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.