It’s a place where the wild mountains tumble down to meet the close cropped green of the valley fields. Kilronan Mountain. We climb up the green road that grips the side of the hill, up through the lane of wild blueberry and gorse, past the just unbudding ash trees, their unfurling leaves shocking purple, up through fields thick with heather and rush. Up through the still new scent of the springs green, and the smell of warm coconut drifting out from the yellow gorse. Thrushes flushed from hedgerows. The arc of a swallow. Worn out posts and metal wire. Up the steep unpaved path overgrown with green.
All this landscape is worked. Its been worked for generations. The stone walls that straddle the hills, made from the fields picked clean of their glacial rubble, have stood, just so, for centuries. The hills are stripped clean of forest, of fauna and flora. Though the balance tips towards the wild. Down in the valley the balance tips towards manicured green. The land is worked to make it productive. The crop is grass, which harnesses the sun for beef cattle, for sheep, and for dairy. But up here on the hillside, things are left to themselves. Gorse grows in swathes. The surefooted mountain sheep pick through the hill paths. The fields are picked out with ramshackle fences and with stone walls. There are fat lambs and quick alert mothers scattered across the roads, scrambing into fields, driveways and gardens.The balance is more towards the wild and and the ramshackle and the tumbling down. It is much too hard work to make it otherwise.
At the hilltop there is a sweatlodge, and old stone construction now pretty much part pf the mountain. Above that, microwave towers and a buried power cable, and beyond the stony brow of the hill there is the still lake in the distance. The sound is of fat bumblebees feasting on the cranes foot and blueberry flowers. It’s also the hum of the microwave transmitter.
There are no truly wild landscapes left here. Every place is the work of human hands, more or less. But it is no less beautiful for that. The stacked stone walls piled high upon themselves connect me to human time. The span of generations written in their stones. The mountain is still geological. Old. Immense. Both these things, the human work that shaped the mountain and the unshaped mountain itself are part and parcel of a bigger, older, wonderful world. I love them both. They are both transcendent.
When I walk my own fields the stone walls connect me to farmers who walked these same fields. Tending stock. Fixing fences. Paring hooves. Catching lambs. Hoping. Working. Setting themselves against their dreams with hope, with twine, optimism and hard work. And these same mountains connect me with the greater older world of the half wild hills.
This is in part what being a farmer is to me. Straddling the what was and the what is. Working in the now, with the claggy stuff of the mud and the earth, one hand resting on the human work of the centuries, and ringed by the half wild ancientness of the hills.
