Poca favilla gran fiamma seconda
From The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil Walter was frustrated. He searched, he wavered. Suddenly he burst out: “He is a man without qualities!” “What’s that?” J Clarisse asked, with…
Kilcash Wood is a Coillte site in the village on the lower slopes of Slievenamon. I guess climbing Slievenamon takes the focus away from here as a walking destination. It…
Continuing my September project with the first avian entry, the capercaillie. From “Whittled Away”: An oversized grouse of woodlands, the last record of which was from Thomastown, Co Kilkenny in 1760…
A while back I was reading the entertainingly gothic ghost story Ferelith by Lord Kilmarnock, and came across this passage: At last, after four years of waiting, I stumbled on the…
Extinct in Ireland continues! From Padraic Fogarty’s “Whittled Away” Wolf: Widespread and probably abundant in Ireland until a concerted extermination programme finished off the last one in the late 1700s. I…
An amusing (though historically significant) misunderstanding from Brian Cathcart’s “Test of Greatness: Britain’s Struggle for the Atomic Bomb” “For security reasons the Manhattan Project had been ‘compartmentalized’ and as a result,…
From “The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise” by Robert Cardinal Sarah, Nicolas Diat: Mankind must join a sort of resistance movement. What will become of our…
I’ve been reading Pádraic Fogarty’s “Whittled Away: Ireland’s Vanishing Nature”. It’s a sobering read, puncturing the fond illusion that many Irish have that their homeland is some kind of environmental paradise,…
Séamus Sweeney 