Our beautiful island does indeed hold 40 shades of green

A visit to old friends in their remote farmhouse in south Sligo was like a foreign holiday, says Damien Enright.

TO BORROW from a Robert Louis Stevenson poem learned at school, “The summer sun shone round me/And yet it was but May”.

The weather, this last month, has been phenomenal. A visit to old friends in their remote farmhouse in south Sligo was like a foreign holiday with time-travel included. I discovered an Ireland that, despite my living, as a boy, in every province, I never knew was there.

The unspoiled nature of that Sligo landscape took me back to childhood. I walked through fields that had never been ploughed, drained or dosed with any fertiliser other than the droppings of sheep and cattle, fields where orchids, purple and white, still flowered, where orange tip butterflies (white wings, with orange tips) flew in abundance, marsh fritillaries thrived in marshes around turloughs, hares were common and cuckoos sang all day.

Even on moonlit nights, our old friends told us, the cuckoos called. A cuckoo calling on a clear night, with a silver moon in a sky of stars, must be magical. There’s no light pollution in this place, and never has been. It’s too remote and too uneven to suggest a city or even a plough.

I say ‘magical’ advisedly, because cairns, constructed long before the pyramids, still stand on the ridges of hills for miles around, marking the solstices and the appearance of stars sacred to the Megalithic people who built them, and who created their mythologies of battles between the Tuatha dé Danann and the Formorians— the Battle of Moytura at Lough Arrow and a canon of histories and sagas, real or concocted. And they all happened in the land around us.

At lunchtime one day, we sit in glorious sunshine watching a mountain hare basking in a field not 50m away, something we wouldn’t see in the prairie fields of agri-biz Ireland. Swallows swoop above our heads and cuckoos call. Our host finds two silky-furred woodmice in his bird feeder, and takes them for a drive to elsewhere. Hares are common in these hills bypassed by modern farming. They regularly come into our friends’ yard, and are entertaining to watch, the adults hopping to prodigious heights in the long grass, males boxing in the springtime, leverets chasing each other around the house and, once, a female giving birth on a flagstone under the kitchen window.

In plain view, it lopes out of the long grass, and sits quietly on the flag. Soon, another hare joins it — male or female is unknown. As the newcomer looks on, the female drops the leveret; it’s a lifeless, wet ball. Almost immediately, with no washing or licking administered, the adults hop away into the grass. Our friends erect a shelter to stop crows or pine martens finding it. Ten minutes later, it begins to stir. An hour later, an adult — presumably its mother — approaches and carries it away, out of sight.

Swallows nest in the outhouses. In one, an opportunistic wren has built its hatchery on an derelict nest. Wrens’ nests are usually a mossy ball, with an entrance hole. This wren has saved itself the work of building a roof.

Looking out the front door, a ring fort forms the horizon on a nearby hill. Two cairns, over 5,000 years old, are visible on distant ridges. The hearts and souls of their builders, Ireland’s earliest settlers, is revealed in the

immense labour spent in respecting their dead and appeasing their gods by raising these passage tombs on hilltops, each in sight of the next and orientated to the sun.

At an opened cairn at Carrowkeel, above Lough Arrow, we ducked beneath a lintel, and after walking stooped down a short passage, we stood upright, overawed, in a chamber dry as a bone.

The corbelled roof of flat boulders above us would each have taken 20 men to raise. This cairn cluster was only discovered in 1911, so remote is its location. Cremated human remains, bones, tools and pottery were found

inside. The world-famous necropolis at Newgrange was likely built a few centuries later. The skill and astronomical knowledge to build it would have been a legacy of the makers of the cairns.

On May 29, at home in west Cork, we saw the gossamer seeds of pussy willows take sudden flight and fill the air like windblown snowflakes. It’s an annual event. While quoting oneself is taking a liberty, lines of a poem I once wrote for a five-year-old son recall days together “When time goes by like drifting down/ On a summer wind beyond the town...”

Meanwhile, down here, it seems Sligo is as unknown as Manchuria. Our island, indeed, holds 40 shades of green.