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.
Our small parcel of land is bounded by an ancient, low, stone wall, built of slabs and boulders that must have taken immense manpower to move. There is history here that we are slowly uncovering, like the old flax ponds that once were part of a thriving linen industry, using the acid bog water to soften the fibres brought from nearby fields before bundling them off to the mills, and the crumbling, overgrown outline of an old stone road on our low, southern boundary lined with giant, sessile oak, leading to the spring on our southwestern corner that must once have been an important water source for the locality.
An old guy, whose lively, gleaming eyes belie the years told by his deeply creased, leathery skin and toothless grin, stops by sometimes, tells us he sold this land, long ago, long before we bought it. He tells us where they hand cut turf on the bog, and dug waterholes for the cattle in times of summer drought. And how he would climb to the top of our hill, madra rua, he calls it, the hill of the red fox, where two giant boulders sit as relics of a land carved from ice and aeons, to watch foxes play in the fields below. He tells us with the unbridled emotion that spills with age, that us he is glad to see us here, keeping the land that clearly was his love, and that brings me so much joy and inspires me to preserve—no, to reinstate—the heritage and life of this land. The location and topography is prime for sitka plantation or wind turbines, either of which would wreck havoc to the delicate life systems here. No, I have a very different vision: one of an integrated, vibrant, nature-farm ecosystem that echoes the memories of the land and works with the land to gently restore its verdure.
We are into our fifth year with this land now, but only our second winter living on it. (I have written previously of how we gave up our little cottage homestead thirty miles away to come and live on the land in a 16ft caravan, I won’t repeat that story here). Besides that low stone boundary wall with a rusted and rickety old sheep wire fence alongside that sags across the bogs, propped up with rocks over the rock, there was nothing here. The land had been open, summer grazed by sheep and goats, then lain fallow for a year or more. Old, rank purple moor grass choked the ponds and grasslands, gorse scrub and bracken usurped the lower slopes, and the heaths were a tinderbox of dry scrub and thatch.
Our work is to restore diverse, organic, species-rich, native pastures; to restore fertile, structured soils. To get there (without deep ploughing or subsoiling) we need to plant a lot of trees—native, broadleaf trees that will break the pan, catch the rain and give depth and fertility to the soil while offering shade and shelter to our livestock and the land—in open, wood-pasture style, shelter belts and hedges. And fence off areas into fields and paddocks to enable us to properly rest and rotate our pastures, to manage the impacts of our livestock for the best benefit of the land and ecosystem, for healthy land, healthy animals and healthy humans.
Our livestock are integral to our work on the land, as our tool to munch, manure and restore our pastures while transmuting mud and rain through the rough scrub that grows here into our nourishment. For this we have a small herd of dual-purpose dairy and meat goats, and a small flock of hardy little Shetland and Mayo-Connemara blackface hill sheep—animals that are light on the land, well adapted to the landscape, and thrive on heather, gorse, rock and rain. I wrote about working on the land with goats during the summer, and I will write more on them and the sheep another time.
Our green season is short, the moor grass falling dormant from late autumn through spring, greening when the hills erupt into life in June. For now we bale graze the sheep on meadow hay over areas we want to restore pasture, and then over seed with native grasses and forbs.
Plans for this winter include planting several shelter belts and stands of native willow, alder, and oak; restoring and properly laying our roadside hedges, grown wide and straggled by years of neglect, now nicely thinned by our goats (their favourite job) for us to get in and do the work; and permanent fencing the next set of small fields that we are slowly carving out of the open landscape, to be rested, planted, or bale grazed.
This is all expensive, labour intense, and very slow work, done on foot and by hand over this rough terrain by my husband and myself, while he holds down a full time job and I run the farm and make what extra income I can crafting my sheep’s wool rugs and hides, and writing this Substack. We’re not a commercial farm, we don’t make a profit from the land, we don’t have Entitlements to grants or farm payments—partly by default, they don’t make it easy for those of us from non-farming backgrounds to access land or subsidies—but mostly because we choose to work and live on the land under our own tenet.
Some photos from around the farm, through the seasons:
A little catch up on the season around the farm: It is November, the month of mud and rainbows, and the land is saturated. Storm after storm has ripped across the land and the hills are deceptively bare. Life has retreated into the sodden soil, where it slumbers and gestates. Days are short and settled into the lulling monotony of winter routines of feeding, bedding and hauling hay on repeat.
Breeding season is done for the sheep. Six ewes, one ram, two weeks. Practically a year off. A small and sweet handful of lambs to be expected next April, and I can give my focus to the goats, resting the land, my writing here, and growing a fabulous wool crop from the other thirty-odd non-breeding ewes.
The rams are working over the top field where the devil’s bit scabious grows and the moor grass had smothered the pasture (see second last image above). We grazed the moor grass hard all summer, and now they’re spreading hay, trampling mud and manure, making a levelled, turned up mess for me to over-seed in spring, so that it will spring back fresh and green. We’re finding this method of spreading hay to be much more effective than simply throwing down seed on bare soil that only washes away in the rain or scorches in summer drought. Next week they will move onto the next field-in-the-making to be given this treatment, where they will spend the rest of the winter trampling hay, munching down the moor grass, making mud and alchemising soil.
I love these reports! As my husband and I endeavor with the same challenges and dreams (but very different landscape) with our shoats (sheep and goats) and land, I am deeply inspired and interested in the stories of others doing the same. I’d love to hear more about you...where you grew up, how you came to this work, who taught you what you know. Also, more on how you tend your goats. I am such a novice. I love your account. Thank you!
To arise each dawn where I now live in Appalachia, and have such beauty for my eye to rest upon as I sip my coffee and look out past the porch is perhaps my most favorite blessing. When I see your photos, I sense you share this appreciation for the blessing of beautiful earth.