After driving a 10-county circuit of Ireland at the weekend, I can confirm that in the words of the song, June is bustin’ out all over. But another thing that’s bustin’ out all over, with less happy results, is farm machinery.
The problem of tractor obesity is already well known. They seem to get bigger and broader every year. Wide as tractors now are, however, the things they pull are often even wider.
On the cross-country route from Monaghan to Galway on Saturday (yes, I shouldn’t have started from there but it’s where my dentist is), I was stuck more than once behind a tractor-pulled machine I guessed to be a silage baler.
In fact, as I have since learned, it was an “integrated baler wrapper”, of a model “equipped with a 25-knife chopping unit, automatic progressive system and a servo operated load sensing control valve, which when combined with the Expert Plus control console, makes the baling and wrapping process fully automatic.”
And all that technology doesn’t come thin, as you can imagine. Although most of the roads I drove were officially two-lane, the balers often found one lane insufficient for their needs, keeping at least half a wheel in the other.
This was unnerving enough when you met them coming – I held my breath instinctively a couple of times, trying to make my car thinner. When the balers were in front and you were trying to get past them, however, it was another challenge entirely.
There were two ahead of me in convoy at one point. The first driver decently hugged the grass margin long enough to let me by. The other was more militant, or possibly didn’t have a wing mirror wide enough to let him know I was behind.
For several twisty miles, he drove just fast enough to deter any attempt at overtaking but still slow enough to be annoying. Many fleeting opportunities to pass came and went, meanwhile. I was myself as tense as a wrapped silage bale by the time he finally turned off somewhere and left my road clear.
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An overnight in Spiddal later, we drove to Connemara, where you were more likely to be stuck behind a camper van than a baler. But at Omey Island, we also witnessed one of Ireland’s more unusual traffic obstructions.
As readers may know, Omey is a part-time island. It secedes from the mainland twice a day, at high tide, and rejoins in between, when you can drive onto it via a fully signposted road of hard sand.
We arrived just too late for that. The sea wasn’t bustin’ out all over: it was seeping gently in from both sides to form a narrow channel, so you could still drive halfway across.
But as it does regularly, it had caught someone unawares. From Omey’s only road, across the gently widening channel, we watched a car emerge, its occupants having lingered too long on what, since their arrival, had again become an island.
I heard myself say they were “stranded”: the conventional terminology in such circumstances. But on second thoughts, it was the sudden lack of strand that was their problem.
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June-ness was also general in the Burren, where later in the weekend, I finally got around to seeing Poulnabrone Dolmen in person.
At first sight, it’s a little disappointing, but that’s because you approach it from behind, where it’s see-through and looks like the spindly, petrified skeleton of a small dinosaur.
Only from the far side, off to an angle, do you enjoy the famous profile that makes it Ireland’s most photogenic portal tomb.
The surrounding limestone pavement is spectacular too. And despite the ubiquitous rock, the place was a riot of wildflowers: spring gentian, wild thyme, milkwort, lady’s bedstraw, common violet, bloody cranesbill, among many others. I cogged that list from a sign nearby, but I’m sure they were all there.
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A reader in Cartegena has given out to me over alleged misuse of the verb “to weave” last week. “Dear Mr McNally,” writes Terry Walsh; “You seem to have joined the ‘simple past’ crowd with weaved (sic) in today’s Irish Diary piece, which is regrettable.”
I may well have fallen in with a bad crowd, simple past or otherwise, but am at a loss as to why “weaved” was wrong. I trust Mr Walsh does not believe “wove” or “woven” would be better? Fowler’s Dictionary of English Usage tells us those are correct only when “weave” means “to create fabric”.
When the verb means “to move repeatedly from side to side” or “thread one’s way through or past obstructions”, Fowler adds, “the standard past tense and participle are […] weaved.”
The verb in my case referred to driving a car through debris on a road. But vis a vis the weekend just gone, I could also say – and hereby do – that I weaved a path around the back roads of Connemara and the Burren.
Whereas, on a related note, I suggest that not even the wool factories of Galway and Clare have ever woven a path, although American tourists would probably buy one if they did.