Under the spell of nature

Damien Enright revels in the beauty of a fine April day.

HOW beautiful the coast of Ireland is on a fine April day. The view I looked out on one morning last week was so perfect that no artist could imagine a scene more idyllic. But such views can be enjoyed at countless other places, coastal and inland.

Below me, the sea lay like a great pool of blue enamel bordered by black headlands, with slopes of yellow gorse pouring down to cliffs potholed with caves and divided by white coves and beaches.

To the east, the long finger of the Old Head of Kinsale extended far out into the ocean, its towers and lighthouse silhouetted against small puffs of distant cloud.

There wasn’t a boat on the sea, nor any evidence of my fellow humans other than the ruins, the lighthouse and a few far-away farms across the bay. The nearest habitation was Coolmaine Castle, two miles away, set in new lawns and woodland created when it was bought in the early 1990s by Roy Disney, grand nephew of the cartoonist, whose antecedents were Irish.

A breeze with a small chill in it reached me where I was sitting amongst the daisies in a break in a blackthorn hedge, the branches above me already changing from flower to leaf. It was welcome, and refreshing. Give me Ireland on a sunny day, when things are green and a light breeze blows, before any Mediterranean shore where the sun rules and there’s not a whisper of air to ease the heat.

A dark shadow skims over the field and there’s a sharp “Cawk!” as its owner, the raven that nests on the cliff below, spots me. It swoops toward the nesting site and its blue-black wings shine, as if lacquered, in the sun. It alights on a fence post, cawing again to alert its mate and fledglings of its arrival, then rises and planes down over the ‘blossom’d’ furze into the cleft where it rears its family and where, in all probability, it was reared itself.

Out over the sea, two terns pass back and forth, white specks above the ocean — sandwich terns, with black caps and scarlet beaks, quartering the enormous breadth of water as they search the surface for small fish. Once spotted, they rocket down to seize them, every bit as spectacular as diving gannets.

Walking home, I pass along a narrow avenue of fuchsia in new leaf, and speckled wood butterflies dance and pirouette around my knees when I stop still. They’ve spent winter as caterpillars and now are hatched and courting, full of the rising sap of spring. It’s sad, these days, to sometimes come upon wrecks of great beauty behind curtains or cupboards, those small tortoiseshell butterflies that have sought refuge in our homes in winter but haven’t survived, for whatever reason, to fly again in this new year.

The majority, however, do survive, and I’ve seen five or six so far, and a peacock butterfly, another species that over-winters in a comatose state and flies again when the warm weather comes.

And what a year for primroses and wood violets! Primrose paths abound and our back lawn has exploded with varieties I never knew were there — creamy yellow, soft pink, salmon red, carmine, crimson.

Bluebells are filling up the woods, vying with onion-smelling white ramsons and delicate wood anemones for space. Like golden celandine, the small, glittering ‘buttercup’ of the roadside ditches, the anemones open their petals only when the sun shines.

* A Mr O’Callaghan from Midleton sent me a spider in the post, in a glass tube filled with vodka, a practical way of preserving a specimen when formaldehyde or embalming fluid isn’t to hand. I can’t say I’ve seen one like it before. He wonders if it might be one of the Latrodectus family, the widow spiders, which includes the venomous Black Widow (below, showing its characteristic hourglass marking).

Latrodectus species are found in the Americas, Africa and Australia but, like flat worms arriving from New Zealand on imported plants and mitten crabs from China in bilge water, they may have come here as stowaways and set up home. Shirt-button size, dark brown with a small head and bulbous body, they apparently curl into a ball when disturbed. A number of them live in a shed in Mr O’Callaghan’s backyard. I’ll happily forward the specimen to anyone who can identify it.