Magical realm still connects to today

THE WORD for May, Bealtine, originally meant bright fire. “During the May festival, a great fire was lit to encourage the sun, and greenery was brought into the house symbolising the desire for future prosperity...”; so begins a press release for a new book, The Lore of the Land, an encyclopaedia of Myth, Legend and Romance, by Dáithí Ó hOgáin, associate professor of Folklore at UCD.

Published by Collins Press, the volume delivers what it says: a huge compilation of ancient Irish lore.

There is nothing one would want to know about the folk tales and beliefs of old Ireland, the customs, folk history, mythical and religious lore, vernacular traditions and romantic history that isn’t dealt with in this watershed work. It is timely, too, now that many of these quaint — but not always groundless — notions grow dim in the national memory. Some of the stories, I half-remember.

They are fascinating and tell us a lot about our ancient selves. Meanwhile, I recall the lines ...

“... after April, when May follows,And the whitethroat builds and all the swallows ...”,

and I look for whitethroats in the hedges, but find none. Robert Browning wrote the lines a century and a half ago. The whitethroat still builds in Britain, and in Ireland there are some 30,000 pairs. However, desertification of the Sahel region south of the Sahara has reduced their numbers. While not uncommon in the midlands, in south Munster one rarely sees whitethroats now.

They are pretty birds, the size of a robin, and more visible than most warblers, the male with a neat grey cap, the female with a red. The males sing a short, sweet song, delivered from a bramble top or in a vertical song-flight, dancing like a puppet on a string. Both sexes are violent in courtship. The male arrives first and approaches the first female that crosses his territory, offering her pieces of grass in his beak and then dashing at her with short, loud bursts of song. She responds by spreading her wings and tail and lunging at him.

Swallows are still seen everywhere, with about 250,00 pairs breeding here, although their numbers, too, have declined. This has more to do with the demise of dungheaps and insect clouds in farmyards than to goats or climate change in the Sahel.

As usual, May’s merry month arrives with a blaze of flamboyance.

Gorse paints the hillsides gold and the skinny blackthorns are covered in white flowers. Bluebells opened in our local woods last week; now the forest floor is purple and the light beneath the trees is blue. Primroses decorate the ditches, and trees are fresh and green in the hedges. Old hedges, however, are becoming scarce as whitethroats.

It is heartbreaking to see whole swathes of hedge taken out, dozens of linear acres, full of a vast variety of plants and wildlife, leaving only huge, prairie fields empty of birds, insects and wild flowers.

Farmers are, we know, having a hard time but while the wholesale removal of hedges may or may not save them, it seriously threatens the survival of the native flora and fauna which not only functions in the health and beauty of the countryside but is part of all our heritage.

It is a matter of simple subtraction. If two acres of hedge is required to support two pairs of song thrushes, and half the hedge is cut down, then one pair must find another hedge or die. We are not planting new hedges, except around new houses. The long, thick, ancient field hedges that roamed the landscape, joining one to the other across the breadth of Ireland are replaced with posts and wire, if at all. Where is the wild creature to find new territory? Every yard of hedge is already occupied.

It cannot migrate to Liverpool or Boston as the displaced Irish did.

Different wild species have different food requirements, and just as farmers use every metre of ground, so also do the birds, insects and mammals, each to its own needs.

Hedgerows support more diverse life than any other habitat. Yellow- hammers needed, on average, a half acre of hedgerow to survive; no wonder we now see one yellowhammer where, before, we saw 20. And the corn buntings, that required two acres of mixed farmland and were so common in my youth, are now gone.

How much we respected wild creatures in past times is evidenced in folk tales from old collections in The Lore of the Land. They provided lessons in prudence, cunning and bravery for our children. Bees, birds, seals and foxes, all had their message in the magical Irish world.