Another Life: The Monday morning sunshine brought a swelling automotive glitter to the edge of the strand and, by afternoon, a new and strange burbling sound came drifting up from the sea.
Binoculars found SUVs right out at the tide's edge and beyond them our very first jet skis, ploughing circles in a mackerel-calm Atlantic. A few days before, I had watched the local bottlenosed dolphins passing there: a serene procession of arching fins, seeming to make no noise at all.
The dolphins will be back, and spring tides will wipe the strand clean of tyre-marks. But recent weeks have brought another change, a permanent, man-made erasure of a little bit of what the Romans called genius loci or spirit of place.
Topographically, our corner of coast is a tangle - even, in gleaming, mid-winter floods, quite a mess. Rock, sand and water interleave in a windswept sprawl beneath Mweelrea. An arm of the sea used to reach right in behind the dunes, a scene re-enacted now in great spring tides that join up the lakes and leave seaweed up the boreen giving access to the strand. "Road liable to flooding", says a sign beside the bulrushes.
One of the more unruly elements of this landscape has been the river from the mountain, the Owennadornaun (a name we have failed to unravel, even with the evocative flights of Dinneen). Its upper reaches run through deep clefts in the bog and spill around bleached white boulders. Further down, picking up volume and speed in a flash-flood, it cuts through the skirt of farmland between the bog and the sea. From time to time it has broken its banks and scattered its burden of cobbles across a grassy field.
It has also been in two minds about its final exit to the strand. For a long while it entered the big lagoon behind the machair, scouring out the sand brought in by the spring tides. Then, one night half a century ago, it refused to take a corner in a meadow and charged on, tearing out a new course beside the salt marsh and traversing, in the process, the boreen to the strand.
Thus it created first a shallow waterfall across a sill of rock, then a pool, then a ford across the boreen: rarely any obstacle to a tractor and only sometimes, in the wake of a storm, to us in our wellington boots. The trick then was to keep one's eyes on the far shore and not look down at the rush of water, the dizzying, coppery flood. There was something ecstatic in the crossing, even if - as could happen - I needed to carry the dog.
The ford was the first line of defence for the wildness of the shore. In summer, when the stream was a mere babble over stones, it sorted out the people who would never think of taking off their shoes: their cars retreated in laborious six-point turns between the field banks. Beyond the ford, too, the boreen was rocky and rutted in a final stretch to the sand. There, the tidal channel to the lake set a second watery barrier.
But the ford was much more than an awkward quirk of a river: it set a threshold to the natural world. One never knew, walking down to it, if a heron might be standing in the pool. Dippers once nested at the waterfall, and sand martins annually in holes in the bank above. Sandpiper, grey wagtail and pied wagtail were all part of the sparkling and airy spirit of the place. Some feel for it may come across in my painting, executed at the ford in its heyday, so to speak, and bought, at a time of penury, by a passing American art dealer from Vermont.
Changes began some months ago as machines addressed the river's untamed flow and continued even as summer left the ford a totally dry stretch of stones. First the little waterfall was hacked away, as if to smooth the riverbed. And then, the other morning, I found the boreen closed to all but "local traffic". Down where the ford had been, a digger of Wellsian proportions was heaping rocks over twin sections of wide sewer pipe.
This created an instant hump-backed bridge, which in turn disappeared beneath many more tons of stones scooped from the bed of the river and dumped at either end. Relays of lorries brought massive glacial boulders from the stacks cleared from fields many miles away and these now armour the new, high riverbanks as they narrow to the pipes. It's a logistically impressive achievement (even, if you count the great carting of boulders, an ingenious use of natural materials), and carried out with extraordinary dispatch on the eve of the holiday week-end.
Campers and SUVs can now sweep down without hesitation to the tidal apron of the strand. The ford is left to memory. In a world where people and nature lead parallel lives, it was a crossing-place, in several more senses than one.