FOR 21 YEARS, Sarah Poyntz's stealthy observations and finely honed vignettes from the Co Clare landscape in the 'Guardian' have given the wider world access to a special place, writes Paul Clements.
Each day a small column appears tucked away at the bottom of an inside page of one of Britain's national daily newspapers. It is no more than 350 words long, takes at most five minutes to read, but is lapped up by a loyal following. The Country Diaryin the Guardianfeatures wildlife notes from different regions of the Britain and Ireland. The contributors write with flair about the fluctuations of the countryside, the migration of birds, or a particular aspect of the outdoors that interests them.
Since 1987 Ireland's sole contributor, Sarah Poyntz, has been writing monthly dispatches with erudition and passion about her chosen patch of stony ground: the Burren. She has one of the best freelance jobs in the vineyards of journalism. Taking the reader on a journey, she walks the green roads and the seashore, checks on the flora, observes the changing seasons, and has a friendly gossip with her neighbours about the vagaries of the weather. These encounters are squeezed into a condensed and easily readable slot.
When you've had your fill of reading about wars, coups, the turmoil of government and political squabbling, you can turn to the Country Diary, described by its editor as "a touchstone of sanity". It is an oasis in a troubled world, a calm way to start your day.
In all weathers and in all seasons, Poyntz has evocatively documented the moods of the Burren in its infinite richness, and with her personable style, entertained readers from the Orkneys to Oxford and from Penzance to Portarlington. An instinctive observer, she is skilled at capturing the character of individual species and describing what makes the place so magical for her.
Her delight in an area she adopted as her permanent home 22 years ago is obvious. For many years she had been an admirer of the column and expressed an interest in becoming a diarist. The editor asked her to send an example of her writing but warned not to hold out much hope as more than 300 people were on a waiting list to write a column.
"I simply sent off a sample diary," she explains, "and got a phone call to say they'd selected me because they wanted someone from Ireland. So, early in 1987 I began writing the column and I'm still doing it 21 years later."
WE WANDER ALONG the shorefront near her bungalow on the Black Head road and climb over a low drystone wall. Field glasses in hand, she points up to the rounded misty top of Cappanawalla hill behind her cottage and its stepped terracing where the cattle are spending the winter.
"I love writing about the Burren because I love the place and because the air is so pure. It has wound itself around my heartstrings since I retired here." Originally from New Ross in Co Wexford, Poyntz taught English in Cornwall and Cambridge, later spending time writing and travelling in the United States. It took her several years to believe her good fortune that she had found the perfect place to live on the north Clare coast. Since then she has never ceased to be amazed at the wonder of the Burren. Many of her best ideas come simply by exploring the fields and roads or the ruins of an abbey or church.
"Sometimes you don't even need to leave the house. It's inspirational just looking out through our window on to the sea and across to Finavarra and the Flaggy Shore. I read a lot about the Burren and about the fascinating wildlife and it all seems to come together. When I'm walking I never make notes but instead write the diary in my head. I go back home, jotting down what I've seen, putting the date on it, letting it simmer in my mind, and then writing it up."
Poyntz enjoys the research and finding out about some of the lesser-known flowers, or the habits of the Burren's feral goats, pine martens or stoats.
She has a thoroughly exact approach to her job. Firstly, she writes her diary in pencil in a pad, types it on to a computer, sometimes cutting it back or embellishing it. She then goes back over it, checking and rechecking, omitting needless words, before e-mailing her polished precis to London. Each year Poyntz writes 13 columns, which, over the course of 21 years, add up to nearly 300 diaries recording the comings and goings of nature.
"You need a concise writing style and can't develop anything very much. Every word and letter has to count - even the letter 'a'. But it is satisfying to produce a good diary and one of the nice things about writing it is getting letters from Guardian readers. I get fan mail but I also get what I call fan persons coming to the door. They enquire in the shops where I live, then I get a phone call and people ask if they can come and see me. They come from various parts of Britain and Ireland and when the diary appears in the international paper, the Guardian Weekly, I get Americans coming. They're very kind and say they love my diaries. Normally, as a writer, you don't get any feedback so it is great to get human feedback. I now correspond with some of them every month."
There is also a strong literary flavour to her diaries. She enjoys quoting from the work of writers and poets and is extremely well versed. Frequently she will invoke the words of Yeats, Chaucer, Wordsworth, Shakespeare or Ralph Waldo Emerson. "I feel they really give us nature in such a marvellous unified way in terms of capturing the beauty of the world. They certainly hit the nail on the head. I taught Shakespeare's poetry and he had a great understanding and acceptance of people in all their diversity. I love the naturalness of Yeats's poetry and the concept he gives of life without any stilt about it. He was a tremendous thinker and I feel he hasn't got much credit for that. I also like the natural history work of Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley, who've both written poems about the Burren."
When asked if there are any locations that she keeps to herself rather than revealing them to readers, she admits, with a glint in her eye, that she has her own special places. "I do keep one or two little secrets and I have one place that is so beautiful. It's a small area of about 20sq cm and it's in a wall. I think I'm the only person who knows about it and I keep it to myself. I look at it through every season. Small ferns and some small flowers grow in it . . . but I can't disclose its location because then it wouldn't be a secret."
Poyntz doesn't specialise in any particular topic but tackles a variety, throwing into her Burren recipe a dash of geology, archaeology, history and local lore.
"I also include birds, because they are such an important element of life here. The sea too plays an immense part in my writing. I just have to look out and no matter what the weather is like I get inspiration from the colours, the physical aspect of it, or in the depths of winter when it's roaring with a tempest."
Since moving to live in the Burren she has seen many changes - not all, in her view, for the better. "Ballyvaughan has developed badly over the years and sometimes I despair, but I try not to convey that despair to my readers because I think there is enough doom and gloom around. I prefer to write about the positive and happy things rather than emphasising the opposite. They built nice town houses in the centre of the village but there is another building near us that I think is absolutely disgraceful. It should never have even got planning permission. In the preparation of the site, huge 10m-long clints of pavement were lifted up by an earth shifter, put into a machine and ground down into fist-sized stones. It broke my heart to see that. In the end I had to drive past it without looking at it as I couldn't bear to see what they'd done. I think the county council and indeed the Government are disgraceful at times.
"In Bell Harbour they've built holiday homes that are like rabbit hutches and look terrible. Domestic architecture in this country is disgraceful. They're building houses three and four stories high in the middle of rural Ireland and there is no excuse for it. It is just sheer ostentation. People have too much money and they don't know what to do with it so they show off."
Despite her dislike for recent developments, the Burren still holds a bewitching appeal. The seasons provide her with a rich variety of descriptive copy but she finds it hard to single one out. "I don't have a favourite season. Then sometimes I rethink this and when the spring arrives this is my favourite. But when it's over and the summer comes I call it the blue and purple season and I love it too. With the arrival of autumn you get the spareness of it all, and then in the winter you see the Burren in its bare rock with the trees and their bare branches. I'm especially fond of the sea in all its wildness at this time."
CURIOUSLY, FOR SOMEONE living in the midst of a vast array of rare Arctic-Alpine plants, when pushed to select her favourite, Poyntz chooses a modest flower - the humble common snowdrop, or as Alfred, Lord Tennyson referred to it, "the solitary firstling".
"I love them all, of course," she says, with a cheery sweep of her arms. "The gentians, mountain avens, and the early purple orchids but when I see a single snowdrop early in the year rising from the stony ground then I realise the rest are on the way. There aren't that many snowdrops here but for me they are full of hope for what lies ahead." At 81, Sarah Poyntz is an institution. Like Wordsworth's daffodils, she is "jocund company". A sprightly walk with her across the limestone is a peep into Burren life and reawakens a sense of wonder and exhilaration.