Sheep’s Head offers sunny delights

I HAVE A friend in Tokyo who says she’s unworried by the regular aftershocks.

However, she says that during the big quake, “I felt so scared I didn’t know what I should do during having-been swinging the land.”

Her English may be eccentric but she wonderfully expresses the sensation. When we lived in Japan, we often felt the land “swinging” beneath us — but nothing like as violently as she would have experienced on the March 11, 2011.

Meanwhile, in Ireland, it’s been another week of almost Mediterranean sunshine and, once again, I’ve put off buying tickets to Ibiza to see old friends, some of whom I haven’t met since I lived there in the early 1960s. The weather here is just too good to miss, and, in nature, every day brings more surprises.

Last week, I was out at the tip of the Sheep’s Head peninsula — the Sheep’s Hoof, one might call it — walking, photographing and composing a commentary for a circuit to be included in Scenic Walks of West Cork to be published by The Collins Press in May.

There, I met James O’Mahony, a local historian, part-time farmer and Rural Recreation officer for the Sheep’s Head Way, one of the finest itineraries in Ireland of which he was an important contributor.

We met at the cafe at the “end of the world”, the Sheep’s Head Cafe at the Tooreen Turning Point, when Bernie Tobin, the proprietor, learning that I was interested in local information, invited my wife and me for tea and homemade cake. James turned up in his van with a throve of information and a bucket-full of assorted mussels, scallops and very large oysters — the latter to be returned to their element without delay — which, he said, he’d been able to pick without getting his feet wet, as a result of the lowest tide he’d ever seen.

As the sun sank over the western ocean, it was a grand time to be sitting in the cafe with its picture-windows giving views of the Three Castles Head and, from the tables outside, over the blue mountains of Beara.

Meanwhile, a band of choughs arrived and tumbled and dived picturesquely in the sunset.

Next day, mindful of the low tide, I walked my local beach and, finding many cockles and clams stranded, brought a few home for the table. With the tide far out, the volume of teeming life beneath the sand was awesome to contemplate. There was hardly a square metre of exposed sub littoral but it was dense with the casts of lugworms, sand masons and peacock worms — acres of these, as well as cockles, tellins, clams and razorfish. What a rich habitat are the mudbanks in our estuaries, and how many millions of humble but important creatures do we destroy when we pollute or build over such seemingly “undeveloped” places.

As I walked along the lower shore, pools of tidewater were a-glare in the sun, and when I reached for a cockle in a shallow pool, the water was warm. Small children were running around in beach-wear and making sandcastles, and sunbathers lay on the white sand under the sea wall. A pet day indeed, with many before and after.

On the way home, I heard, from some tall trees, the rapid-fire chattering of a pair of magpies, like machine-guns in Benghazi.

They had built a huge domed nest, as big as a squirrel’s drey, and a grey crow was nonchalantly raiding it. I say nonchalantly because, despite the fact that the magpies were jabbering like hysterical fishwives only inches away, it seemed entirely unconcerned, indeed for a minute it looked like it was going to hop inside via the entrance hole, but it didn’t.

I wondered if it was raiding the nest for sticks (but it didn’t carry any off — perhaps they were too tightly woven to be displaced) or for eggs.

Magpies do, sometimes, lay as early as mid-March, and it isn’t unusual for grey crows to lay at that time too, while ravens certainly have eggs in the nest by now. We know magpies, when they are feeding fledglings, will raid smaller birds’ nests and carry off their chicks. So, perhaps, it was a bit of nature’s come-uppance for the long-tailed piebald raiders.