Some unmissable sights round Co Cork this June

SIGHTS not to be missed this week: firstly, the Water Crowfoot in your local river.

I think I have never seen the Bandon river between Bandon town and Innishannon so bedecked with flowers. Second, (if you’re within driving distance), the cliff-top to the right of the gates at the Old Head of Kinsale, the high-rise cities of sea birds that create nurseries on ledges often no more than a few inches wide, and come and go and shriek and bustle, making the air ways as frenetic as a Jakarta street.

Inland, water crowfoot blooms from the green tresses of weed that move sinuously on the current of almost all our rivers, or did before some became polluted.

Readers will know the famous Pre-Raphaelite painting of Hamlet’s Ophelia by John Everett Millais, the girl adrift on a stream, pale as death (for she has, indeed, drowned, accidentally or intentionally). In her waterlogged dress, she floats, face up, amongst the crowfoot, which is not in flower.

Brown trout use crowfoot to dodge under when alarmed. They move like the crowfoot itself, pliant with the current. It is, presently, a glorious sight on a bend of the Bandon just above the remaining ruins of Dundaniel Castle, on the opposite bank.

It is a pity, a grave pity, that a derelict tea-stall stands on the layby beside that lovely stretch of water. A heron often fishes there, where the white water breaks in rapids and small rills. But nothing can distract the eye from the ugliness of the decaying tea-stall. It should never have been allowed to begin with. I wrote complaining about it years ago but got no response from Cork County Council who said the man who had established it had gathered hundreds of signatures from passing motorists for its retention.

Later, the sign which said the space was a public recreation area was obscured by the snack van, and I remember friends of mine visiting from the UK thinking they couldn’t park there unless they patronised it.

Now that it is abandoned, and rotting on the site, the local council must remove it. It is a blight on the river bend, an ugly, aberration despoiling Ireland’s beauty on the route along which visitors driving west from the airport and ferry port must pass. Take it away, please!

In the countryside, everything is blooming. Birds are singing, and nesting, and nowhere can nesting activity be better seen than at the Old Head and, happily, in doing so one doesn’t have to face a confrontation at the threshold of the massive gates erected to keep the public off the exclusive golf course. One can enjoy the best view possible from the clifftops beside them.

But readers, be careful! The cliffs are three hundred feet above the sea, and the sight of the kittiwakes, guillemots, razorbills, gulls, cormorants and shags may so entrance one that, stepping back to get a better view, one may find nothing but air beneath one’s heel and join them.

A family story has it that, when I was a small boy, I did that very thing (always fascinated by nature) and was saved my father, grabbing me by the necktie in the nick of time. Happily, I wore a tie. A cravat (which was not our style) would have been quite useless.

On the way west from the Old Head, crossing the bridge over Kilbrittain creek, I glanced at the pool on my right where I have previously seen otters cavorting, and was rewarded by the sight of a pair of shelduck parents leading their brood of eight duckling to their first immersion in their natural element, the sea.

Shelduck nest in rabbit burrows (thus, the female, with no high-flying predator likely to spot her, is as brightly plumaged as the male, white beast, chestnut scapulars, black head, red beak and legs). The trek for the small ducklings may well have been a long one, but reaching the water’s edge, they launched themselves without hesitation and paddled off behind their parents, , no doubt enjoying relief for sore feet.

Another outdoor sight, none the less lovely for that it is almost ubiquitous on any country excursion, are the hedges brimming with whitethorn flowers. ‘Frothy’ might well describe them, the white flowers bubbling out of the green foliage like spume.