On the beach

I survived the first full week of teaching at The Institute. Early last week I remarked how a new timetable has scuppered my chance of hanging out with the ancients of Tramore each Monday afternoon. Monday looks to be busy but Wednesday is bonkers: wall-to-wall classes with no gap for lunch. That's okay with me, food at lunchtime tends to put me to sleep in the afternoon. But the maths of 18 contact hours in a 40 hour/9-5/M-F week means that if things are frantic on two days, there must be slack water elsewhere. Turns out that I have only one class on Fridays: 0900hrs Year 1 quantitative methods = QM1A = remedial maths. Now, a glass half empty sort of guy might crib about that and lament the fact that it scuppers a 3 day weekend but Dr Positive thinks it's fine. The weekend before last, I was down in Cork, and so missed the window for mowing our scrap of lawn down on the Waterford coast but did get a chance for a quick tramp along the beach at Benvoy to break the journey between Cork and Tramore. Win! I found a serviceable plastic fish-box at the tide line after a day of fresh on-shore winds.

Time and tide and growing grass wait for no man; and if you let things slide for more than two weeks, then mowing the lawn gets to be a real chore rather than a bit of light whole body exercise that leaves things tidier than before. Checking the weather forecast [sunny spells, no rain] and the tide-times [Low tide Dunmore East 1210hrs] the night before practically forced me to mitch off after class and head South. Accordingly, I loaded the lawn-mower into the Little Red Yaris before I left for work.

The timing was perfick, I unloaded the mower as the tide turned and was 8km along the coast at Annestown 12 minutes later. At Annestown, as for a lot of the much indented and heart-stoppingly beautiful Waterford coast, low tide is the key. For a couple of hours, twice a day, you can scramble round the headland at the East end of the beach-with-car-park and have a great sweep of strand all to yourself. As I came round the headland, a watery autumnal sun started to warm my shoulders and my spirits soared. With a job; the full use of my legs; free; warm; a cheese sandwich in my pocket for lunch; boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretching far away; who wouldn't be happy?  I tried to recall the lines:

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven!

But Willie Wordsworth was wrong, dawn is greatly over-rated on the bliss-side which is often cold and dewy-damp and I can no longer pass for young. But who'd be young again? When I was young I was ignorant, unappreciative, in a hormonal turmoil, and my hair was far too long - eeeuuuw.

On the beach, I felt like all of the kids in e.e.cummings poem rolled into one:

maggie and milly and molly and may 

went down to the beach(to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang

so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles,and

milly befriended a stranded star

whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing 

which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and

may came home with a smooth round stone 

as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me) 

it’s always ourselves we find in the sea

It wasn't On The Beach by Nevil Shute, or anything like it. I read that book when I was 12 or 13 with almost as much care and attention as I devoured The Day of the Triffids [prev]. Triffids is a book that forces a consideration of what is essential in life and which of the planet-wasting things in the shops can be done without. Beach, set in a doomed Australia after a universally fatal Northern Nuclear war, is about having no regrets about a previously wasted life. In one scene towards The End, as the fallout sweeps remorselessly South to engulf them, they hold a final Grand Prix motor race.  The competitors have each managed to save a 25 lt drum of petrol to fuel their last race on earth. With nothing to lose, there are several fatalities. When/if we arrive in a bleak future full of privation, and short on food, I don't want to think about the half-eaten pizza that got thrown in the bin because we'd over-catered again. I don't want to regret buying tawdry knickknacks, plastic bottles and single-use kitchen gadgets. To avoid this future regret, I now make a point of eating food that is edible if not pretty; I don't mind sharing a lettuce leaf with caterpillars. I don't eat caterpillars . . . yet . . . but I don't bin a leaf because it's got a ragged hole in it.

Finally and more positively, I'll add that my couple of hours on the beach  - after Annestown, I trotted along Benvoy and then Knockmahon looking for a smooth round stone or two - were more richly appreciated because, by one accounting, I should have been by my desk at work in The Institute. It had, in Yevgeny Yevtushenko's evocative phrase, the taste of not bought but stolen apples. After the beach, the lawn; which looked much tidier after I'd given it an hour-long short-back-and-sides. The crab-apples are as red as plums, they'll be ready to pick in a week. Life is good.

Repatriation

For as long as I can remember, I've gone down to the sea-shore to scavenge. The idea of sitting on the beach soaking up the rays is a) only possible to achieve twice a year in Ireland b) causes melanoma so I don't do that.  In England, when we lived there, it was wooden fish-boxes and rope.  In Ireland, because things have moved on, it's plastic fish-boxes and rope . . . and buoys. We live a long way from the sea, so I tend re-purpose the buoys as Art. The Beloved and I spent pretty much the whole of last weekend down on the incomparable Waterford Coast. The weather was a blessing: dry enough to mow the lawn, warm enough to leave a coat behind and sunny enough to need a hat. Over a couple of days, I scoured the beaches between Stadbally and Annestown: Ballyvolane, Ballydwan, Templeverick, Knockmahon, Kilmurrin, Benvoy and Woodstown / Whitefield. No not the Woodstown, famous for its oyster farm and for having hosted Jacqueline Kennedy while her husband was on his Presidential visit to Ireland in 1963. There are four townlands called Woodstown in Co. Waterford.

It's been pretty calm at sea the last month, so there wasn't a lot to be found. But it was super-wonderful to be out in the fresh air, in the sun and have all day to spend loafing.  For many of these beaches you don't ever get all day because they are only accessible at low-tide . . . unless you have a canoe.

We are currently collecting sea-scoured drift-wood for another Art project which doesn't involve buoys but I can't leave buoys all lonely on the beach when they can meet lots of new buoy-friends in our orchard. Eeee, I were delighted to see a pink blob in the distance when I came round the headland from Annestown to Woodstown. It turned out to be a large buoy, such as used by lobstermen to tag the end of a string of pots. It also had JUEAST W245 printed in big letters on the side. When we got home to a nice cup of tea, I googled up the information that Jueast is:11 m long; 11.5 t gross tonnage; and her home port is Dunmore East. There are even pictures of the ship [R].  After talking large last month about how I would return a fish-box if the owner was nearby, I could hardly keep this buoy. Before we packed up to head home on Sunday afternoon, I snt a txt to the Harbourmaster at Dunmore East asking if the Jueast was in port because I had something to return to them.

Being a Sunday, I didn't expect a reply and headed in towards Dunmore aNNyway.  It's more than 20 years since I was in Dunmore which is still one of Ireland's most attractive villages. My grandfather was harbour-master there from 1922-1947 and my father learned to sail out of that little port. Neatly, the Jueast was indeed in port, tied up to the quayside and unloading boxes of crabs. They were expecting me, because the ever-wakeful harbour-master had forw my txt-msg. They knew exactly where and when they'd lost their buoy, were delighted to have it back and curious to know where I'd found it.  Then they went back to work and I went to find another cup of tea in the locality. Good day's work.

maggie and milly and molly and may

 . . . went down to the beach(to play one day) [ee] 
[premature posting error on Friday! here released on schedule with added value].

may couldn't lift a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone. 
Which is just as well because it [L]was an interstellar messenger from the Planet Zorg cooling off in a rock-pool at Benvoy along Costa na Déise. I mentioned that my family left me alone with my weighty blanket after Easter and headed W to The Coral Strand = Trá an Dóilín in the Connemara Gaeltacht. I can just about handle having six extra [beloved] bodies in my own house . . . disappearing my charging cables tidying things up. But wrenching myself off a familiar sofa and, in a foreign environment, fighting over the breakfast cereal with m'fam? That was a too much for my agéd frame. Not to mention making a boarding-house queue with my fellow guests for access to the bathroom. At home, rain-or-shine, day-or-night, there is always the compost heap. So they went off and I stayed home and everyone was happy.

But they came back to the Sunny South East less than a week later and continued their live-like-there-is-no-tomo fun along the Waterford Coast. There is free-will, but in a sense they rolled their Ould Fella up in a bit of carpet, strapped him to the roof of the car and took him to Tramore. 

The timing was ungood because, a week before Waterford has been named the top destination in Ireland by Condé Nast Traveller, in a list of the must-see places to visit in Ireland. In particular they cite Trá na mBo so it will be even less of a Secret Beach than it has been since they added steps down the cliff and signage to get more footfall. I couldn't go: I was all tied up [nnggg nnnGG] with building works: being required to hold one end of a piece of timber and pass nails and screws to The Boy. But Dau.I took her niblings to Trá na mBo [you may call it cow-strand, if you live in England]. Together they made the rite of passage [woooooo] up the rocks and through the hole in the cliff to The Secret Secret Beach beyond. Which is important because Gdau.II is ten years old now - almost too old for Secrets.

I'm glad they didn't ask me for an opinion; because several years ago, I stopped making that micro-journey when it was clear that several tons of roof had collapsed since I last went to visit. But nobody died [Phew!] last week and they disturbed a seal, Phoca vitulina probably, who had hauled out at high tide. Seal probably thought "Fakkin' Condé Nast, I've been sunning myself here, minding my own business, for years - and now it's ruined by human yahoos".

One of the new additions at the car-park nearest to Trá na mBo is a box made of pallets and painted pink&blue with a scrap of fishing net atop to slow down the gulls. It says [in a rather spare, enigmatic ee cummings way - appropriate to a beach where one may encounter poets who are fluent in Spanish - and if you don't meet a poet you'll have to spout forth something yourself - do not mumble, the seals defo don't like mumblers.]

Tidy Towns
Beach Box
Swap & Share
Lost & Found 

Bannister

I have, so, a camera, several cameras, but that does not make me a photographer. Dau.II otoh has a bit of an eye. She was down to the Déise in June, being handy. We seized the moment between chores to clamber over a headland that is only accessible for an hour each side of low tide. You can tel it's low tide because the tide mark is halfway up the rocks:

Credits: Dau.II for the crisp picture; me for the tacky sentiment.

 We've been beach-combing together for at least 20 years, but we aren't in competition. She is more for 

may came home with a smooth round stone 

as small as a world and as large as alone.

while I lean towards the discarded work of human hand. 

I swear I offered free choice of beach from Benvoy to BallyDwan. But we found ourselves on a stretch of coast which I'd visited about 10 days [20 tides] previous and given up on 7m of bright orange hawser with an eye-splice at each end. I had come with a collection of sharp objects to separate the useful from the tangle. The  hawser had, after 10 sleeps, become even more useful than it had seemed on first presentation. So I worked and worried until I had reduced the load to what a 70-something can carry away [L sic transit] over some modest cliffs.

I think it will do for a fixed-rope adjacent to the stairs between our house and the garden above and behind it. Me, I trip lightly up and down this familiar route even in the dark, even with armfuls of laundry, but I have noticed that [much younger and seemingly fitter] visitors approach the task with trepidation. Sooo, the local bainisteoir = gaffer [L] intends to install a bannister for safety.

Logainm

Logainm is a searchable database of the placenames = logainmeacha of Ireland. The island is partitioned into ~60,000 townlands - the smallest civil division available - ranging from less than 1 acre (Termonmagurk, County Tyrone 0.63 acres = 0.25 ha) to several thousand acres (Fionnán co Galway 7,500 acres (3050 hectares. That's smaller than a parish [2,509] let alone a barony [328] or a county [32]. Logainm.ie is briefed to document and archive all the geographical names in Ireland; I guess down to individual fields, streams, bogholes. Names have utility: sending The Chap out to cut hay, the Gaffer needs to indicate unambiguously where to start. It may also give clues as to past agricultural practice . . . and also maps with names are important for taxing folks!

I've just finished reading That Place We Call Home by veteran RTE broadcatser and gaeilgeoir John "Creedo" Creedon. I got it via the family KrisKringle at Christmas last year, was gallopping along in January but set it aside to deal with a welter of time-limited downloads from Borrowbox.  Like my mother and Dover Castle, knowing something is available forever often encourages putting it on the long finger. Creedon has pitched a number of shows to RTE which involve him tooling round the country gabbing to the ordinary folks he encounters to investigate the local peculiarities of geography and history. This book is a sort of distillation of a couple of decades of turning up, listing and being interested.

I'm interested toponymy & etymology, so this should be my jam. The story often hinges on the dilemma about whether to translate or transliterate Irish placenames to generate a pronounceable English equivalent. Take Baile na gCailleach, as Creddon does on p78. This is the town of the nuns / women of mature age / hags. We've had nuns for longer than you or I can remember so there are many examples of Baile na gCailleach about the land. But Anglophication has taken many different patths: Collinstown WH; Ballynagale WX; Calliaghstown D; Collierstown Duleek MH; Callystown LH; Ballynagalliagh SO; Ballynagally LK; Calliaghstown MH; Ballynagalliagh KE; Collierstown Kells MH; Collierstown MH; Galliagh DY.

Our hill [one of the many] Knockroe[s] is clearly Cnoc Rua the red hill but is that the red-brown of dying bracken Pteridium aquilinum or the pinky-purple of flowering heather? Erica cinerea and/or Calluna vulgaris? And on colour, I was paying attention to the signage when I was last on the Waterford coast and twigged that Benvoy is An Bhinn Bhuí = the yellow cliff presumably named for the yellow clay exposed by the eroding cliffs.

Son Creedo's book is not an academic treatise, nor is it peer-reviewed science. But it's not a trivial skim across the landscape either. So many places are revealed and named that, unless you are already fluent in Irish, you're sure to learn something new about the places with which you are familiar.

The cloths of Heaven

An Fear aka The Man aka St Micheál of Martin, our Leader, announced that, from 10th May, intercontinental ballistic inter-county travel would be allowed for all. Clan Blob were quite slow on the take-up of these freedoms but we expect Dau.II to come across from the People's Republic later today. Though not without faults [who is?], nobody chid Dau.II for not being willing. She can change a plug, mow a lawn, saw a straight line through lumber and is happy with power-tools. 

It didn't seem fair to ask Corkies to break their journey on Costa na Déise to mow 10 or 12 ares of grass simply because they were passing. And there is self-interest in this: I'd rather not wait an extra couple of hours before the English Market hamper is opened and we can start tucking into cake, custard, cheese.

Accordingly, I scabbed a lift with The Beloved last Thursday when she travelled South about her father's business. It was apparent from the photo above that I wasn't the only one with thoughts of mowing: a farmer was in process of taking the first cut of silage from the meadow on the cliff-top just West of Kilmurrin cove. I can definitely be relied upon to take a crap photo; but this captures some of the magic of the Waterford Coast with its receding headlands all the way to Cork and backdropped by the distant Comeragh Hills. If there's one thing my father could capture in his water-colours it was the idea of the variety of clouds in Ireland. Taking a shy-and-retiring role in the composition is the banks of thrift / sea-pink Armeria maritima [prev] which is characteristic of The Copper Coast; partly because of its resistance to heavy metals.

Preparing for a [brief?] interlude of inter-county travel, Dau.II asked me to prepare a Beachcomber's Guide to The Copper Coast. I was nothing loath; indeed I have made a project of this in the past in anticipation of friends-and-relations visiting this gem of hidden charms - geological [go Ordovician], botanical [see above], ornithological [go Choughs Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax]. All those coves: Stradbally, Ballydwan, Trá na mBó, Bunmahon, Knockmahon, Kilmurrin [see above], Boatstrand, Benvoy, Annestown, Woodstown, [no, not the oyster Woodstown], Kilfarrasy, Garrarus, Trá Mhór. Since she could toddle Dau.II has been to all of them, but unless you're driving and or paying attention to the passing landscape, it can be difficult to a) tick them off in order b) remember which one has the towering purple cliffs and which are only accessible at low tide. It turns out that Waterford CoCo has not been idle during the lock-down but have prepared and distributed a lot of new signage [L], so you know where you be when the car-door opens and you can rush out to explore. As well as the finger-posts, there are new info-boards at each place with some handy annotated photos of what you're looking at. Especially interesting because there have been substantial, photo changing, rock-falls at least on Woodstown and Ballydwan beaches.

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

WB Yeats

Well met by tideline

Saturday was a drizzly mizzly dreich sort of a day after a night of persistent rain. We had planned to set off for the Waterford coast but as I drove down our lane I noticed that the drain was worryingly full of debris from the previous rains. Accordingly, I turned round, got into my cruddiest clothes, and spent a dirty sludgy hour shovelling out the drain, so that I could sleep quieter at night: if the drain backs up in a storm, the lane disappears down the hill.  The delay meant we didn't arrive Down the Déise until after dark. But that's okay, I've stolen time for some beach-bliss on the Waterford Coast before. Sunday, low tide was at a civilised 10am and sunrise was at 0830, so I was down on the beach in time to watch the sun boiling out the sea as I walked over the headland to Trá na mBo aka The Secret Beach where I had the honour to swap quotes with Senator O'Sullivan in 2016.  I had the merest twinge of disappointment when I noticed footprints on the palimpsest of the beach but barrelled straight up to the perp and asked what his obsession was - because the was no dog in evidence.

It turned out that, like Keiran Russell cited above and George O'Mahony, whom I met at Benvoy strand a tuthree years ago, the chap on Trá na mBo was another photographer, who had driven 150km from Wicklow to capture the light with his camera. He was determined to escape from the shackles of his business as a graphic designer and get in some work-life balance. That meant leaving home, wife and kiddies in the small hours in a blanket of fog and heading South for beaches and headlands which he'd never seen before. To say he was delighted with himself would be this year's understatement. He couldn't stop gabbing about the light, its reflections, the wet pebbles and the wisps of cloud. I was only trying to establish that, by scarfing up some buoys and rope, I wasn't queering his pitch. And indeed, I did discover an unliftable tangled hank of monofilament fish-net with floaty-rope at the top and lead-shot rope at the foot but I couldn't salvage much.

Round the corner in the car-park at Bunmahon Strand, I saw another young chap earnestly scanning the sea, shading his eyes from the still brutal-bright low-slung sun. He also had come a long way that morning - 80km from Enniscorthy; and also left a wife back home in the bed. He was there for the waves and was only mildly disappointed that there was a fresh on-shore wind. Surfers prefer the wind to act against the incommming waves. "But hey, I've got a real thick wet-suit, I'm just going to get out there before the sun goes in" . . . and so I left him to it.

I've noted before that in contrast to Seamus Heaney's Irish proverb "Man to the hills, woman to the shore", men have  a dangerous fascination with water. But my third recent tideline encounter was with a woman, only a bit younger than me, whom I met scanning the sands of Annestown beach with a metal detector. I'm a youtube 'expert' in that hobby so I suggested that all she'd find would be bottle tops and ring-pulls. I was right! She too was delighted to be on the beach escaping from the day-to-day. She was also delighted with her new toy which she had received form he husband for Christmas in fulfillment of a long unrequited desire. I suggested that the desire might be on her husband's side: while she was away with the sea-breeze combing her hair, he could be undisturbed at home watching the darts.  I was almost right there too . . . "It's soccer, actually" she corrected me.

Brimful

On the 12th June I wrote about drought-break as if less than 1mm of rain was an excuse for  🥳 🎉 💃 🍾. In Namibia, that might be fair enough . . . and maybe with sea temperature rise disrupting our wet westerlies we should adjust to a skeleton coast base-line for Ireland. The following weekend it was a) my bday & Father's "Hallmark" Day which was really an excuse for  at least 💃 🍾. Accordingly we decamped to TráMhór on the Waterford Coast for back-to-back movie nights and 🍰 with Pat the Salt. Clocked: Le Concert (2009) + Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939) ; Youth (2015) + About Time (2013). Mostly good fun: no car-chases, no guns, no spaceships.

We also carpe diemed a stroll along Benvoy beach [multiprevs] at low tide and combed a big blue fish-box in serviceable condition - which event gave me a frisson of delight. Never enough crates! Like Darwin discovering marine fossils 3,000m up The Andes, archaeologists in 1,000 years are going to be puzzled by the local midden of beach-plastic so far from the sea. Even if the sea is lapping at the foot of the Blackstairs by then.

But that 16/17 June weekend it really rained: downtown Tralee was flooded. Back home, we'd previously cleaned out all our water-collection devices WCDs and they were ready to catch water again  . . . even if we were all off site whooping it up on the beach. Gravity and infrastructure does the work. There were some desultory showers the following week and started pumping water up hill to our 1 tonne IBC. On St John's Day we mowed all the grass - including the cow-slip Primula veris corner, so we're looking allll protestant again. The following morning, early, another belt of rain passed across the country from the SW and we were able to top up all our WCDs including our diverse clatter of buckets and watering cans. 

I tell ya, it would be mighty if we could get our 1000mm of annual rain delivered like clockwork at 10mm every third night.  No floods, no droughts, just enough, on the regular - perfick!