Lough Hyne, where sea and lake hold their breath

WHAT an outstandingly beautiful day was April 28.

I believe it was one of the loveliest days I’ve every had the privilege to live through — in any season, in any part of the world. It was a “pet day”.

At 8.30am, it was warm enough to have breakfast on the balcony. Temperatures soared to 18C by mid-afternoon. The woods were brimming with bluebells and three, fat young ravens sat fully-feathered and almost ready to fly in their nest over the blue sea at Coomalacha. A blackbird was still fluting on a tree outside the our window at 9.30pm, as if darkness would never come and it would carry on singing the night through.

In this week, bluebells have opened in deciduous woods and under hedges all over Ireland. By the time you read this column, my local Courtmacsherry woods, and a thousand others, will be carpeted in the blue flower heads with, more often than not, mats of white, star-like ramsons in between. The ramsons smell of onions. Bear’s garlic, is the translation of their Linnaean name, Allium ursinum.

True, the garlic is not as refined as the cultivated variety (and was therefore favoured by bears?) but the leaves, chopped and cooked, have been used to flavour human food for centuries.

Late on the afternoon of April 28, walking through the woods, I was surprised to see a Red Admiral sunning itself, with wings wide open — red bands on a black background, with white markings at the tips — on a bluebell, a strange perch for an Admiral. It was an early arrival in Ireland; Admirals fly here from mainland Europe, even from the Mediterranean shores. The first migrants lay eggs, which hatch into a resident generation in the summer. Admirals, like the Speckled Woods — which grow more numerous by the day — choose personal territories and drive other butterflies away.

As we breakfasted al fresco, a pair of Speckled Woods jousted over the yard, circling one another as they rose and fell in tight spirals, like spinning tops or yo-yos on a string.

Unmistakable with their dark brown wings, speckled with buff-coloured dots, will spend all the daylight hours patrolling a shaft of sunlight they have chosen for themselves under the beech trees or along the hedges of country lanes. Here, they conduct their courtships. Eggs are laid, one at time, on grasses. Up to four generations hatch each year, each living for about 20 days. Caterpillars hatching in autumn survive through the winter and change into chrysalises which produce butterflies in spring.

The woods at Lough Hyne, near Skibbereen, are lovely now, in springtime green, but lovely also are the slopes of bare rocks and red, died-back bracken reflected on the still water. The marine environment of this salt water lake is, of course, unique. A channel, known as The Rapids, joins it to the sea beyond, to the Atlantic Ocean. The cup of the lake, fed by the tides, offers a refuge to marine creatures from predators that cannot broach the rapids. Uniquely, the tide rises for some four hours, but falls for more than eight.

Even as the tide at sea begins to rise, the water level within the cup is still falling, and a point is reached at which the two meet at the same level. For a moment, the kelp which, yielding to the force of the falling current, has been pointing out to sea, stands up and falls over, and points inward toward the lake as the in-rushing sea takes it. It is a unique moment when, as one of the lakeside interpretation boards puts it “sea and lake seem to hold their breaths, and if you were there, waiting [and watching it], you’d never forget.”

The sea in stasis, these two immense forces locked and, momentarily, silent, can be seen by anyone fit enough and willing to climb along the shoreline rocks from Barloge Pier. The tide times change daily of course, and tide tables need to be consulted. Also care must be taken to be able to return to the pier before dark.

But, then, to simply walk the roadside around Lough Hyne is entrancing. The ditches, with their diverse wildflowers, and unfurling ferns, are replete with wonders at this time of year.