The Way Home

by Mark Boyle

  Looking at my home here in Knockmoyle, I have a sense of how Ó Guithín may have felt. I can see the same forces at play under my own nose, and the same slow death unfolding. The local pubs know it too. As Ó Súilleabháin’s grandfather would say, it’s twenty years a-stooping. The population here is getting old, and farmers’ children have no interest in continuing the farms that their families built up over generations. Though the tractors first brought ease and speed, they soon replaced the need for labour, and so the labour – otherwise known as young men and women – took off to cities to work in factories, offices and the service industries, and made new lives for themselves there.

  I’m reminded of Aldo Leopold’s words: ‘In the long-run too much comfort only seems to spell danger.’

  ~

  Out for an evening’s walk, Kirsty and I meet Aisling from up the road, who is out doing the same. We stop to talk. She had seen us out on the horse and gig a few mornings ago, as we were collecting a few sacks of sawdust for our composting toilets from a nearby, seldom-used sawmill. She says the sight of it took her back fifty years.

  She tells us that, when she was young, she would take the horse and cart the 6 kilometres to the shop, every Tuesday, to pick up the week’s flour, along with any other groceries her family needed, and could afford, if any. The trip took all day, but only because they called into all their friends and neighbours along the way. Hard enough times, she said, but happy times.

  With that she’s off, power-walking down the bóithrín in her high-visibility bib. We stroll off in the opposite direction, where we need to water the horse.

  ~

  The postmaster tells me that it has been announced that four hundred of the remaining eleven hundred post offices in Ireland are to be closed, and that all of the closures will be in the less-profitable rural areas. Right now he doesn’t know if his own office will be one of those getting the axe. Nobody knows yet. No point worrying about it, he says stoically, as there’s not much to be done about any of it. It’s a decision that will be made at headquarters, in Dublin.

  If this office does close, it will mean an extra 24-kilometre cycle for me to and from the nearest town, but my troubles will be hardly worth mentioning in comparison to his, or to the locals for whom the post office is more than just a place to pick up their pensions and send parcels to far-flung family.

  He tells me the week’s weather forecast too. It’s not good. There’s a hurricane on the way, he says, so get yourself prepared. Next to the cash register in the adjacent shop there’s now a large box of loose candles, already half gone, in the place where the chocolate bars have always been before.

  ~

  After much hullabaloo, Hurricane Ophelia finally hit the west coast of Ireland today. Neighbours told me that the media were predicting that it would cause €700 million worth of damage. That’s actually good for the economy, I tell them; or somebody’s economy, at least. Universities, schools and shops have closed down for the day, and even the postman isn’t delivering this morning. Such is the collective fear of the nation that the electricity has blacked-out before the event. Wind speeds of 140 kilometres per hour, they say.

  Ophelia reaches Knockmoyle by mid-afternoon. She’s in a right old mood. Who can blame her? I grab my coat and go for a walk. Good to feel the wind in your hair. I need the elements. They help to keep me in my place, save me from any delusions of grandeur and remind me that I need to appease the gods of water, earth, wind and fire. A few trees have already come down, her vengeance brutally indiscriminate. The roads are empty. Nice. The chickens are hiding in the coop, which we’ve secured in the lean-to. Ophelia roars, and I try to listen.

  Those in the farmhouse come over to the cabin for dinner. As we don’t have plumbing, central heating or a boiler, we’re able to put down a fire without the risk of anything exploding. The electricity may be off for hours or days. It’s more likely to be the latter, as resources will be thrown at the cities first.

  Jorne, who has spent over a decade captaining sailing ships from Europe to the Caribbean, explains to me that as the temperature of the oceans increases, hurricanes will become more prevalent. Best get used to it, he says.

  ~

  In his essay ‘Axe-in-Hand’, Aldo Leopold wrote:

  The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away, but He is no longer the only one to do so. When some remote ancestor of ours invented the shovel, he became a giver: he could plant a tree. And when the axe was invented, he became a taker: he could chop it down.

  After a season of giving (spring) and a season of taking (summer) I’m now due a season of giving again. November to me means tree-planting time, and I take whatever opportunities I can get, my ambitions limited only by the amount of land I am entitled to do it on.

  Kirsty’s family own land which is farmed industrially – sugar beet and crops intended as animal feed – and after a few years of conversation we agree to plant a small woodland on a four-acre section of their land. It’s a small gesture towards ecological restoration and yet, at the same time, a bold and brave move, running in the face of conventional wisdom regarding how farmers use so-called agricultural land. Most farmers would grow any crop other than trees on their land, even if it is one – such as sugar – which is proven to be detrimental to human health. Anything but trees. One of her family tells us that the woods we’re planning will be financially unviable. I tell him that I hope so, and that his surfboard and music system are financially unviable, too.

  After much advice from a good man in the Forestry Commission and various ecologists, we decide to mirror the adjacent, existing woodland and the species which comprise it, as considering its age – some of the trees are over four hundred years old – these are the varieties best suited to this particular place. We will plant in clusters, according to the needs of each species, with forty per cent of the patch kept as a meadow for wildlife and wildflowers.

  We lay the trees out. Pedunculate oak, silver birch, downy birch, field maple, hazel, holly, hawthorn and dog rose (Kirsty introduced the dog rose, which wasn’t growing in the existing woodland, simply because she finds it beautiful, which was a good enough reason for me). Sixteen hundred trees in total. They each come with their own guard to protect the young trees from rabbits, which are abundant here due to the absence of predators, something that’s a trademark of vast agricultural landscapes.

  I’m torn over the guards. On one hand they’re made of hard plastic. On the other hand they’ll protect the trees from rabbits which, because of supermarket chicken, beef and soya, have become too inconvenient to kill, skin, butcher and pot up anymore. My own ideal is to simply leave the land alone and let it rewild itself, as it has been doing this very well since the beginning of time. Saplings grow up fast through the pioneering brambles, which naturally protect the trees from deer and rabbits and provide food for wildlife. The trees, once they begin maturing, eventually shade out much of the brambles, and in time a native woodland establishes. It is only such self-willed woods as these that have any hope of becoming ancient.

  The idea of allowing the land to rewild itself is still controversial in farming communities, however, and so our options were restricted to it being industrially farmed with insecticides, pesticides and fertilisers, or for us to plant a so-called traditional English woodland instead.

  Planting a woodland can be as simple or as complex as you like, depending on whether you opt for a gridded plantation or something resembling a native, natural woodland. If you veer towards the latter, as we have, the main work is in understanding the land, and listening to what it might want. Putting the trees in the ground is the easy part.

  The technique I use for bare-rooted trees is one called slit-planting. This involves little more than shoving a spade in the ground, pushing it forwards to make a slit and dropping a young tree into the opening, before firming matters up. A child could do it. A child should do it. I can plant about 250 trees a day when planting this kind of woodland (which is much slower work than a
gridded plantation), but a good forester can do upwards of 500.

  Re-reading Leopold, I reflect on the spade as a tool. As well as planting trees, it can also be used to disturb soil, harming the life within it. Like all technologies, even the laptop, it can be used to give or take life at a greater pace than we would be capable of ourselves. But Paul Kingsnorth captured the differences in these technologies best when, in Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, he wrote:

  Both may give you sore arms, but there is a difference between a keyboard and a spade. A spade can still be made fairly simply. It doesn’t need constant energy to keep going. It can last a long time, if you treat it well, rather like your body. A keyboard and a spade are both products of an industrial economy, but not to the same extent, and they do not have the same purpose. One can exist independently, the other cannot. This might be a matter of degrees, but the degrees matter – and so does the intent.

  There’s another point too, though, and perhaps it is a more important one: nobody ever got addicted to a spade.

  Because we’re not planting in straight rows, the woodland takes three of us more than two days to plant out and protect. It’s satisfying work, even in a cold northerly breeze that gets in at your bones if you stop for a break. Over the course of the whole weekend, I notice three earthworms. Three. Looking across the field, all I can see yet are green upright plastic tubes, but I hold tight to the hope that in twenty years’ time I might walk through this field and witness the return of life – trees, wildlife, insects, wildflowers and earthworms – all carrying out the age-old task of feeding each other and creating life through death.

  In ‘Axe-in-Hand’, Leopold tries, and fails, to explain why he prefers pine trees to all others. In the end, the best he can do is to say, ‘The only conclusion I have ever reached is that I love all trees, but I am in love with pines.’ Well, I love all trees, but I am in love with oaks.

  ~

  Some of the neighbours have caught wind of the fact that we make our own cider, and so during the first week of November sacks of eaters and cookers continually land at our door. While none of the natives use them themselves any more, the older generation still hate to see them go to waste. Their sons and daughters, who would have traditionally provided the muscle to press apples, are all off in Dublin, Toronto, London and Sydney, earning good wages so that they can buy things like bottles of cider.

  I go through each apple, separate the good from the bad, and from the latter I cut out any rotten bits, put them in a crate, and pass them to Kirsty. She puts these through the old, rusty Wexford self-feeder which is at least one hundred years old and which the previous owner had used to grind up swedes for his pigs. With these all chopped up in a bucket, she passes the baton to Jorne, who hand-cranks them into pulp so that Elise can press every last drop of juice out of it. From there it goes straight into a barrel – no sugar, no yeast, just apples. It’s almost like a factory system. Almost.

  By lunch, we’ve all had enough of apples for one day. But it has been a fun, rewarding morning in which our lungs were full of clean, crisp air and work song. There will be 46 litres of cider in the barrel – a shrewd businessman would value this at €230, retail price. Our first job, however, is to drop around a few bottles of apple juice to the local ‘pioneers’ – those who, aged twelve, took a pledge at their confirmation to never drink alcohol. The rest – the majority – will have to wait six months, like ourselves.

  ~

  Kirsty likes her eggs soft-boiled. Without a watch, they’re difficult to get just right. So I take six eggs – four for myself, two for Kirsty – out of the pot, and hope that I haven’t left them in too long. I peel the shells into a mortar and grind them with the pestle. I’ve read that ground-up eggshells, being high in calcium, can aid the regeneration of your teeth. Considering that I grew up on chocolate, sweets and fizzy drinks, I’m keen to give it a go.

  They’re more edible than I had imagined, but that’s not saying a whole lot. They taste of, well, eggs – which, surprisingly, I find surprising – but I can’t see them appearing on restaurant menus any time soon. Still, I prefer them to buying tubs of calcium supplements from the health food store I used to run.

  ~

  You can really feel the change of seasons today. I woke up not so much feeling ill, but not feeling full of vitality, either. Life has been busy of late. I find that it’s the communication of this way of life – the writing, talks, interviews and curious visitors – that tires me; the life itself only seems to keep me in good health, physically and mentally.

  Kirsty makes me a pot of tea from herbs – red clover, silverweed, raspberry leaf, calendula and chamomile – which she picked and dried earlier in the year. Such teas are not intended to treat symptoms directly, in the way that we use industrial medicines; instead they aim to aid the body in the task of healing itself, something it always wants to do. While the tea is brewing, I chop and eat five cloves of raw garlic. With that I decide to put away the pencil, light the fire, grab a book, kick back and take the afternoon off.

  If you don’t make time for health, you have to make time for illness.

  ~

  Like most of our dinners, today’s is common fare: potatoes, swede and garlic from the garden, roasted in an oven heated by spruce and beech, alongside a good-sized jack pike from the lake and a few sprigs of rosemary and thyme from the herb garden. To go with it I pick a bowl of salad: kale, pak choi, rainbow chard, purple sprouting broccoli leaves, rocket, mustard lettuce and parsley.

  If we had kept the polytunnel that, against conventional wisdom, we took down to build the cabin, I’ve no doubt that we would have a few more varieties of vegetables at this time of year. I was under no illusion otherwise. But I’m satisfied with the choice we made to eat an Irish diet – what this climate can provide without recourse to violent products like polytunnels – and all that it entails. Sometimes I miss peanut butter, bananas, halva, olives, sun-dried tomatoes, cashew nut butter, hummus and other delights that can only be grown in other climes, but mostly I don’t. And there’s a sense of real security that comes from knowing that, no matter what crises or catastrophes unfold in the wider world, you know how to put food on the table for yourself, your neighbours and those you particularly love.

  And then I remember that damned monofilament line which helped me catch the pike. I have books full of primitive fishing techniques – Ray Mears and John ‘Lofty’ Wiseman being the most useful – but there are two problems with them. One is that they are all illegal in an industrial world that at the same time not only permits, but actively encourages, bottom-trawling. Two is that they were effective at a time when our rivers were heaving with fish. Our rivers and lakes are now as barren as the soil that, along with insecticides and herbicides, washes into them with every heavy rainfall.

  One day, our waterways will be clean and full of life again, I tell myself in hope, and it’s a day I’d like to see before I die. But I fear that if we don’t learn from our past, and our mistakes, it may not happen until after many of us are gone.

  ~

  Speaking of which, I’ve just walked past the chapel in one of our nearest towns. It’s a glorious day, and four of its devotees are out tending to its garden. When I say ‘tending’ what I mean is that they are spraying herbicide on its manicured lawn. The man who is doing the actual spraying is walking along the bank of a river, and I notice that some of the herbicide is being sprayed into the river directly (more will inevitably find its way in on the next heavy rain). As he turns around to spray the stretch of grass that runs parallel to the church footpath, two of the other men – who, up to now, had been spectators – suddenly spring into action and walk alongside him, holding up a large PVC board to prevent the spray leaving an ugly film on the tarmac which leads the congregation into their chapel. I ask them, in a friendly manner, if they could at least not spray next to the river. One of them tells me to ‘leave us in peace’. I assume to love and serve the Lord. The Lord must prefe
r tarmac to rivers.

  ~

  On 23 November 1953, the last of the Islanders were evacuated from the Great Blasket.

  Thirty years later the translator Tim Enright would say:

  One cannot mourn the ending of a way of life that, especially in winter, was very bleak indeed; one cannot but mourn the ending of a culture that was rooted in the far distant past.

  ~

  There are three traditional methods of dressing a deerskin: brains, eggs and soap. Modern tanneries usually use chromic acid, which is cheap but toxic and cuts swathes through life, devastating the waterways surrounding tanneries in countries with lax environmental laws. According to Matt Richards, in his comprehensive practical guide Deerskins into Buckskins, these tanneries then market the chrome-tanned deerskins as buckskin, despite it having ‘very different properties than the traditional material’.

  Strangely there’s just enough brains in an animal’s skull to tan their hide, so I do it that way. I cut away the skin between the deer’s eyes and his antlers, before sawing a v-shaped opening into the skull until the brains are exposed. I put my fingers into his skull and scrape out the brains and put them into a bowl of hot water, before mutilating and liquefying the brains into a soup.

  Into this I soak the dried deerskin – which has already been fleshed, soaked in a wood ash solution for three days, grained, rinsed and membraned – and leave it for half the morning, before I wring it, dress it and wring it again. This morning I don’t have time to soften it – the process which made buckskin such a valued material for millennia – so I stretch it out a bit and hang it up to dry.

  ~

  I’m excited. It has been a long time since I’ve had a hot, relaxing bath after a hard day.

  I filled the bath with water earlier in the day, and covered it with a lid I made out of clear, corrugated Perspex, which we took off the old pig shed. This allows the afternoon sun to take the chill out of the water, meaning I need a bit less wood to heat it up. Before I set the fire I swap this lid for another wooden, insulated one, so that when the water does start warming up, the heat won’t drift off into the dark night sky. When you haul, saw, chop and stack your own wood by hand, you take care to use it as wisely as possible. Washing ourselves has been the most challenging aspect of the last eleven months, but the hot tub before us looks all the more appealing for it.