Around the Farm

on the land, our little ridge of Irish hill and how we farm it

Our land is a strip of rough, hill land in the foothills of the Cork and Kerry Mountains, in the southwestern corner of Ireland. On a ridge of shale and clay between the valley and the high hill, it is rock, heath, bog, and old, wet grasslands on shallow, peaty, iron pan soils. It is steep, rugged, wet, and exposed. It rains a lot—I mean really, a lot, so that we are trussed up in wet gear and wading through mud and flood for much of the year—and the wind is a near constant that rattles through our ears. Not much grows here now but heather, bog myrtle, gorse and moor grass, and a handful of specialised species like the sundews, butterworts, mosses and marsh orchids that flourish on the wetlands. It is wide open to the sky and whatever the heavens hurl at us, and it is breathtakingly beautiful.