Halcyon: A Kingfisher in Gortrush Wood

There is a folk saying recorded in Mark Cocker's Birds Britannica that "Only the righteous see the kingfisher." As both a birder and a poet, I treasure Cocker's book—an encyclopedic volume that weaves together both natural history and the human associations of some three-hundred-and-fifty species—and I particularly treasure this proverb. It is easy to speculate as to why this beautiful saying would have come into existence. The kingfisher, with its electric blue back and head and its coppery-red breast, is the most brightly colored of all birds in these islands. It is rarely seen, and when it is spotted, usually glimpsed only very briefly. The most common sighting would be of a small, vivid glint of blue light whizzing low across a lake or river. By the time you can say "Look! Kingfisher!" to your companion, or even to yourself, it will be gone. Its color and brevity always leave a deep impression, a sense of great luck, almost of revelation.

My partner Jane and I moved to Ireland in 1980, when we were in our late twenties. We had been living in Oxford, taken there by the M.Phil. I pursued at Pembroke College. Oxford is a wonderful city in many ways, but I was keen on birds and wildflowers; Jane loved to walk and liked to paint landscapes. As time went by Jane and I hankered increasingly to live in the countryside, without ever being able to work out exactly how to do so. Then, when good friends, a couple who lived in Dublin, suggested the four of us might buy a cottage in rural Ireland and move in together, we agreed without a second thought.

In those days, it was still possible to buy an Irish cottage for very little. Our friends found a suitable cottage in the small village of Owning, in South Kilkenny, near to the borders of Counties Waterford and Tipperary. We came over and lived with them happily for a couple of years before we bought a small cottage of our own some seven miles away, in a town land called Tobernabrone. We have lived there ever since, nearly half our lives now.

My father had died in 1978, too young; he was only fifty-nine. The following year, I was offered the chance to do a Ph.D. at the University of New Mexico, on a particular aspect of the work of D. H. Lawrence, whom I had been studying at Oxford. It was an offer I was keen to accept, but when I raised the prospect with my mother, she asked me directly not to go: she felt she still needed my support. My mother was the kind of woman who never talked openly about her feelings, so I could well imagine the emotional wrench, the psychic cost, she paid to make such a request. I also knew it meant that she really did need my support. I felt I had no right to move so far away from her.

But my mother was happy enough about our move to Ireland a year later. Time had passed; Ireland was closer; and she shared my love of the countryside and the open air, which, indeed, I had inherited from her. She had a strong need to be outside, in the fresh air, using her body. She loved to walk, to swim, to play tennis, to row. It wasn't a case of her feeling she ought to take exercise. The need ran much deeper: it was a fundamental part of her nature, something independent, solitary, even wild in her, something that had to go its own way, outside. Her need to be outside increased after the death of my father. No doubt it helped her to cope with her grief.

Tobernabrone consists of a few dwellings scattered among farmland. The name, in Irish, means "Well of the Quern." The well is found in the farmer's field next to us, a small spring rising through the hole in the center of a quern stone ormill stone. Its water was once held to cure...