Monday, April 19, 2010
I WAS in west Clare about ten days ago and, because it was April and the sun was shining, I decided to go and look for vernal gentians in the Burren.
I think they qualify as the most wonderful and spectacular harbingers of spring in the whole country. I had an accomplice who knew the Burren very well and guaranteed she could take me directly to the best gentian sites.
We arrived full of hope, despite the fact that the landscape was as depressing as I’d ever seen it. It was dry and yellow with very little sign of growth but much evidence of hard grazing. Beefy-looking cattle were everywhere, along with their hoof prints and cow pats, and a hundred metres away a herd of feral goats peered at us suspiciously. We headed inland on foot, after parking on the coast road south of Fanore.
It’s a while since I’ve been to the Burren and I had to acclimatise myself to the skills of walking on limestone pavement. Negotiating the clints and grykes and anticipating the slab that’s going to shift under your feet is remarkably tiring when you’re not used to it. My local companion soon left me in her wake.
I compensated by peering closely at botanical detail – though, truth to tell, there wasn’t a huge amount to look at. There were primroses and violets in flower – violet species are quite difficult and I’m not a good enough botanist to know which one I was looking at, and to tell you the truth I didn’t care too much. There were prostrate blackthorns extruding from cracks in the rock and in glorious flower. Then I found something I didn’t recognise growing out of a crack in a pale grey cliff. It was covered in white flowers.
Luckily, my companion is also a photographer. The digital camera must be the most useful botanical aid since Keble Martin. She captured the image and, in due course, it will be emailed to me and I will pore over the text books and get an identification.
It was a warm, humid day with sunshine battling with a mist that threatened to drift in from the Aran Islands. We walked and we sweated and we peered at the ground but there wasn’t a gentian to be found.
There were tour buses parking on the coast road to the west of us and disgorging hordes of people with priapic cameras who took photographs of rocks and the mist. Then, on the way back, we noticed something rather different.
A very old man leaning on a stick of hazel was making his way slowly up the slope. He had a sack on his back and every now and again he would pause to get his breath and gather something off the ground and stuff it into the sack. We were curious so we fabricated a detour that would intersect with his uphill course.
He returned our greetings in a very quiet voice. He may have been saving precious breath. He was certainly in his mid-80s and the slope was considerable. The sack contained hay and he was adding to it with tufts of dried grass that had survived the grazing under the protection of the low thorn bushes.
There was a calf up on the hill, he told us, that wasn’t well. He was going up to check on it.
I was suddenly struck by the immense difference in lifestyle between him and the people from the coaches who were photographing his landscape. And, for that matter, between him and someone like me who travelled to his land to look for an obscure wildflower.
In some way this insight more than compensated for my failure to find a flowering gentian.
* dick.warner@examiner.ie
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