us and the tomorrows stretch towards forever, and today is nearly done". 

Whatever about Sudan, same thing happens in Irish ICUs. IF an old chap like me rocks up to ER = accident&emergency ANDIF he's really unwell ANDIF there's a bed in ICU THEN he'll be admitted. And once he's installed he'll stay until one of 
a) d.d. discharged dead 
b) a bed be found in palliative
c) miraculous recovery and return home, possibly via a regular ward bed in the hospital.

If 20 minutes later, my pal V, aged 35, father of four, gets poured out of an ambulance shattered after a head-on car crash . . . he's out of luck. The best the system will do it expedite him to another ICU bed in a different part of the country. As it happens, there was a bed for V that night, and an orthopedic surgeon got back into scrubs and spent the next eight hours in theatre deciding which broken long-bone to fix next. V died twice in ICU in the following 12 hours but eventually made a good recovery. Good enough to go back to work to support his family.

Holy holy holy

There is a Holy Well Project afoot. I was part of this venture one recent Saturday. It didn't seem to have much lasting effect on my mental state (or immortal soul); but I applaud the idea that such shrines have a place in community. Even if that place is secularized to fit the needs of 21stC Ireland.

One element of the project is to go visit some of the 42 Holy Wells in the county, make a little video & say a little prayer poem. 

• Overview, introduction 
• St Andrew, Dunleckney 
• St Bridget, Myshall 
• Our Lady, Clonagoose, Borris  
• St Fortune / Fortchern, Killoughternan
• St Lazerian, Lorum (not to be confused with St Lazerian Old Leighlin) 
• These are hosted by the County Library YT Service, where more such clips may appear. 

The key reference article is The Holy Wells of County Carlow (1933) by Edward O'Toole.

As we're talking about heritage, it is with some sadness we report the death of Manchán Magan, gaeilgeoir, broadcaster, prolific writer and Master of Woo. I am a bit of a fan. His republican antecedents are dynastically impeccable - Grannie. As a spoiler, I wrote down all (and more) of his Thirty-two Words for Field when that book came out in 2021. He was interviewed on RTE, essentially from a hospital bed, just a couple of weeks ago when it became known that his prostate cancer had metastasized all over. Still and all, three weeks notice is a bit tight for setting the affairs in order. His latest book Ninety-Nine Words for Rain (and One for Sun) is available at Kennys and in the library but there are 2x reservations as there are copies in the system.

Tír gan gaeilgeoirí, tír gan anam

 

 

Les Phares de Chansons et de Contes

A few years ago, I was wrong! I know, hard to believe, but I asserted in a book review that Le Tour de Cordouan featured as Gorodish's hideaway in the [super; cool] film Diva [wch prev]. Everbode kno that it is rather Le Phare de Gatteville [R wikicommons] in Normandie located just North of the D-Day beaches; but 380km = 5-6 hours by car from Paris. 

Three weeks ago, it was flagged on Metafilter that Bressay Lighthouse in Shetland is available for sale by Savilles.: a snip at £350,000 for 1 tower + 3 houses 7 beds 3 baths 3 sitting rooms. It is also about 5-6 hours [by plane and ferry] from Paris. Ah well, it's not going to happen for me in this lifetime. 

In the MeFi comments there was link to another lighthouse which fulfilled someone's dream. The light on Graves Shoal/Ledge is on the seaward edge of Boston Harbor about equidistant from Hull, Boston, Nahant and Winthrop. The shoals, which are about 40,000 tide-washed sq.m. [call it I acre] in extent had been ceded to the Federal Govt in 1903  by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for so long as the property was used as a “light and fog signal station.” It was bought from the Feds in 2013 by Boston resident David Waller for his own quixotic reasons. in 2019, the Town of Hull decided to asesss Graves Ledge for property tax. Mr Waller appealed and after much to-fro the Massachusetts Land Court decided Hull had no locus standi in the matter. This scrap of seaweed and seabird-shit covered 'land' is thus maybe the only unincorporated part of the Commonwealth. Check out the 50 pp PDF judgment if you like pedantic detail, mappes and historical research.

In 1990, we sold up in England and returned to Ireland "to give The Boy [then 14] a sense of cultural identity" and "to buy an old farm with 10 acres and outbuildings". I had secured a retraining fellowship and was pushing the frontiers of science in TCD. The cunning plan was to contact auctioneers down-country with our specs and go visit suitable properties at the weekends. The first place we got serious about was The North Light at Duncannon looking out over Waterford Harbour. That link is to a post by Pete "The Lights" Goulding on my pal Russ's TidesAndTales blog which gives an illustrated history of that piece of paradise. In 1990-1991 we found that, for £35K Irish, we had our pick of old farmhouses with 5-12 acres of scrubby fields with or without sheds. It was a buyers market at the end of then 80s recession and we were fussy.

The Duncannon light came with maybe half an acre [0.2 ha] of terraced 'gardens' at the end of a long bohereen. It was cosy. We rocked up to the auction with a ceiling of £35,000 and a counter cheque for 10% of that, then substantial, amount. For context we had sold our 4 bed 150sq.m. terraced house in Newcastle upon Tyne for £53,000. I got to throw my cap into the bidding twice but it blew through £35K and finally went from more than £100,000 to a couple of Dublin professionals as a second home. More details and pics at the NHBS National Heritage Buildings Service.

It took us five years and two more children to finally off-load our money on Irish property. But that wait bought us 16 acres as well as the farm and out-buildings. Despite reading and re-reading John Seymours' Self-sufficiency and Kains' Five Acres and Independence, we never worked out how we might make a living on and about the farrrm. And that aspect would have been even less likely at Duncannon Light.

Well well well-being

In the midst of Coronarama our county employed a Heritage Officer with a background in archaeology but very wide interests in culture, our place in Nature, our built environment, our beliefs and baggage. One definition of Heritage being: that which is a) valued  /valuable worth preserving and b) come down to us from the past. Go Eoin! He's been out to see our Ringstone several times despite it being right at the very edge of his bailiwick. His latest project builds on the fact that there are[who knew?] ~46 Holy Wells in the county - which is only 900 sq.km. in extent - so everyone is a short walk from the waters of balm.

Holy Wells? My jam! Ten years ago, I was 'supervising' a project at The Institute which was measuring Lithium in the groundwater. The Effective, Dr Lithium as he became, read the literature and came across the work of John Cade using lithium carbonate to control the devastating symptoms of bipolar and other mental disorders. In addition to obtaining and analysing several hundred water samples from domestic bore-holes, the Effective stopped whenever he passed a Holy Well and ran those samples through his analytical engine. Sorry folks, but we have waters of balm but not waters for balmy: the data is noisy, but there is no significant association between elevated Lithium [to soothe the troubled minds of bachelor farmers?!] and the location of Holy Wells: cf, - Saints, scholars, and schizophrenics : mental illness in rural Ireland [1979] by Nancy Scheper-Hughes. 

Eoin would like evidence that Holy Wells do good for the well-being of the plain people of the County. What say renting a bus, filling it half full of old people [who are used to free travel!], and visiting a couple of accessible Holy Wells? And further, giving the crumblies a free lunch and asking them to assess their feelings of bliss before and after visiting each sacred place. Hold me back, dear reader, that is how I spent the last Saturday in September: watching the soggy countryside through the rain-spattered windows of a charabanc.

Setting off through the tail-end of a rainy front which passed over Ireland that Saturday morning, first we travelled South to St Lazerian's Well in Old Leighlin at the base of the Castlecomer plateau. The well is in a little dell on the edge of the village where the road takes a savage turn. It was not the safest place to park while disembarking a couple of dozen frail elders. But, heck, the L3037 is a minor road going from Smallsville to Unimportant so there wasn't a lot of honking traffic. The steps down to the well were also lethal slippy for the unsure-of-foot. But nobody died and no hips were broken. Perhaps because of the mediation of the many prayers uttered beside the Holy Hawthorn which is within the enclosure of the well:

The rain had blown through by the time we'd had a) a historical timeline / explanation on St Lazerian's well b) a reading by Caroline Busher from one of her YA books c) a reading by Clifton Redmond of a poem inspired by St Lazerian, St Moling and Eó Ruis one of the five sacred trees of Olde Ireland. I hope that these creatives were on the payroll, rather than will work for food like the rest of us. Free travel [✓] free lunch [✓] but the payback was several questionnaires on how our souls were feeling Before vs After each stop. Gotta say that my answers about happiness, engagement, anxiety did not alter one jot through the day. But I had a pretty good day without experiencing changed, changed utterly a terrible beauty is born. 

At lunch [in the Tinryland Community Hub - excellent home baking] we Olds fell to discussing recipes, virtues and thriftiness of bread&butter pudding. For the 30-something at our table it was like she'd just stepped out of the Tardis into 1943. I was also able to get out my phone and, between cakes, show my neighbour a picture of our neolithic art work. Gotta say that the lunch was better and more interesting than, although superficially identical to, the lunch we got in Myshall in August.

After lunch, it was back to work . . . into the bus and on to Cranavane [sunny spring pics] just off the N80 near Kildavin.  

Never 'eard of it, me; let alone gone to visit before. It's a very short detour from our route to Altamont Gardens, which we do go to on the reg'lar. I'll be sure to bring people back to Crann a Bhán even though the eponymous white tree was felled a few years ago before it fell on someone. St Finnian's Cranavane is a different vibe to St Lazerian's - more naturalistic [mowed grass, daffodils in season] and with less fetish. Kindly, because they surely didn't have to, a handful of the Cranavane care-and-maintenance team were there to greet us and show us their treasures. This absolutely made a difference: to get the insider details of how it all works and what it takes to make available a contemplative space for all. It's obvious to all, for example, that folks throw coins into the elongated pond in front of the Well. But without hearing it from the horse's mouth, I wouldn't know about the local custom of dunking coffins in that water on the way to the burial ground up the road.

The Carers were at pains to acknowledge that the avenue to the enclosure and the rath itself were the private property of a local farmer, whose father had been at the forefront of the "re-discovery" of St Finnian's a generation ago. I was little bit mortified when my lunching neighbour spoke up at that point with "and we should recognise that man Bob over there, another discoverer of Ireland's heritage, who a) was able to recognise the work of human hand on a tumbled old stone b) makes access across his fields easier than a lot of farmers would". I had to get me phone out and show another handful of people what he was talking about.

As The Guardian of the Ringstone in another part of the county my line is "According to the Land Registry, we own the fields but we don't own the heritage - that's part of the commonwealth or maybe better the common weal". Heck and jiminy, if, as Thoreau maintained, The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation then it behooves us Haves to share a little of our fortune with the Have-nots. 

CwCoCo Heritage is organizing a parallel jaunt 
data-gathering field trip this coming Saturday, 
there may be tickets still ask: 
carlowholywells@gmail.com

Further? There are some Carlow County Library YT explanatory clips assoc with the Holy Well Project. 

Title pun explanatory footnote: The Beloved's late lamented Uncle Henri had a much told funny tale which hinged an important English visitor to N. Nigeria being hilariously mistranslated into Hausa. 
I go further →→→ "kafin na kai ga uban kowa" ie. I visit your male parent
Well well well →→→ "rijiya rijiya rijiya" ie. borehole borehole borehole
By this I about doubled my Hausa vocab.