George Moore's Grave

The ashes of George Moore are buried under a cairn of small limestone boulders on Castle Island, Lough Carra, about a mile from the bleak remains of Moore Hall. I discovered the spot last year with CM, who is studying the breeding duck of the islands on the lake. We had landed by boat at the northern end, where the anglers stop to light fires and have their lunch. The place is littered with water bottles, beer cans and crisp packets. This is not very productive ground for breeding mallard. Instead, CM was drawn to the southern half of the island, with its dense canopy of woodland and a ground layer of ivy. Closer to the water's edge, the trees are smaller, allowing light to get through and producing a lovely variety of ground flora.
'Any good?' I shouted as CM reappeared in the scrubby underlayer.
'Yeah! I got two near the grave!'
'What grave?'
'George Moore. He's buried over there.'
And so I stumbled on the final resting place of this troublesome, troubled figure. His cairn is set a few metres from the water's edge, overlooking the wind among the reeds (the poor fellow can't escape Yeats, even here).
Because this grave is so seldom visited, and is of no interest to anglers, the peace here is virtually undisturbed. CM the scientist and his boatman are the only regular visitors that I know of. The ground is very favourable for mallard, which nested here and all over the lake in numbers up to the seventies. Since then, a steep decline has set in, which CM is trying to investigate. Predation of eggs and young by mink is the usual explanation, yet when we surveyed the island last summer, the empty egg shells carried the marks of corvid beaks. So the mallard and tufted duck are under pressure from a number of fronts: mink certainly, but hooded crows and habitat change also take their toll. Even the scientists have to be careful that they don't disturb the peace here and show the predators the way to the nests. The exact influence of these different factors on the duck populations remains unclear. We can at least be sure of one thing: on Castle Island there is no significant pressure from literary tourists visiting the grave of George Moore.

The other half

One half of the literary craft involves deciding how and what you want to write; the other half calls for the ability to judge how it will be received.

Snow mountains

The snow melts quickly on the lower ground while the mountains in the distance stay white for a few days longer. As I look south-west from my study window I see a series of ridges and peaks at the horizon still under snow. The Reek (Croagh Patrick) appears like a shark-fin above the drumlin to the west, as if it has just been wrapped by Christo in a white sheet; a closer look through the telescope reveals a white cone with a slightly roughened surface resembling the heap of flour that forms in a bowl when it passes through a sieve.
To the left of the Reek, at the farthest point on this horizon, I see the table-top massif of Maumtrasna. The clear conditions, combined with the covering of snow, allow me to make out a cliff face rising to the brow of the mountain facing me. The rock face contains a series of slanting ledges that make breaks in the snow, appearing as a series of parallel lines across the cliff face. This is the top of the great coum at Glenawough in the Erriff valley, one of the last sites in Ireland where eagles bred. Ruttledge reported them in this area until the 1920s.
The clear conditions result in improved visibility so that the mountains appear closer. The oratory on top of the Reek is visible to the naked eye. In such weather in winter, when there is no water vapour in the air to disturb the light, Westport people complain of the cold, saying that 'The Reek is down on top of us.'

Helping the stonechats

A pair of stonechats has been around the house all winter. With the mild conditions in this area we don't usually think of them as needing help, but this week the nights have gone very cold, with snow showers. [Minus 7 at Birr last night.] This morning I bought dried insects at the supermarket for these insectivorous birds.
Stonechats suffer a lot in cold weather: the cold winters of the early sixties, which made Sylvia Plath despair of England, wiped out a lot of stonechats. I have seen them foraging on the seashore when the frost has locked away everything else inland, and a few years ago in Westport I picked up a dead male in Shop Street.
To compensate for high mortality rates, stonechats are polygamous, and can have three broods in a year, which means they'll soon be starting to breed when this cold snap finishes. Everything is ready to go: all the buds are in place; the rooks are building, chaffinches and hedge sparrows singing. A flurry of snow won't deter these creatures, they know from the length of the day that spring is here.