Just a Little Closer to The Lord

Dang! Missed. Winston Groom dead and I never said thanks. I've been thinking about the rural micro-community in which we washed up 24 years ago; because I've been working shoulder-to-shoulder with them on the Blackstairs Farming Futures BFF project. Like when servicemen of different skin-tone face death and destruction together, they cut each other some slack afterwards and leave their pre-war prejudice behind [a bit anyway . . . maybe?]. Thus my neighbours no longer think I have hooves and tuck a pointy black protestant tail down me trews when I get dressed in the morning. Cuts both ways: these people are kind, competent and circumspect; and they are far better than me at pretty much anything that requires handling the material world. They think they are just ordinary folks, and that's true, but it doesn't mean that they aren't unique and uniquely interesting for their lived experience. Salt of the Earth is a tired cliché but it does the biz here. It's been in my mind to record the snap-shot of who's been living in rural Ireland as the 20thC became The Future.

40 years ago, The Beloved was given "Thanks Wiw!" an anthology of stories "WONDERS: writings and drawings for the child in us all" eds Jonathan Cott and Mary Gimbel. It's 635 pages long but we filleted out a few of the stories and read and re-read them aloud to/with The Boy as he was growing up. Twenty years later with the arrival of Dau.I and Dau.II, Wonders was dusted off and I read the same stories again and again. Indeed, the berluddy book burst its spine between pp266 & 267 because the previous story had been read so many times. That story is "Just a Little Closer To The Lord" by Winston Groom illustrated by Pat Oliphant the renowned political cartoonist.

JaLC2TL is set in Widgeville, Carolina where two parallel communities - one black, one white - have occupied the same space for 300 years. A mysterious traveller, called Walking Hand, washes up in their midst and stays, minding his own business and tolerated in an uneasy way by the people of Widgeville. He is "othered" much as in Ireland [and your gaff too] we other homeless people, travellers, refugees. Stuff happens and violence is about to be unleashed when someone opens the attaché case which has been Walking Hand's only piece of baggage. The case is full of pieces of tree-bark . . .

On each one was a portrait of a Widgeville family, in front of their own house.

"Oh, that's us!" someone said. "They're so real. They almost look like photographs."

And slowly, as each family looked at the painting of itself, a hush fell over the crowd, for each saw in his or her own face a deep and radiant beauty that they had never recognized was there before. The fact was, that the Widgeville people had always believed they were ugly - the whites because they were short and squat and different from people in other towns around them, and the blacks merely because they were black. But in the portraits they saw themselves for the first time as an outsider might see them. each face framed with the glow of hope and loveliness that bloomed from the paintings almost magically.

There's a resolution to that story [nobody dies!!] because Winston Groom was a consummate teller of tales; but you'll have to track down a copy of the book yourself.  Jonanthan Cott the editor was a well respected recorder of pop culture in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Mary Gimbel the other editor had the pulse of the New York arts-and-millionaires scene. Winston Groom wrote his contribution to Wonders, 6 years before he published Forrest Gump. And 16 years before the film that made him famous. That stuff I wrote about war helping colour-blindness in the first paragraph, was Groom's lived experience because he served [L] in Vietnam and what he saw set the compass of his subsequent life. As I say, he'd gone now: ave atque vale.

On the hillside

The Blackstairs Farming Futures BFF, Knockroe Division, are under starters orders to get out on the hill and start meithealing away together. Lockdown has put a damper on the project through to the end of June. It's all part of a cunning plan Pilot Study to see if we can't make a better fist of managing Ireland's uplands. Last Sunday 19th July, 6 of us went up the hill to find areas of heather "suitable for burning". In my book NO area is suitable for burning because by turning the above-ground parts of plants into carbon-dioxide you are sending irreplaceable micro-nutrients in a great black plume into the next county. But I am in a minority of One on that. So like Lyndon Johnson on the hideous Edgar Hoover, it seemed better to be inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in: boycotting the procedure will deprive me of agency in influencing the process.

One sub-text of the BFF project is to promote community by incentivising neighbours to talk to each other and work together. That's been a roaring success, especially for blow-ins like us. I hope the neighbours have seen that, despite the funny accents and the Birkenstocks, we are within the normal range . . . and not above getting dirty and wet while cleaning out the drains. There we were following a sheep-path across the face of the hill when I saw a huge umber moth about 5cm across [R slightly less than life size]. I know nothing about lepidoptera beyond that butterflies have bobbles on the end of their antennae and moths don't. So I referred ID to Angus Tyner: tree-hugger; fell-runner; naturalist; mothista; but I heard nothing probably because my email records are, like me,  old. And also to Des Higgins [bloboprevs]: who affirmed that it is an oak eggar Lasiocampa quercus or rather Northern eggar, the morph typically found in Ireland. The common name and the quercus is from the resemblance of its cocoon to an acorn. I was, of course, delighted to see the thing itself up close and to get a name; with a [Latin] name you can tap into the combined knowledge of hundreds of naturalists. And because I've got GPS coordinates on my camera, I can probably find the moth again.

On our expedition to identify areas of leggy heather of about half a hectare in extent, we were not communicating terribly well. The two who are real shepherds and spend a lot of time on the hill looking at, and for, sheep, yomped off up a sheep-path and the rest of us struggled after them. It was a 4-limb scramble in parts with the ever-present danger of a leg disappearing down a hole between two rocks. One of my neighbours, faced by another near-vertical obstacle, tossed her water-bottle to the ground to free up both hands. I could have offered to carry the bottle in my ruck-sack; I could have gone back the few feet and picked it up; I could have chid her for littering. But it didn't seem worth getting on a better-than-thou-sister hobby-horse over a plastic bottle. So we all went on . . . until we didn't. Eventually, the distance between the two shepherd-yompers and us 4 clompers extended beyond shouting distance and we paused [again] to admire the view. And after a short while, turned for home: we were two hours out; it was almost getting dark; and was that a rain-cloud incommming?

Score. Lost 1 bottle : Found 1 Oak Eggar

Bobbie goes to Hollywood

Optional soundtrack - FG2H The Power of Love

We are signed up to Blackstairs Farming Futures BFF, and I have undertaken to log all the evidence of human impact on the environment that will be here in 200 years time. "the environment" here being the 200 hectares which we own in common with 18-20 other neighbours. It's fun because I get to name the artifacts which I find. The more obvious artifacts like the Sitka spruce Picea sitchensis plantation, or the sheep-proof fence that separates it from the commonage; or the sheep themselves? None of them are likely, let alone guaranteed to be there, then. But the stones, split by judicious and musical hammers and wedges? The rocks remain [Horslips] [Maxwell]. I show [L] the most obvious example [it's the parallel lines of wedge-holes, silly] of a project to craft a lintel or doorstep from a granite boulder. For whatever reason the mason stopped his own gallop one minute and cried "Feck it! this is going nowhere" and started work on a more promising rock. It is a snap-shot in heritage time quite as vibrant and informative about human activity as Stonehenge or the pyramids if a trifle more humble.

BFF is a pilot study to help imagine and then create a more productive future for Ireland's upland habitats: there's got to be more to it than burning the heather, running some sheep and planting out more spruce deserts. Can we, with a deft twist of a limiting factor in the environment [Iron; Foxes Vulpes vulpes; Pasteurella haemolytica; blocked drains; impenetrable forests of gorse Ulex europaeus] change the whole landscape like The Man Who Planted Trees? Yesterday, eleven of our commoners rented a minibus and directed it to a Teagasc showcase in Hollywood, County Wicklow. We The Eleven sat in the Hollywood Community Hall for an hour being talked at by ecologists and agrifunctionaries. |Then we were bussed up towards the hills to a commonage called Granamore [view below] to see how ten farmers with mountain rights can get round a table and then round a trough of sheep dip and talk out a sustainable future for their lives and livelihoods . . . and give access to hikers and orienteerers and kite-flyers. They told us a little about the practicalities of road-mending; river-fording; draining; controlled burning and a bit of tree-planting.

One qualified statement got me thinking. They showed a poster of sustainable stocking rates (in ewe-equivalents / hectare) for
upland grassland 1.5-5 ee/ha;
dry heath 1-1.5 ee/ha;
wet heath 0.75-1.0 ee/ha;
blanket-bog <0.75 ee/ha.
Those rates are different for the different habitats but all those habitats are represented on Granamore Common . . . and here are no fences. How to keep most of the sheep out of the blanket bog and more on the few patches of good, palatable, nutritious grassland? One cunning plan that has had some success is to lug a 20kg bucket of mineral lick [essentially candy for cows and sheep] to the areas covered in deergrass Trichophorum cespitosum or matgrass Nardus stricta as a honeypot. While there the sheep will eat some matgrass [though it's a bit bleh to normal sheep], trample some deergrass and give better grass elsewhere a chance to grow after, say, a controlled conflagration. All that is predicated on the fact that farming hill sheep is a really unproductive way to earn cash for children's shoes and cornflakes. Farmers will be better off spending time taking sheep to the mart; working in the mart; shearing, ploughing, mowing and baling for their neighbours; working for Teagasc or as a teacher.

Chris "Drummer" Stewart [Driving Over Lemons is wonderful] retired young to Andalucia to potter and write. He earned an honest crust as a sheep-shearer and got to know his neighbours. Several of them were shepherds who were active on the hills more or less all the time. I always thought that the shepherd and his mastiff's primary task with sheep was to prevent predation; and to stop them wandering into the next village for vino tinto y tapas. Wrong! especially now that we have decimated all the top predators. The shepherd can, by her presence, gently shift the flock wholesale from areas-to-be-protected to areas-where-they-are-a-grazing-asset. Even a chap can serve this purpose: load up his smartphone with credit and let him off up there being useful.