This verdant isle is indeed a green gem, but for the visitor from eastern England the abundance of richly coloured flowers is the stand-out botanical feature of the west coast of Ireland.
Roadsides are a riot of primary yellow – bird’s foot trefoil, St John’s wort, ragwort and cat’s ear; pinks and purples – including common, bell and cross-leaved heather and whole hedges of fuchsia; whitish umbels of angelica, and big white and pink striped, flared trumpets of the roseata subspecies of large bindweed.
Rossbeigh dunes project out from the north coast of the Iveragh peninsula into Dingle Bay. The low lying damp slacks are full of spiky little eyebright plants with their yellow-throated white flowers. Surrounding the slack, on the dune slopes, is a scattering of pyramidal orchids, each tight conical flower spike a sumptuous pinkish purple, as beautiful as a rhodolite garnet.
Further west, near Cahersiveen, are a couple of stone forts, or cashels. Cahergal is the most impressive – probably 1,500 years old, circular, 25 metres in diameter and with walls three metres high and five metres thick. Apparently this was a defensive building, but the steeply terraced interior feels more like an amphitheatre than a fort. Time, including rebuilds and repurposing, leaves us guessing how these impressive structures may have been used.
The more modest walls of the nearby Leacanabuaile cashel are topped with grass and flowers, including the very pretty sheep’s-bit, or duán na gcaorach in Irish. This is an under-appreciated little plant; the tanzanite blue flowers look similar to the unrelated scabious but are smaller and the petals are sharply pointed. It even has its own species of mite, thrip and moth.
As a follow up to my diary of 24 June, the Nene tributary without a name is apparently called Laxton’s Brook. The village of Laxton is five miles north of the brook’s catchment, so it is more likely that the name comes from the Laxton family, who lived in Oundle, downstream and to the south of the brook. In 1544 a William Laxton here became lord mayor of London and founded Oundle school.
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