Berehert the Hare

Farewell Nead an Iolair, and Finbarr and Ferdia and. . .

. . . and that view!

Yes, after 13 years of owning this special house, I have sold it to a lovely couple who I know will treasure it like we did. I am moving into Schull (all of 8km away) on Thursday, and I am looking forward to being able to walk everywhere, especially to Amar’s cafe.

Nead an Iolair – it means Eagle’s Nest and was Robert’s choice of a name for the house – has been the subject of many of our posts and as a final honouring of the house and the acre it sits on, here is a round-up of some of the posts we have written about it all, over the years.

Although we have kept no pets, we are far from deprived of the company of animals. Finbarr the Pheasant, for example – our heads tell us it cannot be the same bird all these years, but our hearts just think that we have looked after him so well that he has adopted us. He has had up to four wives – there are currently two and it has kept him busy, herding and courting them and fending off other males. All played out in front of our living room window.

And let’s not forget our other Finbarr, Our Lockdown Mascot, the bug hotel designed and installed for us by Kloë and Adam, of Two Green Shoots. He’s still there – say hello if you pass.

And we still miss Ferdia – the friendly fox who would eat out of our hands (anything except broccoli) and who loved to sit on the terrace while Robert played his melodeon. Occasionally another fox trots by but none have taken Ferdia’s place as a constant visitor.

If I come home in the evening, rabbits are leaping into the hedges as I drive in. When I throw open the curtains in the morning, they are sitting outside my window.

Robert was a hare fanatic, and we did have a brief dalliance with a young hare we called Berehert (below), but they have become quite rare now in our neighbourhood.

The choughs are wheeling overhead all day, with their distinctive call and their aerial acrobatics.

Small birds come to the feeder, and there is a robin that I am this close to coaxing onto my hand.

And although we don’t see them, the moths are everywhere – from hardly visible against a stone wall to spectacularly coloured.

It has been a joy to discover the beauty and variety of these silent creatures of the night.

Every now and then a bird or animal will appear for a brief time to grace us with its presence – like Spiro the Sparrowhawk, who perched outside our bedroom window and cased the joint before swooping off low over the back wall.

Or like this bundle of ferocity – The Wild One – a stoat who terrorised the pheasants, despite being a lot smaller than they are.

One acre – that’s what we have here. I documented the wildflowers that have popped up all over the acre, both in my wildflower patch and just on the land on general.

The chamomile is spreading and every now and then, something really unusual shows up  – like this tiny sharp-leaved fluellen that has managed a toe-hold in my driveway and came from God knows where (below). My slideshow, Lying in the Grass, will give you an idea of the variety of plants I have found here.

The storms that sweep through in the winter can do some damage. When we moved in, we had the gorse jungle in our front haggard dug out.  All that did was expose our pine trees to the winds and each of them toppled in turn. 

The lovely wall surrounding our property also gave way over time, leading us to get Diarmuid to come and Build a Stone Wall. Watching him, we discovered that this was a craft and a skill that hasn’t changed in hundreds of years. 

I will miss our amazing view across Roaringwater Bay. We can see several medieval castles, the Baltimore Beacon, the Fastnet Rock, most of the islands. We hear The Roaring on a calm day after a storm. We see the sun going down further and further south each day as the year turns, sometimes sinking into the sea and sometimes dropping behind an island or a hill.

And even though Robert is gone almost two years now, I still find myself saying we, because his presence is so palpable in this place that he loved, and all my experiences here were shared with him. I know his benign spirit is coming with me to Schull: he would have loved the new house and totally approved of my move.

And yes, don’t worry, his Finola Window is coming with me

Hare Indulgence

Every so often I have to come up with a post about hares – they are an obsession with me, and have been for as long as I can remember. So, when I looked out of the window this morning and saw a real, live Irish Hare foraging in our garden at Nead an Iolair I knew the time had arrived to pen another paean to this most beautiful and elusive of animals. Lepus timidus hibernicus is Ireland’s only native lagomorph; the other two are the Brown Hare and the Rabbit – both have come from elsewhere. But the Irish Hare has been here at least since the Pleistocene: that’s getting on for three million years ago, implying that the species is totally attuned to its habitat.

Here is the hare that arrived on our doorstep today. We know that this is an Irish Hare because of his ears – shorter than the length of his head: the Brown Hare species has ears which are longer than the head.

Before I came to live permanently in Ireland I frequently visited West Cork, and a hare sighting in the wild could be virtually guaranteed each time. Also, when we first came here in 2011, we would encounter a hare or hares once every few weeks. In the last couple of years, however, hares seemed to have disappeared completely, apart from a notable day in August 2018: it was the most soaking of wet Irish August days, and we found that we had the most bedraggled of Irish hares sitting forlornly on our terrace.

As you can see, it was a mere youth – no more than a slightly matured leveret. We invited him indoors for a dry off, but he wasn’t having any of that; however, he did hang around for three days, allowing us to get a few more pictures.

We named this little hare Berehert, after an Irish saint we were researching at the time, and wrote a post about him here. In fact, hares seldom stay in one place for very long – it’s part of their self-protection mechanism to be always on the move. And they do move: they are our fastest mammal and can outrun everything else. Since Berehert departed I always harboured a little fantasy (should we say conviction?) that he would one day call in again to let us know how he was getting on… Very nicely, thank you, would seem to be the order of the day if it is, indeed, Berehert who has come along to test out our lawn – this animal appears to be in fine condition.

But maybe there’s another reason why this handsome hare has decided to honour us with his presence: could it be the new sculpture which has appeared in the garden? It is temporarily lodged down by the hedge (header picture) but it has been expertly laser cut from stainless steel (by Pre-Met Fabrications of Cork City) to grace our recently built stone gatepost at our entrance. My design for this hare incorporates the moon, because in folklore all around the world the hare is associated with the moon; it’s artistic licence that I have exaggerated the length of the ears (thereby making this a Brown Hare rather than an Irish one!) but the ears of hares are such defining features that they ought always to be fully celebrated.

Finola is giving you the scale of the new gatepost hare, above, and trying him out at his final location. The sculpture was a special birthday treat from Finola – an indulgence for which I am most grateful: she long ago banned me from bringing any more hare inspired accoutrements into the house, which currently harbours scores of them. I’m afraid that’s par for the course if you marry a hare fanatic!

The very fine parchment scroll (above) which was made and presented to us by our neighbours Hildegard and Dietrich to celebrate our wedding has a little hare at the end of ‘Robert’!

You may remember that Finola’s stained glass window that was crafted for us by George Walsh incorporates a wonderful golden hare (at my request), flanked by my own concertina – playing the magical music of the Children of Lir – and a piece of rock art recorded by Finola in her days of yore.

Have a look at this ‘post from the past’ if – like me – you just revel in the elegance of the hare . . .