Seize the day and go down to the sea

A LOVELY morning to wake to – for a change. Outside, the sun is lighting the garden like a stage set.

I step out and the air is already half warm. The stream gurgles melodiously, swollen from a week of near-constant rain. Back indoors, the forecast tells me this is the first belt of high pressure we’ve had since May.

For fear it should be short-lived, I resolve not to miss it. Flexi-time is a privilege of my occupation – I’ll work tonight and enjoy sunshine while it’s there. Praise the gods, and seize the day. “I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky,” said Mr Masefield in some of the most strapping lines ever written in English poetry.

That was for me – I’d go out to the lonely cliffs of the Seven Heads, beyond the hamlets, beyond the houses, beyond Turkeyland and Ballmacshoneen. I knew the very place for me to go.

When I arrived, there wasn’t a soul in sight and I met no one in my two-hour peregrination, although on the way home I passed an 80-year-old farmer manfully building a block wall.

The weather held, the initial brightness changing to warm, milky sunlight with no wind. Even on the headlands, where every sceac and whin bush had its branches sculpted by non-stop exposure to the blow-drier of the south-west wind, it was calm. I walked along cliff-top paths beside old stone walls overgrown with fuchsia, montbretia and wild Japanese roses, their shiny red seed pods half the size of ping-pong balls.

A pair of choughs foraged on a patch of ground below me, their orange-red beaks and legs in dramatic contrast with their jet black suits. Handsome crows, indeed, they took flight as I approached, the feathers of their wing tips spread like fingers as they soared out over the sea.

This is the season when prickly, ground-hugging Irish dwarf gorse and purple heather blooms of the cliffs and hillsides in carpets of colour.

Dursey Island, at the extreme end of the Beara Peninsula, is the place to see it at its most resplendent, and there is the hair-raising – but perfectly safe – crossing to be enjoyed, when the cable car, suspended on its wire, plunges toward the boiling channel far below and then, just as one thinks it may not stop, slowly and sedately rises to deliver one securely on the Dursey side.

On a fine September day, I could not recommend a more uplifting experience than an airborne voyage to Dursey, followed by a walk the length of that magic and all but uninhabited island, returning via its gentle highlands though paths of gorse and heather with views, south, across Bantry Bay to Sheep’s Head and, north, to the Skelling Rocks and even the distant Blaskets in clear weather.

But back to the Seven Heads beyond Turkeyland and – as was my intention when I set out – a walk down to the sea. Here, after the flower-bedecked paths, were bare rocks painted with orange lichens as rich a yellow as the yolks of free-range eggs. Sea ivory grew alongside this Xanathoria, as it is called – sea ivory, the spiky, green lichen with miniature branches and fronds. Below, algaes colonised the rocks, tufts of dark-yellow channelled wrack and skeins of bladder wrack and, everywhere, black and deep-purple seed mussels blanketed the intertidal zone, millions of them clinging to the rocks in cushions, soft underfoot.

Limpets, with their conical shells, clung to rock faces, and deep-red beadlet anemones, like jelly sweets, glistened in the damp cervices or were like many-petalled flowers fixed to the walls of the rock pools, their electric-blue necklaces seemingly lit from within in the water clear as glass. Underfoot, tiny acorn barnacles in their tens of millions blanketed the rocks like faded pebble dash, a marvellous surface to walk on, giving boot-soles a mighty grip.

Whelks and winkles, shannies darting about in the pools, silence but the gentle breaking of the sea – in this remote place, so little human presence and so much life.

As I write, the belt of high pressure holds firm over Ireland. Five days of it, we’re promised.

I will be down to the sea again – and maybe a swim – even if it means burning the midnight oil.