Another Life: Michael VineyJust up the hill from my workroom window, the road finds its crest in a cluster of new bungalows, their gables bright in a spinney of wires and poles. A changed horizon runs all around the hill, as new houses perch at maximum exposure to the winds: the ocean view is what matters, the spectacular sweep of islands and mountains from Clew Bay around to Connemara.
Behind the bungalows, and in waiting gaps between, the meaning of fields, walls, streams is changing, too: once the fabric of muscular, neighbourly lives, the land is now weighed as part of the view. Sheep and dry cattle still graze - as many as will fit with part-time, mainly weekend, care - and lift their heads each morning to the cars rushing out of the townlands. While town jobs and construction boom, the small-farm countryside waits to discover its future.
Somewhere in this socio-economic limbo, a whole way of life has disappeared, along with the words that spoke for much of it, even on an anglophone hillside: meitheal, céilidh, sléan. But we're not yet at the point of knowing, beyond some instinct of loss and regret, just what this life was worth.
"Only with the passing of Jack's world," writes Sean Sheehan, "does its meaning and value emerge." Jack Sheehan was his uncle, a bachelor farmer who spent his 83 years on a west Cork hillside until, arriving home with a beehive in the boot and parking his car in the hay shed, he switched off the ignition and died. Jack's World: Farming on the Sheep's Head Peninsula, 1920-2003 reconstructs his life and times in an exceptionally handsome book from Cork University Press: as a €39 hardback, it takes on the heft of an heirloom. Its painstaking, challenging text is interleaved with superb photography by Danny Gralton, Ciaran Watson and Danny Levy Sheehan, capturing the texture of land and the revealing remnants of a farming life .
Jack Sheehan, eldest son among 11 children, was locked into inheritance of the family farm, and looking after his father, while, in the 1950s, so many of his friends - and marriageable young women - were scattering abroad. There was plenty to do on the rough land of Raferigeen. The post-war grants for reclamation, funded from Marshall Aid, exacted, in specific, typewritten terms, the size of field drains to be dug, the fields to be cleared of rocks and of furze bushes the size of trees. Helped by Jack's little diaries and old bills, forms and family photographs, his nephew constructs a rare history, both of physically working with land and of experiencing it as the framework of one's daily life, one's past and one's future. Each day fades into a dusk measured out by Fastnet's five-second pulse of light.
Jack was no miserable, Patrick Kavanagh serf. He made progress - a milking machine when electricity came, a third-hand Ford tractor in 1991, a car to succeed the horses that drew his cart to the creamery (he retired them to a field and went for "a drive around the world" on Sunday afternoons).
He also read books, thought about the world, and went on local outings with the Bantry Historical Society. In his bookcase - one of the brilliant still lifes among Danny Gralton's photographs - is a copy of E Estyn Evans's Irish Folk Ways, well-thumbed and crowded with page-markers.
Sean Sheehan was one of the abundant English nephews who descended upon Raferigeen in summer. He grew up to an urgent intellectualism, producing books on anarchism (in the wake of Seattle), on Wittgenstein, Socrates and Gerard Manley Hopkins; his next will be a book on Lenin. All this helps to shape his view of Jack's life: "It was largely as a result of his work, his 'sensuous human activity' as Marx puts it, that a good working farm took shape. And in the full Marxist sense of a man being what he does, Jack's being was determined by his farming . . . "
On this track, Sheehan arrives at the "meaning and significance" in Jack's world: "Its embedded values and practices made up a non-capitalist community in some vital respects, materialist but not materialistic, for most people shared a way of life that was inimical to consumerism. Subsistence based on one's own labour can bring with it a built-in resistance to consumerism and practices of self-sufficiency can limit the expansion of the need-creating market." (This is by no means, I should say, the general tenor of his book; he has his nature-loving, Gerard Manley Hopkins side as well).
Jack himself voted Fine Gael throughout (an election poster for Garret FitzGerald peers out from the dusty shadows of his workshop). But he, too, was becoming sickened by the capitalism that made a commodity of living land.
"Cutting down wood in building site," ran a disapproving note in his diary on October 13th, 2000. He was, one might add, a man who planted trees.
Earlier this month, ants emerged from paving-stone cracks and took wing.
S Shaw, Sandymount, Dublin, 4
In summer the worker ants rear males and queens, all with wings, but keep them underground until the nuptial flight, which is triggered by high humidity. The males die; the mated queens return to earth, rub off their wings and go back underground, where they lay eggs for 10 or 20 years.
My husband found a large brown frog in a small garden. I thought frogs were green and needed water to swim in.
Geraldine Hogue, Bayside, Sutton, Dublin 13
Male frogs in these islands are brown or grey with spots, and females can have brighter colours. Only Kermit the frog (American) was green. Frogs only need water to mate and breed.
Builders working on a new shed at my house found a hornet-like insect. It is yellow and black in colour with long legs and a long black "tail".
Tommy Maddock, Oakpark, Carlow
It was a female horntail, which is a sawfly. She drills into pine trees with her ovipositor tail to lay eggs, which take two to three years to mature.
Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport,