Another Life Michael VineyThe frosty sunshine found Connacht full of puddles, some the size of lakes: they glittered all the more brightly with a morning glaze of ice at the edges. The land was full to overflowing after endless weeks of rain (a record 45.5mm in my rain gauge one day in December).
It's been a different rain, falling in huge, hurried drops as if the clouds couldn't wait to get rid of it - batharnach or clagairt, as one correspondent quoted from the Irish, or "lumps" of rain as it might be rendered locally. Down at the shore, the mountain river gouged its way the whole length of the strand before its swollen, peaty torrent could swerve into the sea.
Foaming down our hill-stream, the same rains tossed out the rock that anchored my little improvised dam, and flung the house water-pipe out after it (endless anoraked trips up and down the hill to sort the airlocks, a chore I haven't had for years).
All this was a first instalment, I presume, of the 20 per cent increase in rainfall we are promised here in the west, never mind waiting until 2050.
As slugs trace silvery paths across the bedroom rugs and slime moulds come peering through the windows - well, almost - I've been browsing Landslides in Ireland, the recently published study from the Geological Survey of Ireland.
Just after New Year, a friend intending to reach us by the narrow road through the south Co Mayo mountains found it closed at the head of Killary Harbour, near Aasleagh Falls, one of the wettest areas in the country. There had been a modest landslide along the steep northern slopes of the fjord - a stretch now well-flanked by new bungalows and site excavations. What worries the GSI is the pressure of development on marginal and scenic land, racing ahead of caution and research about the riskier contours of the island.
Until the 2003 calamities of Pollatomish and Derrybrien, Ireland seemed an improbable candidate for any major landslides. But while our mountains are what other lands call hills, a great deal of the island's mantle is either blanket peat or glacial debris - both potentially unstable layers, given the right geotechnical properties, pitch of slope and intensity of downpours.
Nor are landslides anything new. Quite apart from major bogbursts and bogslides notorious in local folk history, there have been thousands of events that never found their way into the record. A pilot survey carried out by GSI in the Breifne uplands, in the north-west of Ireland in 2005 recorded over 700 historic events over a "county size" area.
The GSI has set up a webpage on which people can record landslides and this has added at least 117 verified bog flows, slides, creeps and rock falls (http://www.gsi.ie/ workgsi/geohazards/myform.htm). Added to the national database, these should help alert county planners and engineers.
The mechanisms that lead to mass movement of peat are not yet fully understood. But research that followed the Pollatomish landslides showed that blanket peat more than half a metre thick on a slope steeper than 15 degrees can be a major hazard: exceptional rain can set it flowing or lift it off the gravel or bedrock. The extremes of hot, dry summers and sodden winters can make things worse by cracking the peat and drying it out, then pouring in water in winter to shear it from its base.
Glacial till, or boulder-clay left behind by ice flows, covers much of lowland Ireland and forms many of its "soft" coasts and cliffs. It can seem an unlikely source of risk: in a mix of boulders, gravel and sand, one imagines an excellent drainage. Boulder clay should, indeed, be stable at a slope of two horizontal to one vertical, but water flowing from sand layers can cause an "internal erosion" that undermines the upper clays and breaks the slope apart. No wonder Irish Rail commissioned a civil engineer to study the impact of rain on man-made track embankments in glacial till.
Road embankments, too, come into question: a further argument, probably, for planting them with soil-binding trees.
Boulder clay with a skim of soil clads most of our own well-worn hillside, scattered with ice-age boulders and quilted with grassed-over lazy beds. There's a trudgeable slope up to the mountain wall and then, up under the ridge, the lapful of bog that stores our water. The streams that run from it have carved some capacious ravines on the way - over centuries, I like to think, not all at once.
So we're not exactly quaking in our wellies. But one little fact in Landslides in Ireland has rather stuck in my mind. On the same day Dooncarton Mountain fell on Pollatomish, the Shetland Islands had 100mm of rain in three hours, causing 20 peat slides. That was a lump, indeed.
Eye On Nature
In the middle of January my wife encountered a wasp in our kitchen. Is this as unusual as it seems for these northern climes?
Charles Glenn, Derry
All wasps die in early winter except for the new queens, which go into hibernation. One may have emerged in the mild weather.
A hawk perched in the apple tree in my garden. It had distinct white spots on its brown-grey back, beige bars on its chest and vivid yellow rings around its eyes. I could not identify it from the descriptions I read of sparrowhawk or kestrel.
Liam Boyle, Clonmel, Co Tipperary
Your hawk was probably a juvenile sparrowhawk, which will develop a grey back as it becomes an adult.
Delgany has a glen that used to be nice and dark at night. Houses were built and four very bright street lights were installed recently. Since then I have heard birds sing all through the night.
Linde Fidorra, Delgany, Co Wicklow
Urban street lighting has become a false dawn for birds and will probably shorten their lives by using up too much energy.