When I walk in these woodlands on days like this, my thoughts go back to school days and the poet Hopkins...
"And for
all this, nature is never spent;
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There
lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
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And
though the last lights off the black West went
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Oh,
morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs”
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On this morning, pausing to admire the Rowan,
laden with its vivid red fruits, gloriously backlit by the early
sunshine, and then the Mistle Thrushes, stopping by to feed, later a pair of
Bullfinches and all around, the chit chat of Coal Tits, Goldcrest and
Long Tailed Tits, everywhere the muted sub sounds of early morning !
Along the path and up the hill towards the
remains of the "big house", a male kestrel glides overhead and comes
to rest on a beech tree, its grey and rust colouring brilliant in
the sunshine, surveying the undergrowth briefly before it resumes its glide towards the lakeshore and
disappears over the distant alders. A female Blackcap, a late
reminder of summer visitors to the woodland, makes a
brief appearance from among the brambles, to where it returns and proceeds to broadcast an
urgent and prolonged alarm call. Down by the lakeshore, a pair
of Great Crested Grebe cackle and chatter on the almost still
lake...and then, moving stage left at speed, low over the water,
a momentary flash of blue and orange ...a Kingfisher skirts the wooded
shoreline and is gone! A few skittish Mallard feeding in the nearby reedbed,
sensing my intrusion, take wing and off to the far side of the lake ,
towards Derrycassan.
Woodville is a Coillte forest, a mix of spruce
and broadleaf trees, a mini wilderness, a place apart, away from everywhere, a place of peace and
tranquillity on this autumn morning ....a place of renewal for body
and spirit and perhaps some day ..a rarity or two ?
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