The spell is broken.

The cold dry spell has finally been broken. The Irish spring has arrived. For the last couple of weeks we have had more Mountain fires than I would care to remember and last night it began to rain which should bring them to an end. This has been a hard season, three of the crew got burnt, me included! Not serious burns rather more like loosing your eye lashes and eye brows and a bit of fringe, with some superficial reddening of the skin, or the odd blister.

I suppose the toll is harder on the families. Take mine for example. It got to be a station joke that whenever my wife cooked a roast dinner that we would be called out just as I sat down to eat it, this had a knock-on effect of her wanting to sit down and enjoy a nice dinner together so she would cook another one on another day! Same thing! Six times this happened. So when it came to her birthday meal which my son was home from school for with his girlfriend visiting, I decided not to let Jackie cook just incase, and ordered a nice Chinese,  only to have the lovely beef in Black bean sauce put onto my plate and with my taste buds exploding with anticipation took the first mouthful. Thats all I got to have of that, and it's not good for your digestive system if you eat it cold for breakfast!

Each years mountain fire season however refreshes my memory banks with renewed enthusiasm for the mountains at night. There is something that touches me deep inside, the silence, the vast skies, the stars. At night after the light of the fire is out and you sit and rest on a tuft of Un-burnt heather your senses somehow become even more aware of the landscape around you and the different effects of moonlight and shadow. Sound in the absence of light seems to become more amplified, and above the smell of ash you can catch the perfume of the small pink flowers of the heather. Over the years I have been the pathfinder on the mountains to our crew, quite a lot of responsibility! They will follow me down the mountain back to the road or track where the engine was left, or where we can get it to pick us up from. I do this by night vision only, no torches! I have tried to explain about the rods and cones that make up the shapes of the light sensitive end of the human eye but it tends to fall on deaf ears.
The tracks that wild animals make have been laid down over hundreds of years, and if you know what to look for you can see them light the way for you. On one occasion it was a full moon that lit the way on a cold cloudless night, and the light shone silver on the surface of the tiny spring that I was following, and the moon shadows fell magically over dead land or depressions which we stayed clear of. If you relied on torches all this magic would disappear in a man made orange glow, the kind that hides the stars over every town and city even on the clearest nights. You would become reliant on this glow rather than your senses. You would miss out on the feel of the changing geology under foot, the different textures of the bog, the subtle hollow ways through the waist high heather made by generations of sheep, the wool of which shines out like cats eyes snagged on branches, not a golden fleece, but moon silver.

So I bid farewell to my beloved mountains, even if it's a temporary one. The next time we will be up it will be usually to the sad sight of sheep with lambs that have been caught out by the flames of careless campers or pick-knickers with portable barbecue's, or to the drastic cry of the Hen harriers as they circle over head as the flames and smoke engulf their nesting site. In a way I hope that it remains wet for the spring to enable the wild life to recover from the ravages of man, and for us to recover from the exertion of this years busy mountain season.