Spring bursting into life along clifftops of home

BACK on the ground — back on the Holy Ground, that is — I head for the woods and the cliffs that I know so well just to see how nature is progressing in early spring 2016, in Ireland, writes Damien Enright

It is a lovely morning, the sun shining, the sea blue. The weather has put a spring in my step, to match the season. A national version of a poem I learned at school keeps running through my head: “Oh, to be in Ireland/ Now that April’s here...” The poet, Robert Browning, was in fact longing to be back in England, listing, one by one, the events in nature that he looked forward to enjoying as his ship grew daily closer to Albion, his beloved isle.

I mentally listed what I saw as I went, a sort of checklist of the events in nature that I see every spring in my own particular patch — celandine, like children’s drawings of the sun, on the roadside verges, daffodils in hosts (as Wordsworth said), gorse in yellow flower fringing the cliff edges, a wren that has survived the winter (up to 80% of wrens fail to survive hard winters), a pair of stonechats, the plumage of the cock already vivid, a raven in the field, and then on a field post, keeping watch above its traditional cliff-face nest, in which some pink chicks could be seen stirring among the fluffy horsehair or sheep wool that lines it.