With the month of March well under way our garden is crying out for attention. I have great plans this year, among other things is planting more vegetables and in order to realise this I’m digging up one third of our small lawn. Exciting!
I have been suffering a bit from writers block for a while now, hopefully my muze will return soon.
Wishing everyone a glorious spring, or as it happens, autumn time. Much love.
It is time for a bit of stock taking, and for catching up with many friends and followers of my blog. Personally the year 2024 has brought many changes, some challenges, some sad, and some good. Worldwide it’s been a sad and chaotic year too I think. Many of us have asked ourselves serious questions about our general humanity, our deeds towards our fellow human beings. A lot of good has been happening too during this past year, a lot of compassion has been shown, and brave and good people have shown to be always around.
I visit Ian, my husband, in the nursing home every week, something we both look forward to very much.
And now January is almost over and I’m still organizing my activities inside the house and out in the garden, and in society. Lots to do, all good things. During the winter I’ve availed of webinars and zoom meetings a lot. Webinars about grasses and rushes, and other natural subjects. Regular zoom meetings of a lace making group. And an introductory course in tree identification. Collage making or painting with my grandchildren is very rewarding too. Locally there have been meetings of the Early Retirement Group which has fabulous and interesting (mainly) other women as members and a good program, one of the things we do is a weekly chair yoga session which keeps us all quite flexible. Then the monthly book club and the poetry circle are such a joy, as are the very regular and hugely interesting art exhibitions. Skibbereen has it all. There is simply not enough time to do it all.
And then there is the weather which during winter can be quite challenging, storms, heavy rain, frost, the type of weather that makes you want to crawl behind the stove with a good book. Christmas and New Year celebrations seem to have come and went in a flash this past year. The dark days are now getting a little lighter and soon it will be the first of February, for Ireland that heralds the beginning of spring, it is also the feast of St.Bridgid and has now become a public holiday. And so…. I’m chitting my potatoes to have them ready for planting in March. My garden is still my focus a lot of the time.
This coming season my main big plan for the garden is to plough up half my little grass field so I can plant more vegetables. For the past five years I have added more and more shrubs because I had much less time to garden and thought it was the better way. This meant that I now have less and less space for vegetables. So space will have to be made. My grandson Ruben who is now a strong teenager and very willing to help me has already cleared one plot in the back of the garden, he wants to do more. We are great mates and I love him coming over and working alongside me, and afterwards we have pizza and watch a movie.
Luckily during the last storm none of our trees suffered, we have seven trees in a small garden. We live in a terraced house and the garden is relatively small. Ours are a birch, oak, chestnut, hawthorn and elderberry, and in the front garden, a currant tree and an acer. Our hawthorn tree was affected by blight last summer and lost all of its leaves, we’ll see what happens this year. The chestnut had been trimmed five years ago and has some rot in an outshoot and that will need looking after.
Gardening and planning a garden, as many people know very well, is a great joy, and keeps us fit, it’s also hard work at times, but that can be done in part, an hour here and an hour there on a daily basis, weather allowing of course (I’m a fair weather gardener). To be out in nature is such a joy, the fresh air, the scents, sounds, and seeing the growth is all delightful and will keep me going for ever. The observation possibilities of seeing insects, birds, wild plants and herbs growing, as well as tasty vegetables and trying out new types. And then there is the digging up of potatoes and the harvesting of edible produce, how much better can it get I think it satisfies one of our most basic instincts as humans, that of survival.
Not being sure what 2025 will bring for us all, I wish many blessing for each and everyone.
Loving thought to all.
Wishing all my dear family and friends a joyful and happy New Year
“May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
May the clarity of light be yours,
May the fluency of the ocean be yours,
May the protection of the ancestors be yours”
John O’Donohue, taken from Benedictus
And most of all may peace descent on those countries which are hit by war or by genocide. My dearest wish for 2025
I heard the bells on Christmas day, their old, familiar, carols play, And wild and sweet the words repeat of peace on earth, good will to all mankind. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Wishing all my dear friends, family and followers a very happy and joyful Christmas, and a healthy and blessed New Year!
And a winter time filled with pleasurable winter celebrations.
Travelling through the Caha mountains during winter I find that there is plenty of interest to see and get excited about even just along the way. While some of my drives are taken in bad weather conditions, heavy mist, rain and or wind, most of the time I’ve experienced dry and also regularly sunny weather.
Most of all, this winter I find the skies fascinating. The colours, subtle, in pastel pink, light blue, ashen grey or radiant white, and even as if with a magic brush, diffused streaks of periwinkle purple. I’ve seen it all in skies over the Bantry Bay, over the Caha mountains and over the Glengarriff valeys. Ever changing skies with light of a beautiful quality. It certainly holds the attention of the traveller. These days I drive home when the sun is setting, adding another marvel of light, the setting sun, often spectacular!
Looking down into the valley there is a whole palette of different browns, beiges and forest greens. A true feast for the eyes. As can be seen in the photo below Glengarriff National Forest has a lot of birch trees growing, and apart from their stark white trunks, their branches are particularly beautiful at the moment. Every time I pass clusters of them I try to think how to name their colour, a type of maroon, or a vintage wine, or does it look more like an English lavender, burgundy, gothic mulberry or umbral umber. It is hard to pinpoint exactly the colour of those branches, and it also depends how the light shines on them and how the rain brightens them.
A variety of other branches, among them the deep red of the dogwoods is always very nice in a landscape, and so is the drama of the bleached grasses, rushes and sedges covering whole stretches of hillsides with cream blonde colours or even rusty browns.
Darkness falls early these days, painting the landscape mainly in moss green, dark brown or black, though the mountains in the distance do give us some mauve. The landscape changes constantly, it is very noticeably when driving higher up, clouds throwing huge shadows over the valleys interspersed with stretches of sunlight. As I said there is a lot of interest even in winter on my journey. Probably much more to discover yet and that leaves me with a feeling of ever more excitement.
I came across two photos of winter foliage recently, these are paintings of the Danish painter Peder Mork Monsted, (1859-1941) from his ‘Winter’ series. I thought it shows the colouring of the birch trees beautifully and rather well. I think his work very nice. (Referenced from Gallery of Art) with thanks.
“As we live and as we are, Simplicity – with a capital “S” – is difficult to comprehend nowadays. We are no longer truly simple. We no longer live in simple terms or places. Life is a more complex struggle now. It is now valiant to be simple: a courageous thing to even want to be simple. It is a spiritual thing to comprehend what simplicity means.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright, The Natural House
Santa Lucija, Gozo
An evening sun comes shining in our livingroom, illuminating the grass green wall. A last burst before darkness descends. Late October feelings.
Molly Gallivan’s cottage is named after Molly, who lived in this cottage hundreds of years ago, she was a widow and mother with seven small children. And showing entrepreneur tendencies she came up with the idea to supplement her small income by opening a “Sibheen” (illegal pub) where she sold her home made “Poitin” that was locally known as “Molly’s Mountain Dew”
In 1840 a mountain road was built linking County Cork and County Kerry, which led from Glengarriff over the mountains to Kenmare and was called the Caha Pass. This road happens to pass Molly’s cottage and when more and more travellers and tourists took this road Molly saw another good way to increase her income. She set up her own cottage industry and started to sell home spun woollens and knitted Aran jumpers which her neighbours helped her to make while the local sheep farmers provided the wool. Such a resourceful woman was Molly.
In the following photos are some of the lovely authentic items that Molly used to look after her family, a butter churn among them. In this kitchen traditional Irish scones are made till today, I’ve tasted them when I visited with my sister Josephine. We both find it interesting to see what utensils women would have used here less than one hundred years ago.
Looking at the heart there are several items, one of them is a shallow black pot in which a soda bread was made. The dough would be put in and the pot would be put in the fire and hot pieces of turf placed on top of the lid. The resulting bread tasted delicious. I see a flat round gridle too which was used in the making of gridle bread using rough flour, some maise flour, sour milk, bread soda and an egg. Here I found a video showing how: https://youtu.be/PpoTNWOKWtY There was always a large pot to boil the potatoes which were always popular in rural Ireland.
The upstairs in Molly’s cottage actually has two bedrooms and a bed also on the landing. The windows are tiny. There is a rustic cradle. I spot a small spinning wheel in the corner of one of the bedrooms. Electricity came to these areas only in the 1960ies. Her sewing machine would have been worked by hand, same as the spinning wheel and the loom. It was a simple life, but it cannot have been easy always.
We had a lovely cup of tea when we stopped by there during my sister’s visit. And of course we sampled the homemade scones. We also visited the shop area with the lovely selection of Irish woollen items and other Irish goods.
The cottage seen from the N71. Also some of the out-houses one of which is probably where Molly made her illegal “Poitin”, her mountain dew as it was called. The original cottage was only one story part of which can still be seen here in the photo.
I hope you enjoyed learning a little about Molly Gallivan’s life and her cottage. She must have been a great woman!
The cottage is found in Bonane in County Kerry. Bonane is situated in a valley between the Caha and the Shehy mountains and the sea. The cottage overlooks some of this valley. Bonane is know for its many ancient historical sites. Among the sites are pre-famine house ruins and field systems, bronze age copper mines and much more, fascinating stuff. Today Molly’s cottage and traditional farm depicts the lifestyle in the valley as it was during the early 1900s.
I include here the website of Molly Gallivan’s Cottage in case you would like more information on it. https://mollygallivans.com/the-molly-gallivans-experience/
I pass this place once a week and often stop for a cup of tea or a look around. I find the old utensils and the whole setting fascinating.
This photo shows the road over the Caha Pass going down into Bonane with a beautiful view of the Macgillycuddy Reeks in Killarney in the distance, among them is Carrantuohill, the highest mountain in Ireland at 1038m. It gets climbed often, recently my sister, brother and other members of the family enjoyed getting to the top. I took this photo and had waited all summer for the right moment to get a clear view of those mountains, it was already deep into September when I got the right conditions, it shows how the land had already started to get a rusty colour, beautiful!
The landscape has been sometimes dark and mysterious lately, this photo I took the day after a large storm sent torrents of rain down the mountains. It made for a most beautiful journey.
Because of the large amount of rain that fell Barley lake (situated in the Caha mountains) could be seen from the tunnel road quite clearly, while I was literally driving through the clouds. Lots of waterfalls everywhere. Beautiful!
The sky is often quite spectacular to watch. In Ireland neither the rain, nor the sun are ever far away and the clouds are ever present in fascinating forms.
On better days, a roadside picnic with a lovely view over the valley below is a must stop for me. The quietness, even if this is a main mountain road, is so very peaceful.
Some more photos of last months journeys to Kenmare. The landscape is changing its colours fast. I often climb up some of the rocks and find all sorts of interest. The flora is mainly brown sedges now and some of the young gorse plants that were still flowering, and the end of the heathers, also the beautiful seedheads of the bog asphodel, a lovely bright orange!
There are plenty of places where I can stop and look at the views or whatever else I want to find. Lower down in the valleys there is a lot more plant growth. Higher up the rocks are a huge fascination of mine.
On this journey there are, in their natural environment, still a lot of old barns and cottages, these are still in use and have been beautifully restored, though some are left as interesting ruins. The traditional cottage of this area of Ireland is a small stone-built house, two windows with a door in the middle, I think two up and two down they call it in vernacular architecture. Here in this photo gallery is one of those traditional cottages, well restored and used, it’s on the road down into the valley of Bonane on the way to Kenmare. It’s very nice to have a stop there and my sister Josephine and I had tea and traditional scones there last summer, but about this place which by the way is called Molly Gallivan’s cottage (after the original owner) I will tell in another blog to come. Visiting places like this goes back a long way in our family.
And as you can see from my photos there is so much a journey of a mere 71km can provide, even on a weekly basis. There is never ending interest, what with the changing seasons. And the sheer amount of interesting facets one comes across on such a journey make it certainly very enjoyable. Wow!
agoyvaerts 