There’s a secret lagoon in northwest Donegal which I’ve recently discovered. Standing on the pier you can see Bloody Foreland, Errigal, Horn Head and Tory Island. So many iconic landmarks surrounding one little bay. Not as famous as its larger neighbours to the east, Lough Swilly, Mulroy and Sheep Haven, Ballyness Bay is just as
I was born very near the Brown Flesk river in the early forties. In my youth I spent a lot of what spare time I had at the river. To me at the time it was a very big river as I knew no other river. As our small farm was bounded on one side
Very nearly twenty years ago the world was about to enter the twenty-first Century on midnight 31 December it occurred to me as to many others to consider, how would it be fitting to mark this momentous moment. I looked back in time to the Ireland of the previous millennium and thought of the Vikings’
The Edenderry canal breach, 1989 Something was happening but throughout Edenderry people continued on their daily grind. We tramped home from school in good humour as the newness of our Christmas toys sustained the mundaness of January. But near the Blundell Aqueduct, that remarkable engineering feat where the canal passes over the road, farmers grumbled.
An eel, a dipper, a tomato, a kingfisher or a heron, is there an odd one out on a stretch of the River Dodder? For a very brief time I saw an eel, a small, black, viper looking yet harmless eel wriggling across the shallow river bed out to the middle bed of the low
Sounds of water lapping, squelching, splashing, glugging, flowing are trapped within my hiking boots which trudged the Wicklow hills. Heading to the Sally Gap, I don my newly polished boots. Leaving the forest tracks behind, we head cross country towards Lugalla or Fancy Mountain. “Watch out for bright green moss” said my companion. Too late!
When I think of a favourite patch of water my mind immediately takes me back to the spot where I spent many hours trying to catch brickeens during my childhood over 50 years ago. Some of my cousins called these little ifsh pinkeens or minnows depending on where they lived. The stream lfowed along the
I was born in 1937 in the townland of Coole. Coole is about a mile East of Ferbane in the County of Offaly. Our house is about two hundred- and fifty-yards from the River Brosna and our pasture went to the river. From the time I was able to walk I followed my two older
The river Dodder played a huge part in my childhood, as it did for many others. I moved into my grandparents’ home in O’Connell Gardens with my parents and sister when I was six years old. Most of my youth was spent on the Dodder bank with my neighbours and friends. My back garden wall
I love Colm Sand’s song “Going down to the well with Maggie”. It brings me back to my own childhood and the many adventures we had collecting water. Like Colm Sands we also had a Maggie Connolly who lived next door and we shared the well with the family. In those times everyone had a
Constable Lake is a lake near my house in County Cork. It is called Constable Lake because when England used to rule Ireland, there used to be policemen around the place. Back then the policemen were called constables. One day a constable got thrown in, so it was named Constable Lake after that. When my
A scene serene in my memory I store Of gazing down on Annaghearly lake shore The scene below mirrored the sky In a painting of beauty no money could buy The water below so calm and so blue With diamonds glistening and changing hue As snowy white swans with their brood of two Disturbed its