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 small for fish, and although the newts it used to hold are long gone, it still is much frequented by frogs, particularly at spawning time. It is a wonderful tiny water world, an aquatic jungle with a community of interdependent bacteria, plants, animals and insects that have provided me with interest and entertainment for many years. I always pause at its edge, and each time, even in winter, when little stirs, I learn a little more about pond life. Because this pond is in the open and receives plenty of sunlight, it is a particularly rich habitat, but its proximity to the forestry road used by family walkers makes it vulnerable to frog-spawn collectors and dogs having a swim. Hellfire Hill is owned by Coillte, and they frequently carry out works here, seemingly without any concern for the viability of the pond or its teeming but mostly invisible occupants. I have found, in recent years, their ecosystem’s husbandry to be poor at best; with regard to this particular pond I warned Coillte years ago that it was a newt habitat, and that their works were endangering these scarce creatures, but my warnings have been ignored. There are no newts there today.
The pond water was clear yesterday, with only a wind-induced ripple to blur the underwater scene, and initially there was no sign of life. After a few minutes of careful observation, however, we spotted tiny, black, immature leeches scattered on the muddy bottom. Leeches are blood-sucking worms, of which there are 16 different species in Ireland, and 500 worldwide. Their general anatomy is much like that of an earthworm, but they have very specialised features, such as suckers to help them move, much as a caterpillar does, and an ability to attach themselves to a fish or animal and suck its blood. It is fascinating that such a small creature can have such complex parts, including a mouth that is designed to inject an anaesthetising substance so that its host is unaware that it is being ‘got at’ while it slits open the skin and has a meal of its blood. The leeches in the Hellfire pond in wintertime look a bit like the spines of a spruce tree lying on the bottom of the pond: at this time of the year they measure about 6–8mm long.
As I was counting the leeches on the bottom of the pond, a water beetle emerged from cover, and quickly breast-stroked across the pond from one clump of weed to another. As it did so, a sudden blast of wind nearly tossed me bodily into the water, so we left the pond behind and continued on our way. On the north side of the hill the wind was gusting powerfully, punching the trees with a great hidden fist, bending them over at impossible angles. It almost seemed, however, as if the trees were enjoying the violent molestations, revelling in swinging back to their original postures as soon the latest gust passed by.
Instead of taking the lower road past the north pond, we dropped down towards Piperstown to cut around the north-west of the hill, something we had been promising ourselves to do for some time. We found ourselves, in minutes, on a long, straight track going downhill between the trees. I once had a neighbour who professed to have great interest in, and knowledge of nature, and he asked me to take him and his two daughters up Hellfire Hill on a ‘nature walk’. My son David, then six years
