Rahan Millennium Garden

The beech trees are greening from bottom up and  I'm sure the crows will be glad of it, camouflage and shelter are always useful. 

Took a turn around the teeny tiny Millennium garden near Killina, Rahan today while I was waiting for C1 to finish up.   It's hard to believe that Rahan was nearly every bit as important as Clonmacnoise, that a busy cultural, financial and religious centre was centred where sheep and cattle plod about now.   I'll talk about Rahan churches another time, for today I'll just mention the garden, a pet project of the late Fr. Seamus Dunican and Rahan Development association.  Fr Dunican was parish priest in Rahan and a keen historian and champion for the restoration of Rahan churches.  He took enormous pride in Rahan's monastic past and the creation of this small garden around a Mass rock was part of his hope that people might be drawn to Rahan for spirtual reasons.   

 

For those who may not be familiar with the term, a Mass rock was a large stone, usually taken from a church ruin or holy site and brought to an isolated, rural spot to mark a secret location where priests celebrated Catholic mass during the mid-seventeenth century, when celebrating mass was outlawed by the Penal laws of 1695.  Word of mouth spread the time and day that mass might occur at a mass rock, and priests and congregation alike risked much to attend.    A bullaun stone from Rahan made it's way to Killlina. 

The garden is a small walled in affair, with stones carved with historical points in Irish history.  It's peaceful and pretty, a relaxing spot to visit when the day is fine and there's some time to kill between school pickups.  The mass rock itself has some very old initals carved in which I must get C2 to take rubbings of at some stage. 

Small discoveries for my spring visit included a broken egg shell

and a pretty shot of blackthorn blossom:

and the reason I don't trust myself with mycology.. they may look a bit like mushrooms, but those white gills would suggest otherwise. 

Training young naturalists

We're having an unseasonably fine April, with only a few of those heavens opening, vertical deluges that are characteristic of Irish weather. The short walk from where I park my car to work changes daily, sometimes it has even dramatically changed from how it looked on my morning walk to evening. This is the time of the year everything positively splurges, the sun gently coaxes things to make their début and showers bring hungry bursts of green and blossoms.

An after school stopoff is very popular with my two, nothing like an opportunity to fling stones into water to win the hearts and minds of boys. Our usual close and easy stop is by the humpback bridge in Rahan and a more swollen than usual Grand Canal. Today was much more like an normal April day, if a bit warmer, so clouds featured strongly. Everything is so plain along the bank right now, you can see where the irises are starting to make an appearance, but the overall look is of a place that's been to the barbers recently for a short back and sides.

A lot of the trees have made a decent stab at getting their leaves on. Beeches are being their usual laggardy selves, horse chestnuts are out but small and limp towards what they will become. I always feel like I'm caught unaware by trees bursting into leaf - I see them with their characteristic buds and then them with their leaves but in many cases I seem to miss the transition, so I was pleased to catch these shots:

The boys experimented with skipping stones and photographing splashes, I quite like this one, it looks a little like many water creatures bursting open mawed from beneath the surface:

We decided to check in on some tadpoles we discovered last week in Clara Bog while we were at it. The bog is looking a bit sorry for itself at the moment, it's only starting to pick up the colours that make it look so amazing on a twilight evening with silver mists draped low across the heathers.
The tadpole pool is nothing to write home about, surrounded by a lot of felled young willow just the minute and right at the side of the road. The road has had a litter problem and there are new CCTV cameras which seem to be helping cut down on larger scale rubbish dumping. This time the pool had what we thought at first were silver little beetles whizzing about amongst the waterboatmen. We carefully caught one in a small plastic tub and it it's already dizzying pace picked up even more, it tore around the tub like something possessed. We realised that it was actually dark in colour, oval in shape with little stumpy legs, very like paddles, on the back. The silver was a bubble it was travelling with, indented into the water surface. I'm pretty sure after some googling that it was a (fantastically named) whirligig beetle. I'm even more pleased with them because I'm reliably informed they feast on midges, meaning there are less of those about to feast on me.

The tadpoles are still teeming in the pool, which is great. We very carefully dipped a pot in to have a look at a few and very, very carefully put them back exactly where we found them.

I'd like to figure out a way to get a really good close up. We will report on their progress again next week, and hopefully have a photo or two to show the differences.

In case anyone wants to visit: Bridge over Grand Canal, Rahan

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And the rough location of the tadpole pond on the road through Clara Bog. Just looking at street view pictures and there really were a lot more trees when those shots were taken.

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