Precious sunshine unveils Irish paradise

Damien Enright on West Cork’s vast variety of wildlife.

BELOW me, a single white gannet circled, flat winged over the turquoise sea.

Had there been sprat, it could have seen them as clearly as through a window. A seal lolled near the rocks, like a Michelin Man taking a dip. It was a sunny morning, a precious break in the awful weather. I was out on the Seven Heads in the glory of West Cork.

Where I sat there was not a soul to be seen nor an occupied habitation. The only evidence of human history was a derelict house tucked into the rising ground behind me, its back to the sea, and across the bay, a small fort perched above a sheer cliff and held together by ivy. I was alone in the realm of the sea birds, the seals and the sky.

I’d brought provision for a deluge that never happened. Now, I was wearing my tweed cap as protection against the sun and was using my pac-a-mac to line my nest in the ferns and heather.

Bees hummed around me, and the sun beat down. A small and welcome breeze stirred the tallest grass heads.

Gulls cruised high above me, not a wing beat, not a ruffle of a feather, drifting past on a plane of air between earth and sky. ‘En plein-air’, indeed it was, as the French call their outdoor paintings of atmosphere and light. And it was air to be savoured, laced with the smell of the sea.

South-westerly gales sweep these sloping cliff-top acres in winter, but you wouldn’t have known it then. There are no trees but in the summer, the land — hardly fields, for they are unfenced and beyond the last stone walls of husbandry — become meadows of old grasses, fescues and bromes, foxtails and catstails amongst which wildflowers bloom in tens of thousands, a feast for the eyes.

Purple heather and golden gorse, blue field scabious and yellow catsear like tall-stemmed dandelions mix with white daisies and orange montbretia and there is not a square foot without flowers. Pink, billowy Japanese roses, an introduced species with hips an inch in diameter, have somehow gained a foothold here, too.

Wild carrot and Sea Carrot thrive, their heads like tennis balls on tall stems, composed of hundreds of tiny, white flowers, often with a single, pink flower at centre. All manner of insects and iridescent flies bask, feed or copulate upon these umbellifers (umbrella flowers?) as they are called. Conspicuous amongst them slim, russet-red soldier beetles, one almost invariably carrying another in coitus.

While I watched and tried, with little success, to photograph the come-and-go on the flowering head of a single sea carrot, a rose chafer, a spectacular and exotic beetle as big as my thumbnail, alighted on it. In the sunlight its bronze-green body shone like it was sprayed with gold.

Swallows and martins swooped and hurtled in and out of the barns of a ruined house. While the small bay below the house is almost always patrolled by a single gannet, that morning two more, an adult, shining white, followed by a dowdy, brown fledgling, flew in from the sea. Having searched the bay, they set off again out over the ocean, perhaps heading for Skellig Michael or Biscay, masters of the blue sky and sea. It was extraordinary to think that the fledgling, so graceful and strong in flight, resided in an egg only a few months ago.

Other birds were many, with some species not commonly seen. I surprised a wheatear and it surprised me, flying out from under my feet in a panic, its white rump disappearing into the distance. Choughs, raucous as usual, passed over, sleek black feathers catching the sun.

The resident pair of stonechats watched me from a stunted bush and there were whitethroats in a low, scrubby hedge. A flock of linnets were feeding on oil-seed rape which, somehow, had invaded a stretch of the wild ground. Its insipid yellow flowers are nowadays seen on every waste patch and road verge.

Butterflies were in abundance. Peacocks, gatekeepers, small heaths and meadow browns flitted over the carpets of flowers. Spectacular red admirals basked on the purple thistles.

For three hours I enjoyed this Irish paradise and then the clouds swept in. That afternoon, the sky was dark as winter and the heavens opened. The horses in the fields opposite our windows stood stoic and sodden in the driving July rain.