Curlew Moon. Mary Colwell

France suddenly rose, accompanied by a change in wind direction. The birds took their chance and left en masse, but what the birds didn’t know was that Britain and Ireland were still in the grip of a deep freeze. As warm continental air hit the cold air over the North Sea, a bank of fog extended 30 miles from the coast and conditions were made worse by a waning moon, providing very little light. Cold, exhausted and disorientated, the birds made for any light source they could find, hence their landing on ships and lighthouses. Thousands died.

      Bad weather during migration is not uncommon, but extreme events like this are, thankfully, rare. However, migration is always dangerous. Hunting and lack of food at stop-over sites make a hazardous journey far worse. Yet, still, the urge to fly to far away lands full of insects and good nesting areas is strong; it is an instinct that is impossible to resist.

      The shift from winter to early spring was making me restless, too. The date set for the start of my long walk, 21 April, was just a few weeks away. It was time to plan my own, hopefully far less perilous, journey to Ireland.

      Chapter 3

       ARRIVING IN IRELAND

      On a day when the curlew returns,

      Its cry circling the moor,

      Suddenly, to the man

      In love with time, the whole land

      Is the poem he will never write,

      Birth cry, love song, threnody

      Woven in voices of the living

      And voices of the dead.1

      I travelled to Ireland on 17 April, a few days earlier than the start date of my walk, for two reasons. I wanted to visit County Antrim to see an RSPB project working to restore curlews to the uplands, which now host just a remnant population. The other reason was personal. I spent many childhood holidays in Northern Ireland, as my mother was born into a large Catholic family in Enniskillen. Her death in April 2015, just a year before, gave the start of the walk added poignancy. I would begin my odyssey in a place she had loved, and I wanted time to say goodbye.

      My mother lived in England all her married life. As the only one of six siblings to leave Ireland, she held tight to her roots. The religious division and social injustice that blighted the lives of so many in Northern Ireland erupted into thirty years of war in The Troubles. On frequent visits during the 1970s and 80s, it seemed that every street corner was festooned with either the Union Jack or the Irish tricolour, flapping defiantly in the rain-soaked wind. My mother had a life-long loathing of national flags. To her unending credit, even in the darkest days of The Troubles, she never tolerated any taking of sides. She was steadfast in her view that evil was evil no matter who perpetrated it, even though those years of horror profoundly affected her own family. She understood what drove people to extremes. She recognised the inner strength of the ‘ordinary’ people of Northern Ireland, both Protestant and Catholic, and the rich cultures that shaped their experiences.

      For my own part, life with a fiery Irish Catholic mother and a quiet, intellectual father, a Church of England doctor whose soul was rooted in the hard work and grit of the industrial Midlands, made for an interesting background to family life. My mother’s Irish-Catholic view of the world, full of compassion and ritual, complexity and contradiction, merged with my father’s gentle, measured Anglican stance. It was an unusual combination. And then, strangely, curlews appear in the middle of it all. As is often the case, separate strands of life can suddenly and unexpectedly weave together. Grief for my mother and hope for the future of a bird gave an emotional depth to the start of the New Moon Walk.

      It is a cold, still dawn as the ferry draws closer to Belfast. Over one thousand years earlier, an Anglo-Saxon seafarer had written a poem about the hazards of crossing northern seas in an open boat. Storms swept over the deck, sleet and snow chilled his bones, and his ship:

      Hung about with icicles,

      Hail flew in showers.

      There I heard nothing

      but the roaring sea,

      the ice cold wave.2

      The prosaic truth about my crossing, however, is that my Liverpool to Belfast sailing was more like crossing a mill pond, and far from my feet being, ‘bound by frosts in cold clasps’, the boat was overly warm and the bar a little too noisy. ‘I take my gladness in the … sound of the curlew instead of the laughter of men,’ the ancient sailor had written, feeling lonely and uncertain on his gale-ridden sea. I did share that in common with him. I have ears only for the call of curlews, a curlew earworm, overriding the muzak and the chatter in the restaurant. Mind you, had the ferry been more akin to an Anglo-Saxon ship I might have been more prepared for the wintry blasts that strip the skin from your body in County Antrim.

      Stretching north from Belfast is an area of high plateau cut through by valleys, or glens as they are more commonly called. Even today, many of the higher reaches of Antrim are remote. Glenwherry, in the heart of upland Antrim, is my first stop before heading out to Enniskillen. Sitting at around 400 metres, this is a landscape of bog and rough pasture dominated by an extinct volcano – Slemish Mountain – a giant Celtic beast crouched on bogland.

      Glenwherry gets its fair share of rain – lots and lots of rain – and on the day of my visit this is mixed with sleet. It is easy to imagine how glaciers up to a mile high bore down on this land 30,000 years ago, their icy fingers prising open every crack in the rocks and tearing out boulders like flesh off a bone. When the climate began to warm and the glaciers retreated about 12,000 years ago, the land that reappeared from beneath the ice had been stripped of life and was scarred, bare and exhausted. But, slowly, vegetation and wildlife returned.

      Over the millennia that followed, Ireland was colonised by hunter-gatherers and then farmers, expanding westwards from mainland Britain and Europe. The great forests were cut down as agriculture spread. The climate continued to change, and after long periods of warmth and low rainfall it became increasingly colder and wetter. Upland soils were leached of their nutrients and became acidic. From 4,500 years ago, bogs began to form across Ireland. In many places farming was abandoned until iron tools allowed these sodden, poor soils to be worked again. The hopes and beliefs of these early Irish people are writ large across the landscape in the form of tombs, dolmens and standing stones. As Christianity spread, these made way for churches as the modern spiritual expression of local communities.

      In 1832 Lieutenant Robert Botler noted that the last wolf in Ireland was seen in Glenwherry in the seventeenth century. No doubt it cut a lonely figure, stressed and hungry in a hostile land. Standing here today, I could be on a film set for Sherlock Holmes’ The Hound of the Baskervilles. Through the grey, low cloud I can easily visualise a slinking form circling a stone sheep enclosure, providing scant protection from a beast ravaged by hunger. The wolf record is given added credence by an adjacent area of peat land called Wolf Bog, now home to five wind turbines.

      In 1836 James Boyle wrote in his memoirs that the people who lived here were kind, shrewd, hard-working descendants of Scottish Presbyterians and Calvinists. They were livestock farmers, and their occupation is carried on to this day. In a land where rain and gales sweep in from the west for much of the year, it is the only practical option; growing crops is well nigh impossible. While Boyle admired the upright grittiness of the people, he was somewhat less inspired by the landscape:

      The valley of Glenwherry is wild and mountainous, presenting no variety of scenery, either in its natural or artificial state, destitute of planting or hedgerows, its steep but smooth sides mountainous but presenting nothing bold or striking in their forms, being in fact, except along the banks of the river, one unvaried and uncultivated waste. At the western end of the parish the scenery is not so wild and there is more cultivation, but proceeding towards the eastern end of the glen the scenery becomes wild, dreary and uninteresting.3