Living on the harvest of the bay
I’m glad I wasn’t premature in fleeing to the sun.
Earlier that day, I walked the strand at Courtmacsherry and saw thousands of sea potatoes washed up: their delicate, near-spherical, air-light shells drifting on the sea’s surf or lying in drifts where they had been blown across the sand.
It was a brilliant morning. Bright sunlight gilding the wet sand and the sandy sea.
The tide was far out and I could venture way beyond the usual limits. I found cockles galore, stranded and at the mercy of any oystercatcher, grey crow, gull or forager like myself that found them. I couldn’t resist the temptation and, after abjuring the first few, found the ready availability just too seductive to pass by.
I came home with a bag of fat cockles and suggested to the chef de cuisine that we might have seafood-spaghetti instead of Sunday chicken. Happily, she agreed.
We have been living on the harvest of the bay.
That evening, spaghetti volgone, the previous day, herrings from our fishermen friends – the O’Donovans – the day before that, razorfish both raw and flashed in a pan of oil and garlic for 30 seconds. It’s no wonder razorfish are a highly-prized and costly delicacy, but I got them at no cost at all.
Walking the beach after the storms, I found them in their hundreds, lying in their fractured shells above the tide line or, more often, washed clear of their shells altogether.
Glistening white strips, for all the world like fillets of raw squid but much more tender, they lay on the dark sand and, harvesting them as I went, I snacked on the five-inch long stalks of delicious, tender shellfish as one might on celery.
Razorfish spend their lives in vertical burrows at or below the low-water mark, poking their twin siphons above the sand as the tides come in, filtering the sea for nutrients.
The body is a tube, tender and vulnerable inside its long, thin, scabbard-like shell. Sometimes, sand grains in the tube have to be washed out before eating but these, de-shelled and scoured by the storm, were gleaming fingers of delicately-chewy seafood, sharp with the taste of the sea.
Wondrous, indeed, are the creatures delivered by the ocean.
The sea potatoes Echinocardium cordatum, traditionally called Virgin Mary shells in west Cork (the dotted outline of a V and M are a feature of the carapace) do not, unfortunately, provide another free seashore meal – it is in the nature of the shells washed up they are always, in my experience, quite empty. They might well be worth trying were they to arrive on shore full of meat – other sea urchins, the spiny urchin, etcetera, are consumed in Mediterranean countries and are quite delicious, spooned out of their shells as one might spoon an egg.
However, the sea potato we find is an empty, if interesting, shell, so fragile the slightest pressure will break it – yet the creature lives by burrowing in the sand. Thousands lay on the shores of Courtmacsherry Bay on the mid-January weekend.
The spoonbills, taller than egrets and with spatula-tipped beaks, were a phenomenon to be noted: the last I saw were in Morocco but there is a colony in Holland. Meanwhile, the grey seal (a pup, born in autumn and, after the usual three weeks of mothering, left to fend for itself) had spent the day within easy view of the road.
When I saw it on the bare mudflats in the winter twilight, it was lying on the flat of its back and curling its tail up to meet its nose. The tide was creeping in and, just then, the lights came on to illuminate the beautiful edifice that Timoleague Abbey – built so long ago and despite the zealous efforts of Cromwellians to destroy it – still remains.
It was altogether a wonderful, enlightening, surprising and temperate Sunday in west Cork and I am glad I didn’t chase the sun in January. I should never have even contemplated it. Last January, we had a 66-foot long Fin whale in the bay.
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