Summer is signalled as mingling martins return

THE MARTINS at Togher Church near Dunmanway returned from Africa to find their homes newly-painted white to match the new paint job of the church, on the eaves of which they annually raise families.

Having, as usual, spring cleaned the nest interiors and replaced the bedding, they moved in without, apparently, a second thought.

While house martin is the popular name, clearly a church is as acceptable a home as a secular dwelling. For those exercised by such distinctions, martins nesting on Belfast churches might be seen as sectarian, although the birds will be blissfully unaware of this, themselves.

There will be Catholic martins and Protestant martins, but humans alone will be able to tell one from the other, and then only when the birds are at home. They mingle in the sky above the Falls or Shankill; there are no no-go areas in the sky. An accident of birth has them nesting on one church or another: like swallows, they simply return to the sites where they were born. Church martins of both denominations have exactly the same DNA, and are indistinguishable but for the tribal area where they make their homes. Even their accents are the same when they twitter.

In Africa, to which they all migrate together, it is quite impossible to tell their individual religious persuasions. Indeed, feckless in the extreme, they may even be seen flitting in and out of mosques, synagogues, temples or animist places of worship. Would that we humans were as free as martins.

Folk wisdom has it that martins nest in peaceful places where the air is good. This, clearly, isn’t always true, both in the case of houses or churches, or castles, where they sometimes set up home. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Banquo, upon escorting Duncan, King of Scotland, to Macbeth’s castle, notes that it is frequented by “the temple-haunting martlet” and remarks: “Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed/The air is delicate.” Delicate, indeed! How wrong could Banquo be? Macbeth will, that very night, bloodily eviscerate his honoured guest, the king.

While the martins at Togher Church had their nest painted for them, the ravens on the Seven Heads cliffs did it themselves. Decoration wasn’t, however, their intention. These were the droppings of the young, defecating over the side of the nest. The outside of the nest was, in early May, as white as if plastered, and the three young ravens within were big, fat and glossy. This week, I return to Ireland and find the nest empty. The youngsters perch precariously on various trees a distance away, still fed and guarded by their parents who caw raucously and threateningly when one comes near.

Bunches of flowering sea pinks now adorn the cliffs around the abandoned nest. Perhaps I might invent a rustic saw to the effect of: “When the sea pinks bloom, the ravens have fledged.” Yes, indeed — but who but an idler would have the time or interest for such banalities? How many people in the world today see or recognise ravens or sea pinks, also known as sea thrift? They probably have thriftier things to do.

Meanwhile, at home again, I reflect that, while the flower meadows of Andalucia were a joy to behold, Irish fields dyed gold with buttercups equally gladden the heart. There are fields white with daisies too, so white I thought one of them to be covered with clear agricultural plastic, increasingly seen in West Cork so that visitors think there are distant lakes in the landscape, often made attractive by the illusion of isolated trees which seem to be small islands in the plastic inland sea.

In the woods, the bluebells are a deeper purple than they were 14 days ago. They are so blue I have to borrow from DH Lawrence’s description of blue in his poem Bavarian Gentians to adequately describe them — “giving off darkness, blue darkness...darkening the daytime...” Before and behind them, on the forest floor, are carpets of white ramsons, also called wild garlic. The woods smell like a pungent Italian kitchen. The white bluebell-like, garlic-smelling flowers of the verges are Three-cornered garlic, with stems triangular in cross section, quite another plant.

Perhaps the most beautiful sight of all in the woods is sunlight filtering through the pastel-green male ferns, their new metre-high leaves hung with the baubles of unopened tips moving in the slightest breeze.

Meanwhile, the trees around our house are suddenly dressed in leaves.

How pleasant it is, of a sunny Irish evening, to sit outside and drink a glass of wine to the calming coo of dozy woodpigeons rather than listening to the mad shrieks of swifts, splitting the sky above the Seville.