Old Stone Walls And Ripe Damsons...And being Lucky...

I think I've told you before about the Island road...everytime we go along it I think how incredibly lucky we are to live in such a beautiful place as this...mind you...the actual road is pretty dreadful...all lumps and bumps and pot-holes, awful narrow as well.

But the lough is on one side...water shimmering today with the slight breeze...vast reed beds and a long narrow spit that cattle use as a place to wander, before reaching the end for a drink.

There is a little cottage, long empty of people, with tiny Pink roses festooning the walls and rickety old barns where farm cats laze in the sun...

Where the river runs into the lough, the fishermen set up their rods and dinky green folding stools...Thermos flasks and bait tins...boot lids on cars left open.

There are heaps of mussel shells here, dating back to Neolithic times, or so it is said, by those who know such things...

And a babies burial ground also...though I have yet to find it.

There is certainly a crannog...now covered in trees, but the neat circle of the man- made mound can be clearly seen...once a rather up-market home for people who lived on these shores about four thousand years ago.

Resident geese graze the small fields alongside recently shorn sheep...plenty of food for the both. It won't be long before the migrant Swans and Geese fly in for the winter...long skeins of them sailing through the night skies with their mournful cries...

We met a very old crooked man this afternoon moving his cattle down the road...his legs bent outwards and his back humped and I wondered if he'd suffered from the rickets when he was a child and did he ever go to school...sitting on a wooden form in that little derelict school right on the lough shore, with his donkey tied up to the fence outside...waiting patiently to carry him home...did he have a pencil of his very own that he carried in his pocket...did he learn his times tables while wishing he was out on the bog with his Da...

He smiled at us and waved his stick and I saw his stout boots were undone...

Boreens and laneways lead off...left and right...sometimes we take a left turn to see where we end up...past small farmyards with Collie dogs chained to a post...past ancient stone walls surrounding tiny 'famine' fields...derelict homes with fallen roofs, their overgrown gardens ablaze with colour from clumps of Purple Loosestrife...rosy apples on twisted trees. Damsons sometimes...rich dark purple...there for the taking.

Front doors stand wide open to let in the sun...scarlet geraniums clustered on windowsills...plump cats stretch and yawn on paths leading to cow-sheds...a line of washing hangs from one tree to another.

A pony leans over a fence and snickers... open sheds hold stacked turf for the winter and assorted rusting machinery...a hay rake once pulled by horses...the rotting collars still there, hanging on nails on a piece of timber... those stout collars stuffed with chopped straw... home now for wily field mice.

I once said how lucky we are to live in such a place to two people I thought to be friends...they shot me down in flames and said they'd only come because cottages were so cheap...and they thought me to be no different.

Perhaps they've never seen what I have seen.