The Old Boreen

A NARROW winding track, green with trees and leafy shade: the old boreen has been part of the landscape here for generations. More than that, it has long since become part of folk memory and tradition too. My uncle Jer for instance travelling up and down by horse and cart whenever he went to collect a sack of flour from Maggie Shea’s shop on the old bog road, the horse the colour of the snow on the distant hills in winter.

Another story tells of the motor car that made its way down the boreen for safety, when the river burst its banks and the road was flooded in the year 1951. Cars were a great novelty in those days of course so that it was no great wonder, I suppose that the story of the car going down the boreen was told over and over again.

Meanwhile, a friend remembers running up the boreen as a young boy to visit a neighbour’s house on a Sunday afternoon, the woman of the house treating him to a plate of red jelly, as he puts it: the jelly made in one of those shiny gallons in which sweets were sold in the old days.

Looking back, it was as if the gallon had a kind of magic about it, he said, the jelly that came from it sweeter than any he had ever tasted before.

THE THOUGHT of all of that made me look forward to my walk on that fine spring morning: the mossy banks of the old boreen already dabbled her and there with the pale and delicate yellow of primroses. Sometimes I think that the primroses are almost as shy and self-effacing as the little shy violets that nested nearby, the blush violet of the latter the perfect foil for the green of their heart-shaped leaves.

There are different varieties of violet, the march violet known in Irish as An sailchuach chorraigh, the common dog violet, the marsh violet known in as An sailchuach chon. It was the loveliest thing to see the primroses and the violets so close together, everything about them like an emblem of springtime again.

I thought of our walks to the well of old, when gathering primroses was very much part of the season that was in it: the sun sometimes dazzling on the surface of the well, so that it seemed as if the water was imbued with a kind of magic too.

When I moved on again, I came across another flower, the pink of Herb Robert generously stippled here and there, proof if proof was needed that summer would soon be upon us once more, the five-lobed leaves as dainty as the flowers themselves. One of the great attractions of the plant is that the leaves very often turn crimson in the sun, looking particularly lovely as they do on old stone walls and ditches.

AFTER A while the boreen opens out into a broader track and that was when I heard a blackbird sing in a neighbour’s garden, his fluty notes, rich and throaty, full of the joys of the moment then. I tried to pick him out but could not do so at first.

When I eventually did so, he looked like a picture in a storybook for he had not perched in some green and leafy nook, as I expected, but rather on the grey-barked boughs of a magnolia tree: the selfsame boughs teeming with large, star-shaped white flowers.

It was the loveliest thing to see him there for if I had tried to imagine anything more beautiful I could not have done so, the elegant white of the flowers the perfect foil for the glossy black of his plumage and the orange of his bill.

He hardly seemed to notice me though, for still he sang to his heart’s content, as if he could not let the moment pass without giving voice to his delight. The more I stood and looked and listened the more he seemed like one at home in some island paradise in a sea of whitest stars.

MANY EARLY flowering magnolias, such as Magnolia stellata are susceptible to frost, but when they survive and thrive, as this one surely did, they are truly impressive, the grace and splendour of the flowers redolent again of

‘Once Upon A Time’ and ‘Happy Ever After’.

It was no great wonder then that I stood looking at and listening to the blackbird a very long time, the bird and the tree another evocation of spring that could hardly be put into words. I had heard blackbirds sing time and time again in the old sycamore in my own garden, but this was the very first time I heard one sing on a magnolia: the mellowness of his flutes still giving me reason to smile.

The old boreen, a place of songs and flowers and memories, a place where past and present still rubbed shoulders in the quiet of the morning, so that I could only be glad, so glad of my time there again.

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