Walking the long

I thought I was well 'ard to have walked up the coast of Portugal on my own in 1989.  It was not without its challenges - like overcoming my disappointment that the dolphins Tursiops truncatus were pacing northwards far quicker than me. The navigation was easy - if I veered too much left my feet got wet. The second leg of myTrans-iberian trek from the Portuguese to the French border was an extraordinary experience in the people I met for the first time, including myself, and a number of meals memorable for their sharing simplicity. But few people would claim that the Camino Frances was a challenge in a fell-running, ultra-marathon sort of way. The way-marks and directions, for example, are so frequent as to be intrusive as well as infantilising and even travelling against the flow away from Santiago it was almost impossible to lose the way - except in the all-important-to-pilgrims metaphorical sense.

On Thursday we had a busy afternoon neutralising the (small squidgy retreating) testicles of all our ram-lambs and ringing the tails of both sexes so that they would eventually fall off.  Then we ran most of the delivered ewes and their lambs up to a field full of fresh grass.  We have one ewe, our oldest, who is still not ready for the labour ward and we kept back our most fertile ewe and her three lambs to keep the old girl company.  Except that we didn't.  We picked out three lambs believed to be a sib-group and their mother who had a large blue 3 on her flank and let the others off.  Five minutes later one of the other lambs came back down the lane bleating for his mammy, so we had to bring everyone back to the yard and allow the lambs to choose their own mothers and vice-versa.

Sometime in the middle of these operations, a bloke and his rucksack appeared in our yard asking if there was someplace in the neighbourhood where he and his walking companion could camp for the night. All they required was a fill of their water bottles and somewhere flat and grassy. The bottom of Dau.I's field is ideal for camping: flat with the gravitational slump of top-soil and about 60m wide, sheltered by trees and only a step to the lane.  But we were just about to drive the sheep up there and, although I must have looked leery and suspicious, I was rather trying to think on my feet about how these travellers might be accommodated. There is one great camp-site on the side of our mountain, the only place flat enough for two or three tents and thistle-, gorse- and stone-free.  It's also right beside a ruined steading that will shelter a fire and cut the wind a little.  But they had already passed that and rejected it because there was no water.  I told them that water was abundant in the nascent Aughnabrisky River 250m due East of that site.  Which gave me enough time to twig that the furthest of our 3 acre fields is called The Field Over The River because it hangs 10m above a slightly more mature Aughnabrisky and is also flat along its lower edge.  I pointed them tentatively in that direction to see if it looked okay. It was and they filled their bottles and set off as happy as you can only be after a long walk when it's about to finish for the day.

I woke at 0600hrs the next morning, feeling ashamed that I'd sent them off to sit on the grass and eat beans out of a tin when they could have sat at a table and eaten stir-fry (yum) with us.  Accordingly, I made a batch of flap-jacks, and popped a few in a sugar bag to give them when they left us to continue their journey.  Only a few because they looked like the hard-chaw sort of back-packers who cut the little strings off teabags to save weight.  They were a small bit along a Trans-Ireland trek which mostly followed the Irish leg of the E8 - a European footpath that connects the Kerry coast with Byzantium. Actually they started in Greystones and were aiming for Dingle and they cleverly missed out the boring bit of the South Leinster Way where it requires walkers to share country roads with lead-foot farmers driving 4x4s.  And they missed the absurd dog-leg in Borris which avoids the desmesne of The Kavanaghs in Borris House.  The bold red wiggle gives the rough line of march:

It was a bit of a change for them, and I suspect a bit of light relief because they have walked coast to coast across Scotland numerous times.  Last year they did it as part of the TGO Challenge.  The centre of Scotland is the bleakest and least populated place on the Western European Archipelago, so you need to carry everything you need including food and shelter. Here's a list of one man's trekky essentials.  I've written my inventory for Spain in August (less brutal weather than Scotland in the Spring).  We both look wussy compared to Patrick Leigh Fermor who walked from Hook of Holland to Byzantium in the 1930s with the following inventory: over-coat, spare shirts, the Oxford Book of English Verse and a volume of Horace, hob-nail boots and puttees.

Bon voyage!

Badgers and TB, all wrong

Two days ago, I was telling a sorry story about my contribution to the killing of badgers Meles meles to protect small babies from contracting tuberculosis, a disease caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis: it's a argument that requires several 'logical' steps:

• badgers bump into cows in the dark
• transferring the bacteria as they touch noses
• cow develops a case of TB between regular testing for the disease
• bacilli infest the milk
• and are not killed by pasteurisation
• baby's innate immune system doesn't work quick enough
• off to the consumption ward for invasive antibiotic treatment

Fast forward to last week when Dau.I sent me a link to an article in the Grauniad about badgers and cattle and tuberculosis. It's the kind of thing that the Guardian [city boys, Arts block educated] loves to publish: exposing boffins, farmers and the government as culpably inept, destructive and wasteful. We had a brief skype about it later and she asked with devastating rhetorical flourish "How could the badgers on our fields infect the cattle on the other side of the county borrrder if that boundary was defined by the Aughnabrisky River? Would they snuffle 600m down river to cross the 19thC hump-back road bridge?"

Now the Aughnabrisky isn't deep or wide except after a spill of rain across its mountainy catchment area. But if you-the-badger want only worms, insects and a bit of bonking in the Spring would you choose to get wet all over to achieve these desiderata?

But enough of me and my anecdotal [sample size N=1] badger and get down with some data from Cornwall. [R sample N=4 of super-cute badgers from Pinterest]. When I hung out with ecologists in the early 80s, a key piece of tech was the radio-collar. You couldn't hope to see what meadow voles Microtus pennsylvanicus were doing under the long grass but you could track their whereabouts by putting a teeny-tiny radio-transmitter round their necks and triangulating their position with a couple [or better, three] of receivers. Very crude, but sufficiently techy to smell like science if you were applying for grant money. The radio-collars didn't last very long: several of them seemed to finish up inside locally marauding cats Felis catus. Technology has moved on - bring on the GPS, lads! - and researchers from The Institute of Zoology in London have popped GPS tracking collars on 400 cattle and 100 badgers which shared the same space on 20 farms in Cornwall. In all more than 8,000 collar-nights were recorded for cattle and at no time did any cow come within coughing distance = 1.5m range of any badger. The fond imaginings of nose to nose contact in the dark between members of the two different species can now be dumped in the dustbin of fantasy.

One of the authors of the paper Prof Rosie Woodruffe asserts that culling badgers will "make no meaningful contribution to cattle TB control in Britain" despite costing millions. A key problem with TB is that test for carriers is far from being 100% accurate and reliable. The scientists suggest that the culling be stopped and the money devoted to more research for better immunological or DNA sequencing tests for the presence of M. tuberculosis. And who is going to develop these new tests? Scientists! One of the reasons for the continuation of culling is the investment - emotional, psychological, logistical - in culling. Thus pilot studies become full-blown programmes almost regardless of the results.

Back in my ecological days we used to refer to study animals as bigger than a breadbox [cows, badgers, easy] or smaller [voles, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, hard/invisible]. Current policy is to slaughter cattle if they are infested with TB and dispose of the carcasses in quicklime and by incineration. At the same time, the Mycobacterium-rich slurry from these cows [inhumanedoor model] and/or the fields where they have defecated [free-range] are classed as entirely fit for fertilising the grass which subsequent cattle will eat. I hadn't thought of that way of spreading tuberculosis: the bacteria can survive for many  Because they are small, the TB bacteria have been invisible in the equation.  It's easier to blame the black-and-white bread-boxes than blame the farming "industry" for self-destructive practices that have served to keep vets in their practice by government-mandated testing for a disease which is decisively encouraged by the way cattle are intensively raised and maintained inside.

A case could be made that the monstrous way we raise cattle in intensive systems have not only encouraged the spread of tuberculosis within that species but have also adversely affected the badgers as innocent bystanders who happen to hunt grubs on the same pasture. Eat more lentils: that will reduce the incidence of tuberculosis too.

The Field over The River

Not to be confused with Hemingway's Italian war stories in Across the River and Into the Trees. The FotR of the Post Title is the 1 ha. meadow which runs East from The Ringstone to a cliff surmounted by a stone wall which hangs over the Aughnabrisky River. The name came with the property. One of my loyal readers (I cherish you both!) expressed a liking for my Aggie posts. I daresay they were, like me, brought up on the BBC's soap The Archers - an everyday story of country folk. Walter Gabriel, the feckless wurzel was killed off in 1988, so I no longer had any interest. But read on - it's a coloour supplement with many pics . . .

Last year was a National Disaster for fodder. Th early Summer was bone dry for weeks and then rain set from July through to Christmas. We run the four biggest fields son a regime of traditional hay-meadow and get a few shillings by holding off cutting the grass until July - after the supposed time of flowering and seed-set among the plants which aren't Lolium perenne, perennial rye-grass. For years, rye-grass (as much as poss) has been Dept Ag policy; so the abrupt volte-face to encourage anything but is 'disconcerting' to regular farmers just trying to make an honest living from their 'umble patrimony. As a large part of their income comes from filling in forms and obeying The Man, being wrong-footed like this is a real [no shoes for the kids] cost.

We didn't get the grass 'knocked' until October in a brief 4-day window between the relentless rain storms. Knocked, baled and wrapped and plunked in rows at the top of three of the four fields. When all the tractor clanking stopped, I went down to count the bales and was infuriated bemused to find the grass in the FotR still standing. The tractor of our neighbour who has the cutting these last several years had blown a gasket and he'd subcontracted the cutting to the neighbour who never asks AITA. Between the two of them they agreed that, because deer had been rutting in that field it was not fit for sheep fodder and so they'd walked away from the cutting. I've never heard that excuse before but maybe it's about Pasteurellosis?? whc Prev. Whatevs, we had a field, partly chewed up by cavorting deer and partly a tufty tussocky mess of standing dead grass. The last of the hay bales went off site only the week before Christmas. But we'd already run our 60-legs + 15-heads of sheep unto that half of the farrrm.

The Beloved thought it might be a good idea to embrace the Pasteurellosis and/or ignore any nameless fears of two neighbours and corral the flock into the buckety un-mowed field and give the rest of the meadows . . . a rest. Our fully colleged farming consultant-and-mentor from up the Wicklow/Wexford borrrder concurred. Accordingly, at the very end of January, BobTheFarmhand schlepped down the fields; resurrected a six-bar gate from the brambles; druv in two new stakes and tied gate and stakes into the gap in the Northface of the FotR:

. . . said gate's hinge-post had rotted out several years ago and not put back because there had been no reason to prevent sheep wandering at will - until now. The other gap in the walls surrounding that field is at The Ringstone. That gap is (12 ft = 3.6 m) wide, so two of our super-handy and multi-purpose 2.0 m sheep-hurdles and two more new stakes sufficed to block it:

Sorted, so far. It's a bit of a PITA because FotR is the furthest from the house and beyond the reach of a hose. Accordingly I had to lug a couple of water buckets down there. But I don't resent the walk down to visit a tuthree times a day. If it's sunny it's life-affirming; and if it's pissing rain then I usually jog the downhill stretch which is a token touch of cardio - always good for old buffers. Usually, because Ireland, it is  neither of these extremes  but it's good anyway.

The main task is to count the sheep. This is why starting them all in the same field is a boon. It limits the number of thickets, grykes, fences and bushes which have to be investigated to find the last 1 or 2 members of the flock. Try it counting the white blobs. But sheep don't, in my experience, ignore gates. No sirree, they get up close-and-personal and scrunch up against them - it's The Itch; although we got them dosed for that in November. But 60kg of sheep and resonance can work knots and posts loose until the whole barrier collapses. Two days after installation, therefore, I went down with my saw, felled out a few branches of gorse / whin / furze / Ulex europeaus, and threaded them back through the gate to discourage scratching.

The sheep can barely see the gate now, let alone shove it. Although The Red Hill looks rather fine in the late afternoon sun, no?

Answer-time for sheep-tally. There should be (and are) N = 15. It helps if a) it's IRL and they are shifting about b) it's a better quality photo c) The Hand includes a helpful hint Blow Up of a central detail [R]. There are 3 sheep under the mountain ash - count the arses. Almost half the time I go to count the sheep, I come up with 14 the first time. I then walk slowly towards the leftmost sheep making encouraging sounds - in Latin because that's all that Ovis aries understands. The flock gathers together to face me off or all run away in the same direction. Inevitably the missing sheep will struggle out of whichever bush it was lurking in and gallop, all red-faced, to join her pals. 

It's always a relief when roll-call is complete. The FotR, as well as being furthest from the house, is also about 30m lower down. Loading a dead sheep into the wheel-barrow for the Fallen Animal Guy is hard enough. Whatever the joys of jogging downhill, I'm not sure if I have the puff anymore to push a dead weight of 60kg uphill for 250m. But what kills not fattens, and life is full of small delights, like finding a cluster of green ovals in a corner of a frosty field just after sunrise and thereby deducing where the ewes spent the previous night:

Street-light biology

There it is [the Mountain River] running under the (locally) famous viaduct of the long defunct railway that went from Bagenalstown to Wexford between 1858 and 1947. For the last 15 years of its existence the railway operated solely for hauling sugar beet from Ballynowhere to the Sugar Factory in Carlow. The town of Borris, which runs up from the river valley, abstracts its drinking water from the Mountain River, fouls it, treats it and discharges the effluent a little further downstream. It is just as well that, like time's arrow, water flows in one direction. The Public Meeting was called, for 1930hrs 13 Feb 2019 in the boutique wee hotel at the top of the town, to encourage dialogue between ordinary people on the ground OPOGs and All Agency Experts AAEs who occasionally parachuted in to make some desultory, irregular, duplicated, uncoordinated measurements of the river before flitting off to the next project.

• The OPOGs include 
• anyone [N=800 incl. 80 Polish-originally] who has to drink the water in Borris; 
• The town's main's water supply installed in the 19thC was replaced in 2017: Causing transitory transit-jams but great reducing the leakage of treated drinking water
• farmers with bank-side fields [that would include us as owners of The Field Over The River Aughnabrisky] anywhere up the catchment area; 
• anglers; 
• hill-walkers; 
• fly-tippers.
• The AAEs include
• The County Council CWCoCo
• Irish Water [the lads who can't / won't stop discharging raw sewage into Irish Water]
• The EPA
• Inland Fisheries Ireland IFI

The Public Meeting was for Consultation on the local River Basin Management Plan RBMP [we are not nearly finished on the acronyms!]. They were hopelessly optimistic about the amount of interest in their work: the hotel's ballroom was rented and 50 wedding-reception seats were laid out in an arc; 15 OPOGs turned up only just exceeding the functionaries who had to be there to answer questions and explain what they had been doing with their time, and our money, since the Local Authority Waters Programme LAWP kicked off two years ago. The OPOGs were not exactly hostile but were certainly critical of how their tax-payers money had been, and would be, spent. The LWAB, for example, just for the Sunny SE of Ireland employs seven people to carry out audits of water quality.

• One of our OPOGs had been asked by ALL the AAEs for permission to walk through his fields to access the river. "Do you share your data with the Fisheries people?" he asked but what he meant was, the fellow from Fisheries was knocking on my door three weeks before you came. In a free and transparent society these data should be put up in the public domain; as well as the intended schedule of sampling so that IFI and EPA could, say, share the petrol costs. The subtext here was that maybe either the EPA effective or the IFI effective could be laid off and we-the-people could save €80K salary+costs+mileage+PRSI a year. That would go a long way to making the Water Treatment Plant in Borris functional.
• Another farmer worried that the River Barrow was running dry . . . because so many entities were abstracting water. That's a worry because there will be less water to dilute any accidental (or deliberate) discharge. We wouldn't need water treatment if we banned flush toilets.
• None of the OPOGs at the Wednesday meeting admitted to fly-tipping their trash over a convenient bridge across the Mountain River, but many asserted that it was a regular occurrence under named bridges in their neighbourhood. 
• If a hoodlum fires a used soda bottle out of the window, I will clean it up during the annual An Taisce Spring clean.
• If a hoodlum dumps a load of car-batteries or paint-pots into a river someone has to clean it up ASAP (I'm too busy with the bottles). Leaving them there leaching toxins will make a disaster out of a problem. This is not the sort of things that the County Council prioritises: the crud is out of sight from the road and will cost a lot of billable hours to clean up. 

How do assess the quality of river water? The quick-and-dirty way is to jump in the river and do some kick-sampling. This is what LAWPers do: they kick-sample a bucket of aquatic invertebrates out of the river and count the numbers for different key species of creepy-crawlies. If you find caddis-fly (Trichoptera spp.) [example L] and mayfly larvae, (Rhithrogena semicolorata or Ecdyonurus venosus), the water is safe to drink. If they are absent you may not know exactly what's gone wrong with the ecosystem but you know it is poor quality. You could be much more expensive and "scientific": quantify the metals with AAS or FES; measure the nitrates; the Biological Oxygen Demand BOD; TriHaloMethane THM . . . but that would take time, kit and money. otoh, you're not better off by checking for key mammals like otters Lutra lutra: because that species is rare there is not enough granularity in the data. After the talk Ipulled on the lapel of the head LAWPer to suggest that kick-sampling and counting caddis-fly larvae is sooooo 19thC and salary-time-consuming. Why not, I suggested, take a sample of water + river-bottom and run it through a DNA sequencer. It is so cheap to sequence DNA now  and that will give you an estimate, not only of the countable invertebrates but also, of the microbial community . . . and probably the fish species as well from the fish-shit. Concentrating on the countable is a classic example of street-light science: it gives you a handle on what's easily available which may be almost irrelevant to a true measure of biological diversity or water-quality.

It was clear that DNA analysis hasn't arrived in LAWP-land yet - if it ever will. I therefore switched tack and asked what they were doing about [measuring, legislating for, informing the County Council] light-pollution. Here I must confess that I was channelling my pal Rene from St Mullins who, before he left the Netherlands 25+ years ago, was fattened on eels Anguilla anguilla. When he arrived in St Mullins on the River Barrow in the early 1990s, eels were plentiful. When they came back from the Wild Sargasso Sea as hatchlings, some of them turned right and swam up up the Mill Stream in search of a new home. Then the County Council installed a street-light on the narrow road bridge that crosses the stream as it met the Barrow. That was end of eels up the Mill Stream - they travel at night, avoiding light, which exposes them to predators. Same thing happens where the Mountain River goes under Main Street in Borris. Light and Dark are natural! they happen every 24 hours many / most / all animals have adapted to the change. Now, for the trifling convenience of people walking to the pub at night, we have daylight all night with utterly unconsidered consequences for the natural world.

MSF Moutonecins Sans Frontières

You know how it is. You've had an exhausting weekend wearing out the sofa and shouting yourself hoarse at the stupidity of the referee. The sun is clipping the trees on its way to bed and you're lining up [as in R] the evening's entertainment. You are maybe also thinking about something to eat. The end of a perfect day.  Then there's a voice at the front door: one of our regular hill-walkers is there to report that there is a sheep in the Aughnabrisky river up of the hill above us. "It looks like it's stuck; it's certainly exhausted; it's got a red mark on its back; I tried to pull it out of the water but it was too heavy".  Well dang-and-blast-it, that is far too little information to identify the owner, so that I can allay my conscience with a phone call.

Harrrumph. I guess it's up to me, in my MSF scrubs. At least I had sort-of-directions as to which section of river "between the red van and the corner of the forestry". I threw on m'hat, seized my Nokia 3310 and set off North by North East. Despite recent rain, the river was still really low after the long hot dry summer that we've had and I started well down-stream of the most likely Sheep Down location and worked my way uphill. Soon enough I found the wet sheep half immersed in water and rather than filling my boots and soaking my clothes, I stripped off and plunged into the river. It didn't take long to wrastle the moribund cr'ature onto the bank and drag her clear of the water to a level place which could catch the last rays from the setting sun.  The red mark on her back was, if you  know what to look for, an S. I also made a note of the number on the ear tag EI-00445355-4639E. Job done! Clothes On.

When I got home and reported in to The Beloved, she suggested that the headline in next week's local paper might be "Naked farmer has way with sheep - drone footage".  But it wasn't me, I've been Garda vetted.

Badgers? Kill them all

The Almaric Solution sounds like a Robert Ludlum novel but is a syndrome widespread in 20thC interventionist science. Arnaud Almaric's way of separating the Cathar goats from the Orthodox Catholic sheep on 22 July 1209 was neca eos omnes, deus suos agnoscet or Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius or kill them all, the Lord will know his own. Doctors started doing similar as soon as oral antibiotics came available in the 1950s: ear-ache my child? take augmentin and we'll lay waste your intestinal flora. That was all very well, you don't want a Staph infection to spread through the system as septicaemia and antibiotics were prescription only for a chunk of the late 20thC. Except for farmers: they could go a get a bucket of penicillin in case one of their sheep looked a bit crook. Shortly after we moved to rural Ireland 20 years ago, the 4 y.o son of one of the neighbours killed a lamb by imitating his daddy injecting the livestock; he just mis-calculated the dosage by 100x. The syringe and the bottle of penicillin were on a shelf in the barn. Did someone mention farmers and disease? The story of veterinary medicine in these islands over the last, say, 60 years has been the story of tuberculosis and its control. Tuberculin testing has to be carried out by a vet and has to be done on all the animals in a herd, so it is the steady earner for vets in rural practice - a bit like conveyancing for solicitors: frequently required, not intellectually or physically taxing, a nice regular income.

Government agri-policy was/is test, test, test and cull herds that were positive. That is the policy: to stop the infection spreading to neighbouring farms, infecting the milk and causing an outbreak of TB in people. Because the culling is a public good, the farmer gets compensation for his loss . . . from me the tax-payer. Maybe 20 years ago, some scientist had the bright idea that bovine tuberculosis, which was still far from being eradicated after a generation of this regime, was spread from farm to farm by badgers Meles meles [L super cute propaganda badgers, prints for sale at £40] which are no respecter of property boundaries in their hunt for insects, earthworms and a bit of sex. It is true that badgers, like cows and humans, can harbour Mycobacterium tuberculosis, so it is not much of a leap to suppose that badgers spread the bacteria between species just as we can catch the disease from infected milk. World TB Day is 24th March. TB will also spread if you house cattle indoors for much of the winter feeding silage in at the front and pumping out slurry from the other end. It's warm and humid in the slatted shed and the cattle are packed in like commuters on the Metro. So a case could be made that the poor bloody badgers are being demonised and scapegoated rather than address poor farming practice and sketchy ideas of farm hygiene. Actually, it's your fault with your insatiable appetite for cheap beef. The scientific establishment is agreed that, even if it's not a total solution, culling badgers is a useful part of the program to reduce if not eradicate TB. And a LOT of tax-payers' money has gone to fund research in the details of the relationship between cows and badgers, migration and territoriality, dung and sputum. More than 200 papers have been published on "TB AND BADGERS" over the last 20 years.

Maybe ten years ago, I was leaning on the gate with a straw in my mouth watching the day when two chaps came up the lane in a 4x4. They were from the Carlow branch of Teagasc, the agricultural advisory service. They were looking for a particular badger sett that they'd heard was in the area - we'd been grassed up by the neighbours. I was happy to tell them that we had an extended family of badgers at the bottom of our Field Over The River. It is called FOTR because the boundary wall hangs 10m over a steep cliff falling down to the Aughnabrisky River which marks the borrrder between Carlow (us) and Wexford (them). It is ideal for badgers and they have honeycombed the bank and that corner of the field with tunnels and holes. I was also happy to have a robust discussion about the scientific "evidence" behind badger culls and imply that they were paid assassins for the agricultural industry. They took this is good part and assured me that they would never set traps on my property without prior consultation / permssion.


The very next morning (sunny, cirrostratus clouds, a light breeze, lovely) I went for a walk around the farm - it's not something I do every day. I was strolling the edge of the Field over the River saying "Hello trees, hello sky" and generally feeling happy when I found myself stretched out on the grass without having had a conscious desire to lie down . . . and my foot could not move . . . because the boot was caught in a wire noose [a little like the arrangement R]. I had been instinctively walking along a trail because the wet grass was shorter there and the snare-setter had known that badgers do the same thing. Well you can imagine that I was speechless with indignation! Not so much the indignity of falling into sheep-shit - that goes with the program on farms - but the sense of betrayal after the categorical assurance of the previous afternoon. 

I stumped up the hill to the telephone and called a pal of mine from UCD who is an international expert in the genetics, epidemiology and ecology of badgers and TB. White male privilege accords me a network. He gave me the name and number for the head of the Tubadgerculosis Programme for Ireland - a senior guy who wore suits far more often than wellington boots. I spoke, still quivering with outrage, to The Great Man's PA, who reluctantly gave me His cell-phone number. When I got through he was just about to go into a conference on some weighty matter but he realised that I was a public-relations time-bomb and said he'd find out who was responsible . . . and eat 'em alive, he seemed to imply.  That had taken up my whole morning.

In the middle of the afternoon, I got a call from Teagasc, Wexford: young chap on the line was clearly under instructions to Do Whatever to make it better on the Carlow-Wexford borrrder before the whole map burst into flames. Would it be okay if he came up to explain and apologise; he could be there in 45 minutes? Or would I prefer a letter, if I was too busy? I said I'd give him a cup of tea if he came. He did and I did, and I heard that my neighbour across the river had fingered our badgers and invited the badgercides to do their damnedest because his cows were always testing positive. I was also told that they were under ethical  instructions to inspect all traps and snares before 0800hrs on any morning when snares had been set the previous night - badgers being quite strictly nocturnal. I can't remember the details of the arguments, but I agreed to let Operation Killbadger continue. I did suggest that it would be a good idea for better internal communication between badger-hunters: so that they didn't have two members of the same team giving contradictory messages while separated in space-time by one day-kilometer.

Next morning I was up with the Sun as normal and, after a pot of tea, went down to the river to check things out. A young badger was caught by the midriff in a snare cunningly set in the 20cm gap between the stone wall of the field and the wooden fence post. The poor creature cried out and scrabbled as I approached but I was woefully ill-equipped to do much for him - no wire-cutters, no falconer's gloves, no knife, no knowledge. All my killing experience had been limited to mice Mus musculus. At 10 minutes to 8, a contractor from Wexford Teagasc drove up in his 4x4, strode purposefully across a field, forded the river and scrambled up the bank to emerge armed with a .22 air-rifle, gauntlets, pliers and a sack. The contractor was yet another player in the team: neither the tea-drinker nor the liars nor the suit: as I say it's a well funded programme upon which many people depend. The badger was efficiently shot dead, dropped in the sack and taken away to see if he was indeed positive for TB. After two weeks, I had to prod their office to tell me that result; everyone from the office was too busy tooling around the country in 4x4s.

Hickey's desp'iled

". . . a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children" 

Wendell Berry

The quote emphasises the fact that we don't own The Ringstone, the neolithic artwork that we discovered on our property 12 years ago. We are holding it in trust for future generations - perhaps in the hope that they will be better equipped to make sense of it. Grassing ourselves up to the Archaeology Service of Ireland and getting the site mapped comes with some constraint: now The Man [Chris Corlett] knows about it, we can't ship it off to California or build it into the wall of a shiny new bungalow. I think it may indeed impact on planning permissions for the fields abutting the site. Neolithic? that's obviously part of our Heritage. The disintegrating 16ft touring caravan which we lived in while our Farm was getting renovated? Not so much. With 'Native' trees the cut-off is 500 years ago. Weirdly Antiques Roadshow now frequently covers toys and knick-knacks which were just everyday stuff when I was growing up and now command surprisingly high prices. I have to report a sorry tale of careless destruction, so that the ESB, a semi-state body, can tick a box [✓] about diminishing its corporate carbon footprint.

Access to Hickey's: used to be 2.5m wide and you had to duck past an occluding sceach, now you can drive a 20 tonne dump-truck straight in off Shannon's Lane. In the sun in the distance lower-right you can see the white deer-guards protecting the token un-Sitka trees in the plantation
There has been a recent rash of forestation up our valley. Not only upstairs where the bushy, rocky fields meet the commonage but right down to the fields beside which the R Aughnabrisky runs. At least our 0.4 hectare woodlot is a) native only [except - ooops my bad - for the lovely few dozen of larch Larix europea] b) a screen against the hideous steel sheds installed by my neighbour below. Several of of neighbours have recently sold up or leased their fields to a monoculture of Sitka spruce Picea sitchensis.  In December, I was moaning about the damage that might follow from Forestry Operations further up our lane. Well that damage is now manifest, and it was not directly to do with heedless messing with the drainage. The ESB's 15 hectare tract given over to Sitka runs in a narrow strip from the valley floor right up to the edge of the mountain and a much earlier plantation, which you can see in the pics above and we are expecting to be clear-felled any year now. At the top, the new planting crosses from one side to the other of Shannon's Lane that runs from the county road, past our place and up-up-and-away to the mountain. At the crossing, the mighty tracked digger drove straight through the little drive-way down to the steading we always knew as Hickey's . . . because the Hickey's lived there for a couple of centuries.

Hickey's was a sort of micro-clachan, although presumably all the sheds and dwellings were occupied by the one family and their stock. I'm sorry that I never made a photographic record of this one of the magical places where Dau.I and Dau.II played when they grew up on our farmlet. The Eastern gable of the main house [cottage, really) started up vertically from a massive erratic granite boulder [see above left]: the walls were about shoulder height high but no trace of a roof remained because the last of the Hickey's vacated two generations ago and the weather can be quite whippy-of-slates 300m above sea-level.

Every so often I would go up with some shears and trim back the brambles ‎Rubus fructicosus and hawthorn / sceach Crataegus monogyna twigs so that, by ducking and weaving a bit, folks could walk down and check out the clatter of small ruined buildings and the field walls that marked out the property. Someone must have instructed the digger-driver to leave standing any buildings; but now the context of those buildings has been largely obliterated. Which is a shame and a loss, because it's easy to smack something down but impossible to put it back like it was before - thaaaat's entropy. The fact that such heritage sites are protected must be a huge pain in the tits to contractors who are on piece-work [Picea geddit] to clear the site and plant it asap with 2500 30cm-high Sitka saplings to the hectare. Little wonder that they are careless in their clearing

But really did the digger-man have to clear 3 substantial boulders [two clearly visible above] from the old laneway and drop them from a great height right in the kitchen of the Hickey's family home, where they will sit like so many turds for the rest of time?