Drafted 29.12.2011
After a few nights at Suzie & Mike’s family home, and another five in the Carraig Dulra yurt, we were temporarily “rescued” to stay a night with Suzie’s friend and local biodynamic/permaculture mentor, Wendy, and her husband Richard. We loved Wendy and Richard separately and instantly but they have the most charming couple dynamic. There’s a lot of love and intelligence and wit and happiness in the household, with Wendy’s homey clutter battling for territory with Richard’s idea of order. Richard happens to be a prominent Irish ecologist -so his friends proudly told me- and an excellent conversationalist. We had loads of interesting chats and debates over the kitchen table, and when he offered to give us a lift to Cork I was gladder for the chance of more conversation than for the free ride.
Wendy and Richard live on the south side of Devil’s Glen, on part of what was the old Synge estate (cousins of the literary Synge). Their house is beautiful and old and well worn, very familial, with a big square kitchen that is a thoroughfare at the east side where the door comes in, and at the west (far) side are glass double French windows that lead out through a herb-lined walk to a raised lawn and a big gnarled “earlies” apple tree. The tree is hung with feeders that Wendy makes to attract robins and chaffinches and blue tits, but the apple buds that bloom at the top of the tree are always eaten by bull finches. Wendy said she could put up a fake bird of prey in the apple tree but that would scare off the birds she likes to look at. In front of the house is an eightfoot arched gateway fence made of stone, hollow inside for keeping horse food and firewood; between this and the road are trees and an untended lawn. Between the arch and the house is a tended lawn, where ducks are fed, and robins fight over scraps, and to the left of this, and all down behind the house’s south wall, is a lovely sorawling vegetable garden; very good for wandering. We walked first through Wendy’s little wood of hazel and ash and ivy- covered birch, sycamore and elm. This is bordered all round with berry bushes: raspberry, loganberry, blueberry, black current and more. Most of the trees in here, twenty or thirty feet tall, we’re grown by Wendy from seeds. Back out again leads to dozens of open beds and six poly tunnels. I’ve never seen such loving cultivation or prolific vegetables; this explains Wendy’s freezer, which we helped relocate, being choc-full of clear full bags of the most beautiful looking cut fruits and vegetables. Everything in her fridge and pantry is organic or homemade; ten types of honey, tahini, peanut butter, twenty types of herbal tea, crabapple jelly, blackcurrent jam and chutneys. Her son Derry had made Harissa of fresh chopped chillis, with parsley and mint; it smelled wonderful and instead if Harissa he had written Hot! Hot! Hot! Beware! on the jar.
I helped Wendy feed her horses in the field across the road, and we took her Wicklow Collie dog up to the line of oak forest that crests it. An enormous lone oak stands several metres into the field itself, with an old rope swing on it like something out of Winnie the pooh. At the top Wendy pointed down to the large estate home to which all the surrounding fields once belonged. Her own house, over there to the right, was built two hundred years ago for one of their household staff, and gesturing straight down beyond the main demesne she pointed out the smoking chimney of another outlying house; home to the poet, Seamus Heaney. (His modern English rewriting of Beowulf is widely acclaimed. If I remember correctly it’s a loving rendition of, rather than a direct translation of, the original.)
I’m sorry that there’s no picture of the Hundred Acre Wood or of Seamus Heaney’s woodsmoke; it was an unexpected pleasure and found me without a camera. This last picture looks out, from a bedroom on the upper floor, in the opposite direction. What a view though, eh? The cottages and fields…I can’t remember but I think part of that indistinct background blue is the ocean.
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