It wasn't particularly crowded in the Roundstone area last weekend, they say, though bird-wise the air resounded with the voice of the cuckoo. Mind you, it's a hefty sound that one of these birds can make. We all know about the female pushing out an egg from the victim's nest while she lays one of her own. What David Cabot adds to that is the surprising statistic that she does it in ten seconds. And, further, may repeat the process from 10 to 20 times.
But if last weekend was less populated by tourists and second-homers than expected, this coming weekend should show a big influx to the west. For, as the experts say The Fly is up, meaning the one that matters, The Mayfly, ephemera danica. There was a time when professional Dublin seemed to desert the city when the word went out: surgeons, lawyers, even judges found reasons for not being available. For about a week. Nowadays 48 hours will do. Apart from these Nature Notes brought back by one weekender, as elsewhere in Ireland, the talk was of house prices. Even modest, straightforward traditional cottages are being offered at what you might call Dublin prices. And there is much expectation about the big new development at the old Clifden railway station: new hotel, new houses, but the old station and the platform are left as reminders. Everyone who knows Clifden - and what a legion that is - wants to see it.
One of the more memorable and hilarious contributions to our knowledge of the great bog which stretches from Errisbeg near Roundstone to Clifden, comes from Praeger's The Way That I Went. He describes the doings of a group of specialists, including two Scandinavian scholars, on a very wet day in August 1935: "the floating surface of the bog slowly sank until we were all half-way up to our knees in brown water. The only pause in the flow of argument was when Jessen (Copenhagen) or Osvald (Stockholm) in an endeavour to solve the question of the origin of the bog, would chew some of the mud brought up by the boring tool from the bottom of the bog, to test the presence or absence of gritty material in the vegetable mass."
Frank Mitchell, who was one of the party, could not resist repeating this passage in his fine The Way That I Followed. Two men who contributed enormously to our knowledge of this island, with zest, knowledge and good humour. Much is all-modern in the area, but the bogs and the beaches and the mountains remain.