Looking out at the wonderful sunny, still day, it is easy to forget what the weather can bring. Last night for instance, as I lay in bed, the wind got up, and I realised I could hear flapping plastic. Above me. Which is where flapping plastic ought not to be. So I got half dressed, trudged out and clambered onto the roof (it’s easy here, the lowest one is near the ground), and lo and behold, the wind had caught the one area of the carpet/plastic covering of the roof with no soil on it, and it had been flapping around in the breeze. Couple of rocks, easily cured, back to bed.
Then this morning, I see this –
and we are somewhere in the 60-90mph zone. Winds like that pull bits off roofs without even thinking about it, and so of course today’s job has been to knuckle down and finish carting soil and sods up onto the roof to complete the job. Very fine it looks too, and the material that is up there seems to be knitting together nicely. We should now be wind -proofed, roof wise.
In getting the soil for the roof, I have to strip it from the enormous outcrop of granite at the end of the cottage, which is a fascinating job for several reasons. Firstly because the house is made from this very rock, and as the soil is removed you can clearly see where the rock has been cut to take building material. You don’t get more local than that.
Secondly because in the soil there are all manner of things that have gathered there over the intervening 150 odd years. Whether the rock was covered in soil deliberately or not I don’t know, but along the way it has acquired a wide range of pottery, bits of steel tools, and spent rifle casings, all of which look very similar to the unused ones we discovered in the shed.
So as I scrape soil from the rock I imagine my predecessor standing on the same spot, rifle at his shoulder, and the casings falling to the ground beside him. A world away, and yet so close as I uncover these fragments.
The rock has its own power too, just the sheer bulk of it. Not ‘a’ rock, just ‘rock’. Connected directly to its distant larger Mourne cousins, it has a presence all of its own that I cannot explain, and somehow once uncovered it feels larger than the grassy mound that covered it.
I remember a relative of the family who owned the cottage mentioned it. We call it ‘the rock’, she said. I had to bite my tongue to prevent the words ‘Oh really, why is that?’ escaping. Having said that, it is undeniably, a magificent rock.
