Subliminal messages sent from Emerald Isle
IT’S that time of year folks, the Emerald Isle is calling, and as always with perfect timing my friends across the water send me subliminal messages as to why I should be there.
First up is from the mighty Dave O’Shea from the Chimera Gallery in Mullingar and he didn’t need to say a word, he just posted the painting, the top half of which is seen here by Sylvia Parkinson Brown, a fox and raven made with such simple class and the touch of a master, or should that be mistress, either way the pictures set me off.
I thought, I’m going to write a song about the wonderful raven and fox.
They seem to be having a little exchange, which I recall actually witnessing between another crow and a fox a number of years ago at Crowden.
It was a jaunty jackdaw, bouncing, as they do, along the top of a stone wall with what looked like a small dead bird in its bill.
At the time I was sitting watching adult peregrines returning to their next ledge with a brace of passing racing pigeons, and although a good hundred metres away, fortunately I had my binoculars with me. After watching the ‘peregrinettes’ (I’ve just made that word up) getting their faces filled with dead pigeon I turned my attention to the magpie, just in time to spy a fox below the corvid’s wall-top vantage point, and further to see the bird, a meadow pipit, get passed to the fox. Your guess is as good as mine on that one, however the song began like this and I was all fired up to talk of Odin and the stuff of legends.
Foxy tales and ravens wings you’ve heard it all before,
But here’s a rhyme from long ago in a time of an ancient lore
When the badger would speak to the passing dog and the crow to the leaping hare,
And the country folk would doff their cap at the sight of the old brown bear. So far go good one might have thought but the mention of the bear brought to mind one of the finest sights in Ireland.
Deep in a cave, the Ailwee, in that limestone escarpment known as the Burren in County Clare, lies a long dead brown bear, and the poor critter died during hibernation maybe 1,000 years ago.
His bones are curled up still protected by the lip of the pit, which old Ursa will have scratched up as he hunkered down for the winter to deflect any drafts.
The song then went off in another direction and recalls how a local farmer Jacko McCann found him in the cave in 1944 when his dog ran after a hare and fell in.
He’s shuffling now, and snuffling now too long in tooth and claw
His kind will soon be gone from the wood, his kind will be no more
But there’s one asleep in the Ailwee cave in a bear pit safe and sound
A limestone grave says Jacko McCann deep beneath the ground
It was in the year of forty four when Jacko lost his dog
It was herding time when up shot a hare and the dog forgot his job
Well into the dark and through the gap, it was deeper and deeper he fell
Come out ye critter the hare has gone, come out he was heard to yell
I’ll never fit in there he cried, of his dog there was no trace
Come away with ye called Jacko McCann come away and show your face
Well Jacko went home for a candle, and a match to light his way
He loved his dog, and thought him lost and squeezed in without delay
That’s it so far but believe it or not, I was sitting next to Jacko McCann’s grandson on a flight to Shannon two years ago and it will be good fun to send him the song. As for the last few verses I will surely reference Oliver Cromwell’s damming summation of the Burren, ‘There’s not enough earth to bury a man, no tree to hang him high’.
What did he know anyway, the Burren is a World Heritage Site, with relict and dwarf hazel forests, pine martens and gentian violets.
» Please check out http://chimera-gallery. com/ and Dave would be delighted to see you as you drive across Ireland.