What a wonderful world — oh yeah

HEAVENLY, is a word that springs to mind as I walk along the bay-side path on New Year’s morning.

The tide is out and birds are everywhere on the green weed, thousands of birds. If heaven is like this, it would be good enough for me, the huge expanse of the empty estuary on one side and, on the other, the fields and sky.

It seems to me that I remember a scene like this from somewhere but where it might have been and when I can’t recall. Perhaps, it was in childhood. If I believed in the cycle of death and rebirth, I might wonder if it happened in another life.

The fields are immediately recognised but the place and the time when I last saw them is impossible to locate in my moth-eaten memory.

But never mind: here and now, on this glorious morning, these Irish acres are the Elysian fields. One qualification only: were this to be heaven on a permanent basis (perhaps only heaven and hell are permanent: life certainly isn’t, and now limbo is gone) I’d like to have the company of friends.

I enjoy walking alone, but not for eternity. However, those I love must have infinite patience to come walking with me. I constantly dawdle while they stride ahead and then have to pause and wait for me. Happily, they are not route-marching types, tramping single-mindedly along, arms flying, dark glasses on their eyes, ear-buds in their ears, marching to a music the rest of us cannot hear. I’m sure such exercise-walkers enjoy it but why waste shoe-leather when they could stay indoors and watch nature programmes while using one of those conveyor-belt walking machines?

Each to his own, however. I simply have no interest in putting one foot in front of the other at breakneck pace. There’s always something to see on a walk: an interesting wild flower, mushroom, bird, ruin, animal track, some brown trout in the river below the bridge — maybe even a sea-trout or salmon in the depths of a brown pool, if it’s that time of year.

Wayside attractions, wayside miracles, way-laying miracles, delaying miracles. That bushel of twigs high up in the tree — a magpie’s domed nest or a red squirrel’s drey? There is a helluva lot more to walking than simply exercise. The constantly changing tapestry of the great outdoors.!

Now, on this sunny morning, a field — rather, a piece of parkland — takes my attention; therein, 10 very woolly, very white sheep sit together in the warm sun. They are not the wiry Scottish blackfaces one might find in the hills further west, but neat, lowland sheep, perhaps a Romney Marshes or Dorsetshire breed. A fine, Georgian house stands beyond, swathed in Virginia-creeper, with 10, tall windows, and arched windows in an extension to one side, all gracious, elegant, long-standing.

I stop and sit for a while where I’ve sat on warm winter days before, in the sun-trap of the walls of a ruined abbey. Nearby, stumps of stones breast the long grass under which monks or parishioners who once roamed here in the quick of life have lain for the best part of a millennium.

The abbey was established 100 years before the Franciscans built their abbey at Timoleague where the Argideen River meets salt water and where wine ships once docked to supply the monks and the nine village inns.

The single gable that still stands is grown over with polypody ferns. Eight feet thick, it, along with two-and-a-half walls, encloses what was once the chapel, the half-wall being on the seaward side, weathered down by the wind and rain of eight-hundred winters driving in off the bay. On the sheltered slope in front of it, spring primroses often appear in December before the old year is yet done.

On the following day I walked the same bay-side path but at three in the afternoon.

Having spooked the godwits and lapwing feeding on the green carpet of weed I passed quickly, leaving them to their peaceful kingdom.

Heaven can wait — would that it’s as interesting if I ever reach it!