LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

and horizontal spiky branches, a living fence; it is a very ancient craft, certainly practiced since the Neolithic period. In early Christian times Irish farmers grew thick thorn hedges on the top of the banks of their ringforts, which would have been impenetrable to all but a modern tank. In attempting to lay our hedges, I am following the example of the late Tom Hayes, the man who sold the field to us. He was an old-fashioned farmer, and to pass the field out of his ownership in good order he laid all the hedges before handing it over. When I am working at laying the hawthorn and blackthorn, his labour in doing this work forty years ago is often revealed deep in the hedge, in hoary and ancient-seeming horizontal branches, a legacy of his good husbandry.

      There is an art to laying hedges, as I have discovered over the years. Selected shrubs or young trees in the hedge are sliced through, near the ground, with a sloping cut, slicing in 80 per cent of the thickness of the trunk or branch. A bill hook or a hand-axe is the best tool for the job, but in recent years I have seen men use chainsaws, which the purist would certainly regard as sacrilege. The sloping cut goes through the heartwood, but leaves one side of the bush’s sap-wood protected by its bark. The cut trunk or branch is then bent over: the sap continues to rise and growth therefore continues out along the branch, which will put out new vertical shoots. The end result, after a few years, is a hedge thick with thorny horizontals and verticals.

      Over the years, I have planted many trees in Kilcop, and I am in awe of how fast they grow and change our little world here. Apart from being beautiful and useful, the tree is a magnificent natural engine, playing a significant role in combating erosion and moderating climate, removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, generating oxygen and acting as a highly efficient carbon sink. There are more than 50,000 different species of these amazing and often-ignored plants, and they are among the largest living things on our globe.

      In former times, while many rural folk could obtain peat to keep them warm in wintertime, the majority relied on timber. There were severe penalties for cutting down or damaging trees, most of which had been planted by the landlord class, but the country was well clothed in rough forests and thickets, and the poor collected whatever wood and sceachs (bushes) they could find for their fires. This may be one of the reasons why, in the early photos of the Irish countryside dating from about the 1860s onwards, there is hardly a bush to be seen. The gathering of firewood, or connadh, was one of the main tasks of winter, and many illustrations of the period show old people bringing home a great bundle, called a brossna, of withered branches or heather for the fire.

      I have learned that some species of trees are better than others for burning, and one can be guided by a poem by Honor Goodheart, ‘Logs to Burn’, which was printed in Punch magazine in October 1920 and passed on to me by my brother Tom:

      Logs to burn! Logs to burn!

      Logs to save the coal a turn!

      Here’s a word to make you wise

      When you hear the woodman’s cries.

      Beechwood fires burn bright and clear,

      Hornbeam blazes too,

      If the logs are kept a year

      To season through and through.

      Oak logs will warm you well

      If they’re old and dry

      Larch logs of pinewood smell

      But sparks will fly

      Pine is good, and so is yew

      For warmth through wintry days

      But poplar and willow too

      Take long to dry and blaze.

      Birch logs will burn too fast,

      Alder scarce at all.

      Chestnut logs are good to last

      If cut in the fall.

      Holly logs will burn like wax –

      You should burn them green.

      Elm logs like smouldering flax

      No flame is seen.

      Pear logs and apple logs

      They will scent your room,

      Cherry logs across the dogs

      Smell like flowers in bloom.

      But ash logs, all smooth and grey,

      Burn them green or old,

      Buy up all that come your way

      They’re worth their weight in gold.

      Ash is one of Ireland’s most common trees, and a good candidate to be our national tree: some of the largest and most magnificent native trees in the country are ashes – there is one on Marlfield Farm near Clonmel which is over 40 metres tall and 2.7 metres in girth. It is widely known as the wood from which hurleys are made, and the sport generates a need of over 200,000 each year. Unfortunately, less than 20 per cent of these hurleys are made in Ireland today, and so the rest have to be imported. Ash, as I have found, is also one of the best Irish firewoods, and can be burned even when freshly cut. There are many arcane uses of ash, including tapping them for sugary syrup, which can be used to make ash wine, or using the bark in a footbath as a treatment for sore feet, but in Kilcop we haven’t got around to these yet.

      We have, over the years, planted a variety of vegetable and fruit crops in Kilcop, but our firewood crop has been by far the most successful. I built little drying barns from waste timber and roof tiles, and it is my pleasure to stack my harvest of logs there to allow them to dry out, usually over a period of about eighteen months. So I get warm felling the trees, sawing them into logs, and finally burning them in our fire! The thinner branches and twigs, and ash have a lot of such, are gathered up and woven into the old boundary hedge, helping to make it impenetrable.

      lapwing

      Glendoher, 13 February

      We drove back from Waterford to Glendoher after a night during which the temperature had plummeted, and the countryside was a magic winter scene with every tree, bush and blade of grass frosted brilliant white. Passing through County Carlow, we marvelled at the flocks of lapwings that have always been a feature of our winter journeys to and from Waterford, although each year there seem to be less birds. Lapwings are one of my favourites; they look as if a mistake was made when they were being designed and for some reason they were given the wrong wings. They are so graceful-looking on the ground, but when they take flight their broad and awkward plank-like wings do not seem to belong to their slender bodies. They nest in open ground, and are well-known for the trick of feigning injury if you approach their nest; they will limp and drag a wing as if it is broken, all the while leading you away from the nest. There is an expression in Gaelic, ‘cleas an philibín’, which means ‘to act the lapwing’, or try to fool people. Lapwings and their eggs were highly regarded as good food in former times, and the birds were sold in large numbers at markets, and even exported from Ireland to Liverpool as late as the nineteenth century.

      Hellfire Hill, 15 February

      Even if it is a bit early, we enjoyed a quick trip up Hellfire Hill yesterday to see if the frogs had arrived yet for ‘frog-fest’, as we call it: those few days each year during which frogs come from all points of the compass to assemble at a body of water for the annual mating.

      The wind, a warm blast from the south, was extremely strong and gusty; as we ascended the stretch leading to the south pond, it increased dramatically, hurling and whistling and hissing through the trees. The south pond on Hellfire Hill is spring-fed, and when I first saw it in the 1970s it measured six metres long by about nearly three wide. Long before the hill was planted in forestry in the early 1960s, when it was a farmland patchwork of stonewalled fields, the pond served to water the livestock, probably cattle and sheep. It is too

Скачать книгу