The monk and Pangur Bán, his cat, slept soundly on a wild, wet, wintry night in 1010. The North Sea was rough, the Scandinavian rivers were still frozen so the Viking longboats could not sail. I would like to fly SAS to Sweden, over the North Sea oilrigs, but Lockdown only allows travel of 5
As a child, I was always drawn to the river. I wasn’t a lonely child but I was the first cousin of one. My parents worked hard on the farm and my brother who was 5 years older spent a lot of his time helping them. I was too small to help for many jobs,
The gullet is a small stream of water that runs under the boreen where I live. It flows in to the Camogue River near the village of Emly. In winter it floods up so much it is barely able to get through the eye of the bridge. When I was a young lad it had
I grew up with the sounds of the Lingaun river. My first headlong thrust into life echoed her frenetic gush from the womb of the mountain. As my mother kept vigilant watch over me, Slievenamon too stood guard over her offspring. My first tentative steps were in unison with her erratic attempts to form into
One beautiful spring day two cygnets were born on a sunny swamp of Lough Derg, just outside the tiny village of Dromineer. “Can we look at them please!”, asked four older baby swans. “Not yet” their mother replied. Every swan was eager to meet the new-born chicks, especially Smoke, their father. One day passed and
My family lived with Pop at the Mill House which was dwarfed by the mill on the gable end facing our kitchen. We had a beautiful garden, but to the side was an untamed wilderness full of wild rhubarb, wasp’s nests, and badgers, which led directly onto the river. Although we were forbidden to enter