It seems our ‘domestic’, but still wild, heron, Ron, has ‘gone west’ and we find we miss him, scanning skies, balconies, rooftops and canopies of trees in our local wood (those still standing after the multiple storms) for his familiar, elegant profile cut out of the heavenly blue.

Here, on the side of Courtmacsherry bay, where there’s so much unimpeded space in front of one’s nose, the world is lit with an overwhelming brightness after storms or rain, amazing not simply because of the contrast with the non-view of the last time one looked, but because it can be brighter than summer.

A Johnny-the-bogs regularly stands sentinel at the end of an old pier, Tanner’s Pier, now reduced to a corridor of wrack-grown rocks opposite what was once the Earl of Shannon’s summer house, now the elegant Courtmacsherry Hotel.