With an ear to the ground and an eye on the sea…

Despite having been born and reared on a farm, the changing of the seasons was never something I had much heeded. Posters at school showed colourful transformation and American TV showed very distinctive seasons, but in real-life-Ireland the seasons tended to blend into one another.

But here on the island they don’t. When the drochaimsir lifted in February, I traced the sun’s movement and all around me were those ideas we have of spring – rebirth, renewal and the triumph of light over darkness. Signs of spring were not bountiful or dramatic, but subtle and discrete. Slow in revealing themselves. I was happy to wait.

The reward for my patience was not merely to see, hear or smell the spring, but to feel it. I swear I felt spring, felt it somewhere in my soul. Felt it, like one can only in places like Inis Meáin, where life is lived at nature’s behest, with an ear to the ground and an eye to the sea.      

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It was the sun that alerted me to the seasonal change afoot. It was setting further and further west of Inis Mór and across several evenings, my already-beloved west Clare coast was a stunning array of colours. The cliffs were drenched in burnished orange and gilded brown, sometimes golden and even, on occasion, pink. Out my bedroom window, the sun seemed to skirt the horizon – the line between sea and sky a fiery orange thread. A little googling revealed that the sun sets further west every day – i.e. away from Inis Mór – until the spring equinox when the sun sets due west, and day and night are equal in length.

But it wasn’t just the sun’s movement that signalled change. The eery quiet of the drochaimsir had lifted, and playground laughter rang out across the island with the children’s return to school. I didn’t feel the water warmer (others did) but my feet no longer ached with the cold when I got out. A jacket was enough for a walk instead of the bulky coat. The woollen blanket stayed folded at the end of the bed rather than pulled up around me. There was birdsong that wasn’t just the seagulls’ squawk. The smallest little flowers and plants popped up their heads. I found myself making plans for the summer, for the year ahead.

And still, I didn’t cop to call it spring.  

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Our folklore speaks of spring as beginning at Imbolg (later Christianised and deigned St. Brigid’s Day), a period when rites of cleansing, fertility and creativity would be carried out in Celtic and pagan times. Today, these rites are familiar to us as the urge to spring-clean and celebrate. February saw a steady increase of foothering or ag pútáil[1] around the island; doing jobeens, tidying, fixing and mending, sweeping paths, clearing weeds around old walls.

And then there was the planting. Seaweed was gathered and bagged on the shore, the fertiliser bags clustered together like turf when it’s ready for home[2]. Tractors transported it to where it was laid down to ready the ground for sowing. Later came brown sacks of seed potatoes from the northerly climes of Donegal, and soon every garraí had someone hunched over a spade, doing battle with Inis Meáin’s often unforgiving ground. The pride in the work is palpable, and I’ve been but one beneficiary of the planters’ extraordinary generosity with their produce.

And of course, there has been new life. Even in the decidedly unagricultural swim group, there is mention of new calves and lambs. The birth of a black lamb was the source of great mirth. In a few weeks, the island will almost turn on its axis as the cattle are moved from their wintering at the back of the island to the Connemara-facing side where they will summer in the lower ground with more plentiful grass. Just as it has been since farming started here.  

Life harmoniously attuned to nature.

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And though it gave me a thrill to see, hear, smell and feel the changes coming in the year, what properly excited me the prospect of the clocks changing. And Easter. My first time excited by either.

The spring equinox marks the point where day is longer than night, where there is more light than dark. In ancient times, it would be marked by rituals to cleanse out old energy and welcome in the new. We’re still at it; we change the clocks about a week after the spring equinox and the date of Easter, which is all about rebirth and resurrection, is based on the spring equinox.

My ‘resurrection’ will come in the form of Summer Me. Summer Me will be enjoying the evenings again, rather than shutting the door and throwing on the pyjamas after the evening’s swim. Summer Me will have ye all damned with photos of rocks, cliffs, and magnificent skies. Summer Me might actually visit west Clare. Summer Me will finish my jobs by seven thirty to get one more walk in, down to the stony beach (also find out the stony beach’s actual name) and get a good seat for the sunset, or hop on the bike and freewheel to Ceann Gainimh to watch waves tumble and crash.

Curtains will remain open, light will flow in. Doors will be pitched open. The drying rack will be decommissioned and my sheets will billow in the wind. Two chairs will live outside, inviting anyone to call in.

And hopefully, just hopefully, there’ll be a line of visitors making their way up to the second last house on the island where they’ll be treated to the most magnificent views Ireland has to offer. And dinner, possibly.

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My awareness of spring began with me looking for a book that would explain the pagan and Celtic understandings of seasonal change. It ended with me realising that all that has changed in thousands of years is the nature of the festivals, but not what they marked. Spring still reveals itself as it has done for millennia, we still gear ourselves up for summer with the enthusiasm and great intentions of people who haven’t seen the sun in forever, and it’s the sun that dictates the whole lot of it.

I’m still looking for the book but once again, Inis Meáin has schooled me on nature’s dominion over us all.  

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[1] Phonetic spelling both, good luck with finding either in a dictionary – although I did find ‘bheith ag fútráil’ which loosely translates as pottering.

[2] Indeed, like banks of turf in a bog, each household here has their own patch of shore and the rights to the seaweed found there