A PASTORAL ELEGY (Page one)
January 2004

The dread, long-awaited news has arrived – the Planners have granted permission, and the Council mutely assented, to a new housing development on the edge of the Bushmills countryside.

At the stroke of a distant pen, the blinds will soon be drawn on my window onto the natural world. The sounds of diggers ring in my ears as I write these words on my feelings of impending loss. Already they are drowning out the mewing call of our local buzzard.

Views
Maybe born and bred farmers and rural folk take their views of the countryside for granted. But, as an ex-urbanite, every day I rejoice in the wonderful seasonal vistas and glimpses of wildlife as I look out of my kitchen and conservatory windows. Very soon I shall be “blinded” to all this natural beauty, as “black roof-tiles, white windows, and pale yellow rendered walls” take its place and block it out.

No more will I be able to see rushy meadows, fields of seasonal crops, tall trees, mature thorn hedges, the gorse bank and the gurgling stream.

Wildlife
There will be no more dusk delights of badgers, viewed with eyes and binoculars strained to their limits, to catch the awakening scratching and frolicking till the last possible second as brocks merge into the enveloping darkness for their nocturnal foraging. No boxing Irish hares at dawn, nor the watery gleam of otters at play.

There will be no more rabbits lolling in the sun and hopping in and out of the gorse bank.

No fiery burnished male pheasant “KOK-KOKING” and strutting his stuff, reprieved from the guns, whilst four of his kind stalk one of my cats in the field.

It’s goodbye to the aerial ballet of a family of buzzards, heat-seeking a meal of rabbit or shrew; or perched on fence posts preening after a feast.

And farewell to the sight of dinosaur-like herons, long neck retracted, gliding in from their nearby heronry on huge silent wings, to spear an unwary fish from the unlikely confines of St Columb’s Rill, or the expansive recently created ponds on the caravan site.

My new little friends, the beautifully olive veined and marbled frogs who’s under-developed orienteering skills bring them leaping into my conservatory, will probably disappear too.

No more mahogany foxes, glimpsed sloping off en route to their dens and cubs. Or amazingly last May Day, out in the open for 20 minutes gorging on a lamb carcass, then trotting off cross-country; head held high to accommodate the weight of the lamb’s two back legs, dangling from either side of its mouth.

There will be no more ‘tenant’ horses to befriend over the garden gate; but happy memories of huge Clydesdale ‘Lady’ and her foal; of hollow-backed elderly appaloosa ‘Spotty’, nicknamed for her dalmatian coat; and her son ‘Naughty Boy’ for his habit of nipping!

And tearful thoughts of my beloved ‘adopted’ old horse ‘Whitey’ whose agonising, icy mud-covered death throes two years ago, gave this ‘townie’ the courage to kneel beside her and feed her sugar lumps, on Vet’s advice, before she was taken to the USPCA shelter to die.

Sheep
No longer will I laugh to see black-faced sheep, line-dancing in swathes, spooked by a sudden sound; or rush to help those fence-trapped or bramble wrapped, bleating in distress and despair.

Cattle
No more chance of empathy with innocent heifers in first-time labour; then excitement when their wetly new-born calves totter instinctively to suckle; or sadness at witnessing the unseeing, lifeless body of one, hauled into the light on a length of blue twine.

Or bullocks, freed from winter housing, cavorting in green grass like kids let out of school. And prize bull, bored with his own harem, and over-eager to do his duty to every cow in sight, leaping across the stream and tatty fence to the neighbouring farmer’s herd!