Surveying the routes

We're back on the hill, The Beloved and me, making progress for progressive farming in Ireland's uplands. Last week we did a couple of days preparing a square of over-grown heather for controlled burning. Actually it was more preparing the periphery to make it less likely that the heather blazing would take off across the hillside à la California. Clearing a fire-break by hand is heart-break hard. A strimmer, or better a hedge-clipper, is The Biz with a team of rakers and gleaners coming along after each noise-maker.

As the Surveyor General, I was asked to  see if it was feasible to clear the thatch off a path across the hillside to The Giant's Table, our medium sized dolmen; and super modest tourist attraction. I went for a walk to the Cross last Saturday night and came down via the Summit and the Giant's Table. Along the way, I met two of my neighbours in a tractor. One of them suggested strimming a path to the Giant's Table from the North. If you follow the turf track round the back of the hill, it zig-zags up to the summit. At the 1st sharp bend this rutted path is pointing more or less straight at the G's Table. That strikes me as an excellent idea because, having approached the Giant's Table from the South, most people will be heading onwards and upwards. 

I've called this Route A. There are two reasonable paths from the South to the Giant's Table. One veering off the "main road" at the top of the forest. It's 440m [on a gradient of 1 in 3.6] from there to the Table, fairly clear of rocks and reasonably dry underfoot. On the map [R] I've called this Route C.  I prefer a shorter 360m, slightly steeper [1 in 3] route (less work strimming) starting further along the track at the Big Drain under the roadway opposite Ryan's Walls across the Wexford border. This is Route B. 

Having worked out what equipment was required, it took 2 hours to clear 2 sides = 140m of the burning square. Route A+B could take between 4x and 5x as many person-hours. You don't need to be very fussy: the expectation is that encouraging walkers along a make-it-easier path will be sufficient to keep the way clear. 

For surveying the route, it's much easier if two people are involved: one to do the angles and one to plant ["left left right-a-bit, left, that's spot on"] the distant flags. Could be done the same day as the strimming and raking. Again that does have to be obsessively accurate: if the line is, say, 3° adrift if will only be sin(3°) off or 5% at the far end . . . say 20m over half a kilometer.

The Holistic Landscape

I won an election! Single candidate, single party Viva Blobista!, tiny electorate. As the new Heritage Liaison Officer for our commonage, I am licensed to yomp across the hill paying attention to some of the details: rocks, plants, beetles, spiders, birds and the built environment.  I am particularly interested in the latter: where human sweat and broken fingernails have changed the living rock into things with human utility: lintels, sills, walls, pillars, shaughs, dwellings, tombs, altars. But also remember that the whole upland, dry-heath landscape is creation of human activity: without sheep there would be bog or forest. Mutton and wool, and their getting, have given a two century long pause to the natural succession.

Last Wednesday was a Perfect Day: sunny with scudding clouds driven by a warm damp Westerly wind and I had the entire 200 hectares of mountain to myself. I tasked myself to establish GPS coordinates for the more obvious landmarks on the hill. The Marian Year (1950) Cross; The Giant's Table; Dreelan's, Mackey's and The Great Shaugh. It was on the dot of lunchtime when I arrived at the Giant's Table: a chunky dolmen on the East ridge of our hill. I'd made me a sandwich with cheese and lamb's lettuce Valerianella locusta stuffed into half a homemade chapatti and Bliss was it in that lunch to be alive. But soon enough I was heading downslope to flatter land known as Mackey's Walls which is a ruined steading NE of the Giant's table.

That humble dwelling consisted of three rooms, one tiny and a two room shed [granny-flat??!] just to the West. Our family know it as Mog's Bothy because that's where The Boy used to go camping. The Mackey haggard has about the only patch of levelish dryish grass on which you can pitch a couple of tents. When his sisters were small, he'd take them up there for an overnight of magic, wet socks and pee in the bushes. Mackey's is interesting because of a row of five [one missing, one leaning] substantial squared granite pillars running parallel to one face of a rectangular walled enclosure:

I think they must have supported the front edge a roof extending back to the wall, although a man couldn't have walked upright underneath the rafters. Mystery, really. The other notable feature is that a rather precise half acre of, now heather-covered, lazy-beds fills the higher Western half of the haggard.

Lazy-beds is a rather pejorative term used for the potato Solanum tuberosum ridges which sustained the plain people of rural Ireland before the famine. Parallel trenches were dug and the spoil heaped up between. Spuds were planted into the ridge and earthed-up (with dung, rotted straw, seaweed if convenient) during the growing season to keep the tubers out of the sunlight. Unless you know to look and what to look for, you could miss this evidence of how folks lived 200 years ago. I was talking to Chris Corlett [prev and prev and prev] afterwards, about my finds and he said that [2.4m] wide ridges such as Mackey's were far more likely to have supported oats Avena sativa. and the oats, as in Scotland, supported the people. He said that he'd found evidence of such oats growing 1,000 feet up in County Wicklow. The hardy scallion-aters of Carlow were, from my evidence, growing oats at nearer 1,400 feet. 

Corlett also regretted the fragmentation of knowledge into non-overlapping magisteria. Botanists do plants and historians do manuscripts and rent-rolls and historical geographers do old maps. Arm-chair historians can write the papers and draw their conclusions without leaving the library!

The extraordinary things about the human eye is its scalability: we can focus on the moon or the stamens of a Tormentil. And in real time, in the real wet grass we can flick between one view and the other. Unless your knees are wet you only get a slice of the landscape - thin, insubstantial, almost meaningless. Louis Agassiz, Swiss-Harvard geologist and biologist, famously spent the whole summer on his knees in his back yard; but he only inventoried the beetles, not the deep history of his lawn. 

We need a more Prairyerth Deep Map view of where we happen to be standing.  PrairyErth is set in its unique topology, but that is buffeted by the weather (incl tornadoes) and overlies a characteristic geology, which determines the soil, which determines the vegetation, which determines the fauna that romped and slithered through the tall-grass before people ever arrived in Chase County. The view is so much richer because WLHM looks at these interlocking dimensions of the place through scientific as well as English-major eyes. And the people who finally appeared in this landscape were so intrinsically interesting that you need to hear their back-story and listen carefully to their folk-lore and songs. But most of all it is, like Thoreau, a celebration of the ordinary.

I got a little over-excited with all this cross-disciplinary talk. I started to think about besting PrairyErth's single county deep map and convening a symposium on a single hectare [such Mackey's mapped above] in the heart of the Blackstairs Hills. That would be both a metaphorical and physical "on". We'd pick a day next summer, or <covid> the one after, and bring together archaeologists, botanists, cartographers, dancers, economists, farmers, geographers, historians, illustrators, musicians, painters, poets, translators and zoologists. 

Programme:

Everyone to spend the morning digging their truth out of the landscape

Lunch

Each in turn to summarise their findings in 10 minutes

Take notes, lads, two half ideas make something never before seen and imagined.

Quick to learn

Prologue. Many years ago, I had a week back in Boston with the family that adopted me during my PhD.  They had been attending a night class in oriental carpets and the last session occured during the week I was visiting. To everyone's surprise, the proprietor of the bazaar where the course was run, devoted much of the last session to a viva voce quiz on what his students had learned. Everyone passed and everyone therefore got a luck-penny square of carpet back for their troubles. In a spirit of inclusiveness, I was invited to try my hand and "won" a prize, too. It wasn't that hard, because (from a standing start) I'd learned a bit about carpet provenance and patterning from paying attention during the previous exams. Some day I'll be able to parlay that knowledge into a successful round at a table-quiz in Isfahan.

Sunday was Dia de Santiago and no better day for a bit of peregrinage a trek across the face of our hill. My excuse for this was the appearance of an old friend from foreign , let's call him Dan, who was in Ireland for some essential business travel and managed to ring-fence some AirBnB time locally. Last time he was here, he yomped up the hill adventuring with a a handful of his 20-something niblings rather than sacking out for tea and scones with the crumblies. He expressed a desire to tune into St Fursey's Altar which they had discovered on the last trip when it was still The Giant's Table.

We paused at the mountain gate. I showed him [because it's my jam] <teaching-moment> the most accessible example of indents carved in a granite boulder with a stone-pick prior to splitting the living rock with wedges. The story I tell is that some young feller started an over-ambitious project only to be told by an old-timer that he was wasting his time on that rock.  A snap-shot of the process is preserved for posterity in the partially excavated line of indentations </teaching-moment>. We set off uphill on a bee-line for the Marian Year Cross via the Giolleamh Eigin a distinctive sky-line standing stone about half-way to destination. On the way, Dan paused for a "miner's view" [R] and a slug of water and announced "there's another of those stones for your project"

And indeed it was; although much clearer after we pulled back the overlying heather. That's a coup: at least as good as my fragment of Persian carpet. Whereas the mountainside has dozens /hundreds of these worked stones, it is perfectly possible to walk by a fine example  completely oblivious to its existence because you're distracted by midges, fraocháns, chit-chat, or buzzards. One more catch like that and we'll have to call him Hawkeye. Me? I'm delirah to add another datum to my environmental inventory, worked-stone division.

Did someone mention fraocháns? It was Fraochán Sunday and Hawkeye had been introduced to the concept by the three young girls who live in the AirBnB. When we reached the Giolleamh Eigin, I indicated a convenient bush full of the ripe berries and ate one to prove they were edible. Hawkeye was delighted and put N=6 in his water bottle to share with his young pals that evening. Just as well that he forgot all about it, because at teatime, the girls knocked on his door with a neat slice of fraochán pie which would have completely wrong footed him in the potlatch if he'd made the first move.

Torrmentil

That would be Potentilla erecta: "As a prompt botanical in purifying the system in diseases of the blood, and discharges of bloody flux. Administered either in a strong decoction, or the alcoholic extract. It is unrivalled in accumulation of excess mucus and the many progressive disease symptoms this condition brings on. To mention a few: the common cold, allergies, hay fever, tonsilitis, cholera, dysentery, haemorrhoids, etc. It is strongly astringent and will quickly relieve pain due to its influence in arresting the discharges and effectively diminishing unwanted accumulation. It is invariably successful in summer complaints of. children, even in cases where other means have failed". [Sauce] sounds like a bit of a cure-all on a par with Lyrica -- stem-cells -- biochar -- plant stannol esters -- Footmaster but I doubt if it will work under controlled scientific conditions . . . and it tastes 'orrible!

Tormentil is, however, very pretty in an understated wild-flower way and an important indicator species for dry heath - an upland habitat in which there is considerable local interest.

I have become more directly interested in the wild-flowers of the commonage up behind our house since the last meeting of our local cumann na common.  We have undertaken to carry out three "Improve Ireland's Uplands" tasks in calendar 2o2o. 

A for A bit of controlled burning 

B for Bracken-thrashing like last year and 

C for Culture

Five of us [not me] have signed up for Fire Training; everyone has agreed to do some collective bracken and bushes cutting. When it came to Who would cover the Culture? I leapt from my chair with raised and waving hand crying "Meeeeeeeee!" . . . under the [utterly mistaken] apprehension that everyone would want something so interesting and physically undemanding. I have accordingly been the only candidate in an election for the local Minister of Arts Culture and the Gaeltacht.

I see this portfolio [I am bigging myself up here] as having a few different threads that need to be woven into a coherent plan; all having aspects of promoting the amenity value of the hill which we own in common. It is a great credit to us, especially those who actually run sheep on the hill and depend on it directly for their livelihood, that Joe and Josie Poblacht are not only tolerated, but even welcomed onto what is, at the end of the day, private property. There is only one family in our townland who has ever made money from tourism through a decade of operating as a Bed&Breakfast years before AirBnB got legs.

• The Giant's Table, a middling impressive dolmen for the Wiccan
• The 1950 Marian Year Cross for the Roman Catholics
• The Lazy Beds: ancient sites of potato cultivation when pressure of population forced people to try farming higher, wetter and acider land. Then came the Famine of the 1840s . . .
• The Built Environment. This is my gig: documenting the evidence of stone working on the mountain. Including boxed-shaughs, quarried rock-faces, odd bits of wall and once-upon-a-shelters.
• I'll include here the peculiar horizontal shelves - possibly charcoal-burning sites - which dot the South face on the hill.
• The Zoo.
• Buzzard Buteo buteo, golden plover Pluvialis apricaria, wheatear Oenanthe oenanthe, sky-lark Alauda arvensis, crows Corvus spp, Grouse Lagopus lagopus, kestrel Falco tinnunculus. Sika deer Cervus nippon, hare Lepus timidus, fox Vulpes vulpes
• The Garden
• See earlier for list of key species in English. Latin and Irish
• Your suggestion here:_______________________

The Culture Liaison Officer could be quite hands off; telling folk that these assets are there and giving them the agency to find / admire / photograph / eat the whatevs. But there is a groundswell of  opinion amongst us that a bit of signage would be a useful way to spent government money on the overall scheme. Later in the week, I was on the Daily Dau.II Call. When I started to explain the onerous responsibilities which I had just taken on, she elbowed me aside and told me to listen. Pal of hers, also home-educated, is at the beginning of her career as an artist and she should be commissioned to do the drawings for the sign. As it happens young N is an artist in the old style and is very unlikely to win the Turner Prize. Indeed as I write this, I can see that she would be a great additions to the calling of Scientific Illustrator in the honorable tradition of Mary Leakey or Beatrix Potter. I'll hope for something more didactic and informative than "Hare treats its haemorrhoids with tormentil"

Lá Fhéile Fursa!

Calloo callay,
St Fursey's Day

Same as every year, the 16th of January is the Feast of St Fursey, a second tier Irish saint, whose cult I am propagandizing.  2022 - 2023. We have weather in Ireland rather than climate, so the cloud-cover on any day in January is a crap-shoot. But if the previous night has been really cold, that's because there was no heat-retaining cloud cover and it's good odds that the sky will be clear at 08:27 local time, whc is when the sun rises behind Clorogue More. And it was so:

The mental distortion which makes the sun-at-the-horizon look so boiling big is nixxed by the cold logical eye of the camera. You'll have to take my word for it that sunrise between two bands of low-lying stratus was bloomin' marvellous this morning. I am sorry that there was only me to share the traditional feast-day foods of barley bannocks, honey and a horn of mead laid out on The Giant's Table aka St. Fursey's Altar. About 170m lower down, close to the lane that snakes across the heathland, the sceagh-of-the-forest remains after the conifers were clear felled behind it:

 

In the distant past we used to decorate this tree with little wrapped Celebrations candy on St Stephen's Day 24/Dec because we knew a family that was in the habit of walking off Christmas Dinner up our hill. Cripes, the youngest of those kids is now in college. Poor tree is going clean now and looks better for being unlittered. 

For the record: a yomp of 1700m horizontal and 170 vertical takes [me] a brisk 35 minutes. So next year, we really need to leave the house by 07:45.

St Fursey's Altar

I am steaming across the landscape of 32 Words for Field until we pause at Loughanleagh = Lochán Leagha = Lake Doctor where, <cue Twilight Zone>, there is no lake. In exchange . . . A local person will tell you to look out for St Patrick's knee-mark on a rock near where the well of the lake was; on your next visit you will find it and clear see an indentation carved into stone in the shape of a rough horseshoe, but because it faces towards the rising sun over Dundalk Bay it is likely that it too is far older than St Patrick. It's a remnant of a ritual of our sun-worshipping ancestors." [p.155]

That seems really sketchy 'evidence' for inferring a) the date of the handiwork b) the religious beliefs of the handiworker. But, wahay, it's no more than you'd expect from the Arts Block. And I've been happy enough to patter on about the Earth Mother when showing visitors the markings on our Ringstone. If you're expecting evidence [aka confirmation bias] of heliolatry you have two chances of being right: depending on whether you're C for catching the rays or the 180° opposite galloping towards them. And Eee, 'appen, we have one of them horseshoes as well. [see R with stick for orientation] 

Nothing would satisfy me but that I should yomp 1500m N and 250m up the hill to determine the direction our mythic hoof-print was facing. I left at 1100hrs: it wasn't exactly raining but it was a grand soft day with clouds obscuring all the hill tops. I found myself unaccountably delighted to be up on the hill with nobody to bother me with chat and any distracting horizons obscured by the enveloping cloud. As I headed up to the Giant's Table, a golden plover Pluvialis apricaria started up from the wet grass almost under my gallumphing feet and whirred South across the tundra. Mystic! Wonderful!

Arriving at the dolmen. I laid down a straightish stick in line with the hoof-print and got a compass-bearing on the invisible sea to the SE. It was 125° which old style sailors would call southeast by east. The catechism continues:
Q. On which day, if any, does the sun rise at 125° when view from the Sunny SouthEast of Ireland. 
A. Upon the 16th January.
Q. And which [Irish] saint is venerated upon that day?
A. St Fursey of Killursa [Cill Fhursa] near Headford, one of an Ceathrar Álainn, miracle worker in East Anglia and Picardy.

It is as clear a message as could be. St Fursey is the patron of our hill and the Holistic Landscape at its foot. We must all meet at his Altar at Sunrise every 16th January: bring your wretched and dispossessed, they will be made whole. Sunrise is easy: 08:36hrs. Sausinge sandwiches and hot-to-trot strong tea after witnessing the sunrise. It will be entirely appropriate to cut branches of whin / gorse / fursey Ulex gallii as you approach the altar. I have his sandal!

Arise St Fursey!

You can't expect to catch a romantic sunrise on any day in mid-January in Ireland. It is nearly 2 years since I discovered that a petroglyph, the work of human hand, on a flattish glacial erratic, probably not the work of human hand, was oriented towards the point of the horizon where the sun rises on St Fursey's Day. Huzzah! that would be today! Last year the weather crapped out on Furseyites in the Sunny South East and I couldn't see 100m, let alone the horizon.

It was wonderful to be out and about before the sun rises. There were 2° of frost, which dried up the puddles and made the surface of the path up to the Giant's Table a little less boggy. Positively warm compared to my accompanying audiobook [An Unsung Hero by Michael Smith] which had Tom Crean and two others racing plodding stumbling for their lives down the Beardmore Glacier in January 1912 in 20° of frost. 

Anyway, you see above the evidence that the sun rose today, that I was there to witness, that life is good. Lá Feile Fursa!!

Team sports for duffers

Do you like team-sports? Do you do team-sports?  Whether you like or not, do or not, there's a lot of it about. Irish radio on Saturday and Sunday is wall-to-wall reportage of sporting events. Watching, listening to sport is okay, can be exciting, but my final assessment is the same as Dr Johnson's on the Giant's Causeway - "worth seeing but not worth going to see". On the rare occasion I find myself in The Pub watching The Game and folk ask me "Do you play {rugger | cricket | squash | soccer | tennis | hockey}?" My Jesuitical response is "I have played whatever". Because sport was an integral part of my very expensive education; not to mention bezique, contract bridge, canasta and chess.

I was reminded of this because of a thread on Metafilter about teams-sports and Calvin and Hobbes [prev] which had the effect of opening the floodgates of emotional response from the unsporty minority. Sports have become so entirely normative that you are regarded as a special sort of peculiar if you don't buy into it. If you're a boy who 'throws like a girl' or suffers from asthma or is too tubby to run or just plain prefers reading, then life can become a special sort of hell in school. At my expensive school as part of a mens sana in corpore sano policy, we were requested and required to carry out a minimum of three "changed exercises" every week. That meant getting into shorts and having a shower afterwards. For what happened in between there was a fair degree of latitude: you could go for a run, or swim, or play squash, or sign up for a seasonally appropriate team game. Despite the asthma, I'd often go for a run because that meant I could trot out of the school gates with a book of poetry tucked into my waistband and go and find a park bench in a remote part of town.

Then suddenly, in my last year in school, I was made responsible for fielding a team of people to play soccer once or twice a week through the soccer season. Everyone who was sport competent would be doing that and winning medals but that left a substantial minority of misfits who needed to get out for some exercise several times a week. It became my task to round up 11 of these duffers to have rings run round us by fitter, faster and more engaged people from other parts of the school. I decided that the only way to play it was with a mixture of passive aggression and irony to satirise the whole idea of team sports. I don't have much in the archives from those distant days, but I have kept an envelope full of the notices I posted to announce the next fixture and the names of the squad. Names redacted to protect the then-innocent - these chaps are probably captains of industry or ambassadors now.

Nature Lover's League.

Another country ramble today, that is Tuesday 8th of Feb on Birley's 5 They want you to wear a striped shirt this week, so think of it as fancy dress. There will also be some lads from Marlowe there, they will be wearing blue shirts. This time we are trying to find Bellis perennis, but as it is not in fkower it should be quite a test. Also Agropyron repens which is more easily found on soccer pitches at this time of year. If you get bored there will be a leather bladder to kick at each other. But try to concentrate on the beauty of the natural ecosystem that is at its best in Winter. We'd be grateful if the following would appear . . .
Also a prize for the first lad who spots a rabbit. RA RA

Your Captain

Football Vendor's Association

Dear Prospective Buyer,

We of the Football Vendor's Association are offering you, the man in the cloister, a unique opportunity to purchase one of our luxurious velveteen footballs. We offer a variety of sumptuous models to choose from: The Classic - covered in silky soft Skivertex, longer lasting and more durable than real leather; or The Bladder - a hard-wearing cheap football covered in absolutely (money back guarantee) waterproof plastic; and many other superb models in a variety of colours and covering a wide price-range.

And we offer you, absolutely free, an opportunity to see one of our footballs in action. You may even try a tentative kick or two yourself. This unique opportunity to see how good our footballs are will take place on Birley's 5 at 2.30 of Wednesday the 23rd of February.

Perhaps the following would give it a try . . . Please wear blues.

Your Captain

Bulgarian Liberation Front

Brothers of the red poppy! Support our cause. Liberate Bulgaria of the Golden Horde. Fight for Freedom. There will be a rally at Luxmoore on Wednesday the 9th February and our leaders will speak to us about our cause, outlining the atrocities which the self-style Genghiz Khan and his fiends have committed in our fair country. We will be joined by our comrades from Luxmoore who, to demonstrate their friendship with other branches of the Order of the Red Poppy, have offered to play a game of football with us. To avoid confusion comrades we will wear striped shirts. The rally begins at 2.30. Invitations are especially extended to . . .

Unity is Entity

Your Captain

Here's the league table just before the last match; my boys second from the bottom:

	P	W	D	L	F	A	Pts
Luxmoore I	9	8	1	0	97	2	17
Grange	9	6	2	1	44	9	14
Marlowe I	9	5	2	2	19	10	12
Walpole	9	5	0	4	37	12	10
Linacre	9	4	0	5	27	27	8
Galpins	9	4	0	5	14	52	8
Meister O	9	3	1	5	28	22	7
Luxmoore II	8	3	0	5	20	38	6
School Ho	9	2	0	7	19	50	4
Marlowe II	8	0	0	8	1	84	0

Clearly my attempts to rally the boys with cynicism and irony wasn't a winning strategy. Would I have done it differently? Not at all. It's also a bit mind-bending how many goals are being scored. If I hadn't been there I'd believe they are recording rugger or basketball results.  The first notice above has Won 8-0 Ra Ra Ra scrawled across it in big letters. Note also that, as goal-keeper, I let an average of 8 balls a game through me legs or past my out-stretched toes as I dived the wrong way. I don't remember any of us acting or feeling the least bit demoralised from another trouncing, so maybe the strategy was ultimately good for self-esteem in a world stacked against us.