British weather lovelier than our own it seems

THE skies over Leicester in England during our stay were as blue as the skies over La Gomera in the Canary Islands which we had just left.

There was the predictable but welcoming refrain from my son and his partner: “You’ve brought the good weather with you!”.

And indeed it was not only good, but glorious, during our days here in this small city with strong sunlight until late every evening and temperatures of 13 degrees.

The weather in Britain, not only in my recent experience but in memory, is invariably better than the weather in Ireland — or maybe this is so because we live in West Cork, where it is inclined to be wet, and clouds regularly hang like sodden army blankets blocking out the sun.

However, we are sanguine. It is my expectation that upon our homecoming next week, the weather will wax wonderful and we will enjoy a summer unparalleled in living memory. Clearly, I am an unreconstructed optimist, but why not enjoy the imagining, even if the reality will not live up to it.

The fields of Leicestershire were green and neat, the hedges trimmed, hosts of daffodils on the roadsides as we drove into the countryside last Sunday.

At Bradgate Park, a large country estate once the home of the unfortunate Lady Jane Grey — who, for nine days, was queen of England before being beheaded for treason — we walked miles over old parkland, dotted with ancient oaks. I was fascinated by these. Some are 800 years old, and they show it. They were, apparently, pollarded for firewood to feed the hearths of the great house, and severely pollarded by the woodsmen in memory of Lady Jane upon her execution. Gnarled and shorn they stand, but still putting on new shoots and leaves annually after eight centuries.

I think we have no such oaks, or very few such oaks in Ireland, certainly not near where we live. The story goes that all the big Irish trees were knocked to make planking for English ships to combat the Spanish armada. I’m not sure if this is entirely true.

Meanwhile, the houses of the planters are surrounded by trees, as Austin Clark noted in his beautiful poem, The Planter’s Daughter. For the tenant farmers that saw her, she was “the Sunday in every week”. They “drank deep and were silent” while “The women were speaking/ Wherever she went —”

The trees around most planter’s houses are probably no older than 100 or 200 years but (I now resort to the internet) the oldest tree in Ireland is, apparently, a seedling in 1642, an oak tree, still extant in the Belvoir Forest Park in Belfast. In its photograph, it looks a right old wreck, still battling on despite the years, more or less like the oaks in the late lamented Lady Jane’s estate in Leicestershire.

Crows were common there, the English carrion crow which replaces the grey crows in our neighbouring island, except in Scotland where the old grey crew or hooded crow aka scál crow holds the ground. Carrion crows are very dark, the shape of jackdaws but bigger, as black as ravens but less stout and without the massive beak.

There were molehills everywhere in the parkland, which was grazed by fallow and red deer of which we got some fine sightings. Moles never reached Ireland; the Irish Sea got in the way of their subterranean progress.

They couldn’t swim, of course, and the collapse of the land bridge after the last Ice Age presented Welsh and Scottish moles with the unfordable stretch of water that surged in afterwards.. Perhaps it’s just as well. They make an awful mess of parkland and British gardeners invective can hardly express what they do to manicured lawns.

Grey squirrels were common in Swithland Wood, an adjunct to Bradgate Park with no pine martens there to control them. The future of our native red squirrel may improve with the increase of the pine marten population, once hounded but now protected. Red squirrels are nimble enough to usually escape predation by the marten, while the American invader, the grey squirrel, is not.