There is perhaps nothing worse than a city man discovering the countryside. The potential for turning into an anorak-wearing bore is all too real. The need to deafen the unaware with dull tales of newly discovered rural wonders creeps up on you. Take care, reader, you have been warned what lies before you.
I spent my adult life in Belfast, 28 years to be exact. Primary, secondary and tertiary education were all in the city. I walked to school, took black taxis to university. Beginning university two years after the hunger strikes of the 1980s was akin to visiting another planet. The whole geography of the university campus in south Belfast was alien to me and my contemporaries - and we were many. We were of the west, and we prided ourselves on the concrete in our veins. We were the generation who didn't visit a place if there wasn't a black taxi service - and that meant the countryside.
Dulled senses
Certainly, there were those of us who went feral and spent weekends in Colin Glen or traipsing the Black Mountain, but they were to be pitied. The Donegal writer Seosamh Mac Grianna once wrote that he spent too much time at school; it dulled his senses. Cities too can dull the senses, narrow the vision and reduce the spectrum to grey, green and orange.
For my own part, marrying and moving to rural Ulster was a shock to the system. (More the moving than the marrying, I hasten to add.) I now live in a place where two prams on the same side of the street can cause a traffic jam. Further, the old motto, "Ma phosann tu bean an ghleanna, posann tu an gleann", is true. Everyone knows your business. I've had people I've never met ask after the health of the children. How did they know they were sick in the first place?
Oddly though, I would be hard pressed to tell you the names of the people who live in my street. In Belfast, I knew (and still carry) the names of neighbours on both sides of the house as far as you could walk. I still see them and still - despite the children - find myself referring to them as Mrs This and Mr That. Manners were important.
That the countryside smells and sounds different to the city there is no doubt. I still cannot distinguish between cattle manure and pig slurry but the pungent odour of both is to be found on the air. The sound of tractors putt-putt-putting is constant. I have even fallen asleep to the sound of cows lowing. That, more than anything, I found disconcerting, being more used to the sound of helicopters overhead.
And then there's the lough. I live a couple of miles from the southern shore of Lough Neagh. To my regret, I have never actually been on the lough (I intend to remedy that this spring), but I cycled by its shores it for the past five years. Autumn and spring are the best times for an amateur countryman to do his travelling and observation. Winter is too cold and wet for pleasure; the summer unleashes swarms of lough flies which hang in the air like Chinese lanterns.
Hairy legs
It is a very unpleasant sensation to cycle through them. You feel their little bodies wrapping themselves around you and you emerge from the other side plastered in broken insects. Woe betide you if you chose to cycle in shorts and have hairy legs. The carnage is indescribable.
Yet even the most ignorant and untrained concrete eye cannot help but be fascinated by the wildlife of the lough. I remember with a shock the first time I saw stately herons standing in its waters. Until then, they had been nothing more than a phrase in Irish: "Chonalfadhse na corra." ("It would freeze the herons.") And the lough would freeze them but they seem able for it.
The kestrel too is a constant companion on my travels. I have seen both males and females hovering for food, glued like wobbly triangles in the sky. Smaller birds too are easily identifiable and abound: the beautiful little wren, the bullfinch, blackbird, thrush, blue tit and coal tit and chaffinch. Summer visitors such as swallows and house martins are easily recognisable. There is a pied wagtail outside the window as I type this.
Boggy ground
The topography too yields up names from the past. I cycle around a place called the Montiaghs. In my ignorance, I thought it a surname. Only when I heard a local pronounce it did I realise my mistake: Derry Mointigh, he said. The second part pure Irish: mointeach, boggy ground. And it is. But it has its own ugly integrity, its own bleak beauty.
I have found myself turning into a wildlife documentary bore. Much as I admire tales of lions on the Serengeti, I prefer those which deal with these islands. I have seen enough wildlife to make me curious about their habits: the fox tugging a carcase out of a pub bin; the stoat, his mouth filled with a bird; the poor badger bludgeoned to death by a car.
There are other ghosts here too. I often pass a memorial to a murdered man. It's not just the animals who are wild.