North Atlantic Skyline - - Photographs from the west of Ireland (Galway, Mayo, Clare, Limerick, Roscommon and even Leitrim)

The rites of spring

Near Inishmaine abbey lies an old graveyard. Most of the graves are covered in gravel but one was bursting with daffodils. And we can't have an account of March without a picture of daffodils, now can we?

After a couple of weeks in the arid heat of southern India, the west of Ireland seems almost unbelievably lush and green. This is a great time of year - the spring equinox has passed, and last night, the clocks went forward for summer time. Everywhere, life is bursting forth. I visited Inishmaine Abbey (via Cong) on the banks of Lough Mask on Saturday morning - from the heat of the sun, and the stillness of the air, it could have been mid-summer. Only the buds not yet burst open on the trees, and the distant honking of whopper swans that have not yet migrated back to Scandinavia betrayed the time of the year.

I traced some more of the path of the Cong Canal on Saturday - I'll update the gallery when I get around to it. Despite the breeze, I managed to get one clear picture of the hazel catkins. Hazel (Corylus avellana Linnaeus) is one of Ireland's oldest plant - along with ash, hazel re-established itself after the last Ice Age nine and a half thousand years old. The Irish world for hazel is Coll, which is also the name of the letter C in the Ogham alphabet, and hazel nut fragments have been found in the remains of Mesolithic settlements that date back nine millenia. The hazel woods of the Burren probably represent an unbroken presence since that part of Ireland became habitable - it is also the favoured habitat for the pine martin, a creature that, alas, I have never seen in the flesh. Hazel woods also attract owls - the hazelnuts are the staple diet of voles that are in turn, the snack of choice for the birds.

In an old graveyard at the edge of Cong village co. Mayo, there are three magnificent horse-chesnut trees. At this time of year, the leaves are beginning to emerge from their sticky casings, unfurling like butterfly wings. The horse-chesnut (Crann Cnó Capaill; Aesculus hippocastanum)is a wonder to behold at almost any time of the year - soon it will have a huge canopy of large flat leaves, before transforming into a huge crown of blossoms in May. Of course, in the autumn, the tree produces conkers, the dark and smooth nuts hidden inside the wonderfully spiky and bizarre-looking green fruit.

The story of how horse-chesnuts arrived into Europe is just as quirky. In 1557, a Flemish doctor called Willem Quackelbeen, who was working in the Turkish embassy of Ferdinand I, the Habsburgh Emperor, sent some branches of a tree to an Italian botanist (Pietro Mattiola) saying that the Turks used as a medicine to cure horses. The Turks called the tree At-Kastane (Horse Chesnut). Though the seeds sent by Herr Quackelbeen didn't grow, a later batch sent some years later were cultivated in the Habsburgh imperial gardens in Vienna.

Funnily enough, horses don't seem to like horse-chesnuts at all and won't eat them of their own accord. Horse-chesnut timber doesn't have much uses either, either as furniture or even for burning. A fully grown horse-chesnut tree is, however, a beautiful sight, and examples of the tree can be found in many of the old estates in Ireland.

Posted by Monasette at March 28, 2004 10:12 PM