William Butler Yeats in Stolen Child coaxes us, through faery charm to, “Come away, O human child! /To the waters and the wild”, and other places of escape from a world, ‘full of troubles’, and ‘weeping’.
I had the great pleasure recently of visiting sites which would have been familiar to the poet along the stretch of coastline from Streedagh to Drumcliff Bay, Co Sligo. Over the years, I’ve driven through Grange travelling towards Sligo or Galway, occasionally stopping off to visit Yeats’s burial place at Drumcliff, but I’ve never taken the time to veer right from the village to explore the hidden joys found along its meandrous coastal roads.
During September however, I stayed in the townland of Doonshaskin, for a few days, close to the Atlantic, the monastic island of Inishmurray seeming almost within touching distance, “Long and low-lying... like a huge raft at anchor in the broad waters”, as described by Fr John Healy in A Pilgrimage to Innismurry (The Irish Monthly, 1877).
Nearby is the long sandy beach and dune system at Streedagh, close to where in 1588 three Spanish Armada ships were destroyed in a violent storm. Also there, is a saltwater marsh inlet of high conservation value where I saw more of those elegant white egrets I mentioned here before, oystercatchers and a single curlew.
To the south is Lissadell House, its grounds and foreshore the playground for the young Gore-Booth sisters, Eva, who went on to play a significant role in the Women’s Suffrage Movement, and Constance, who took part in the 1916 Easter Rising and went on to become the first woman elected to the British House of Commons.
Soon thousands of barnacle geese migrating from Greenland will descend on surrounding fields and wetlands to feed and roost during winter. Also nearby, the home of the late Dermot Healy, prolific novelist, playwright and poet. Someone who knew the intimacies of this coastline and its wildlife, he wrote of cormorants, “They fly over like flagships of the devil/with messages between the dead”. All this under the watchful eye of Ben Bulben, its flat top and deeply gullied sides, forming part of the Dartry limestones and mudstones.
It was here between mountain and sea, I saw a kestrel, falco tinnunculus, hovering above a meadow in search of prey. A common raptor in the past, the population of this acrobatic falcon has declined in recent years, a drop possibly linked to rodenticide poisoning and land use changes, reducing prey availability.
Birds of Conservation and Concern in Ireland 2020-2026, note the species is now red listed. The kestrel has long been admired for its hunting skills and mastery of flight, especially in windy conditions where it can hang motionless in the sky, ‘kiting’ without a wing beat, head still and the spread of tail feathers helping preserve balance. Hence the Irish name, Pocaire gaoithe, ‘wind frolicker’, and why Gerard Manley Hopkins in his poem The Windhover, writes of how the kestrel’s flight “Rebuffed the big wind”.
Both birds have brown coloured backs, richer in the male which has a grey head and tail. The larger female is browner overall with both having dark spots, sharply pointed wings, long tail and a facial moustache. Detecting prey is aided by the bird’s ability to see ultraviolet light, enabling it to spot urine trails left by mice and shrews moving through vegetation. When prey is visible the kestrel drops to grab it.
Back home I thought, no longer will I drive through Grange without remembering its local beauty and, after experiencing a major car malfunction, the generosity of its community.
