Fat purple buddleia burgeoning on the hedges and waste ground, and no butterflies. I found a dead beauty on the floor of a shower unit in a room we rarely use; it was a small tortoiseshell in the vivid colours of a Persian carpet fresh from the loom.

The summer evenings here in our West Cork village is full not of “the linnet’s wings” of WB Yeats’s ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree’ but of house martin’s wings. These birds faithfully come all the way from tropical Africa to nest below the fascia boards on sea-facing houses each year.

BACK TO Ireland to a countryside every bit as lush and lovely as Czech, and a sea as blue as the Med, in the Balearics, if not as warm. 

THE scent of mown hay, kicked up after we emerge from the dappled woods and cross the baking fields to reach my son’s workshop in a huge and ancient barn deep in the Czech Republic countryside, brings back memories, as if the nose can remember the sweet smells of long ago.

I read in an old National Geographic magazine (2002) that scientists had mapped human impact on the natural world and estimated that 83% of the total land surface and 98% of the areas where it is possible to grow the world’s three main crops — rice, wheat, and maize — had been directly influenced by human activities.

Once during the recent very warm weather, standing at a country crossroads trying to make up my mind which way I’d go, I found my boots stuck in the tar. I almost had to reach down to lift and unglue them.