16.

April 19th. Dogs and Caves.

My furthest neighbour, Robert, passes me on the lane, in a flurry of mud and gear. A gnome on a quad bike. He is going up into the hills to meet friends and make a great deal of noise, as it’s the weekend. We two have a mutual antipathy, since I complained about a young dog he kept in his barn and which wailed every night so that I couldn’t sleep. My silent misery matched the animal’s protest until I lost it and threatened to go to the Maire. The puppy was re-housed with his other hounds.

He keeps an assortment of these in pens, within hearing distance. They are all amiable enough, but out of the hunting season, spend their days on the roofs of their kennels, to avoid the accretions of their own shit that join with stone, weed and rock to create their ground. Every so often, at a signal from one of their own, they set up an almost choral howl. This deeply upsets me and on worse days makes me think of selling up…..


But then there are almost silent times, profoundly quiet days, when I can only hear birds, the occasional voice or vehicle. The children are at school, the dogs are too warm and I watch, work, walk and listen.

In a landscape minus human beings there is a surfeit of beauty but a human says those words and so sees the landscape and edits it, alas. The mountains tell of deep and distant time, before and beyond human experience and thus frighten me a bit. Too far to walk, to high to climb, to deep to fathom. In a cave not far away, 2 km. inside, are marks of childrens hands and rust and black drawings of horse and hind, 15000 years old. What are equally as fascinating are the more recent graffiti, which mark the walls for perhaps one km. in. 200 years ago, people were perhaps too afraid to go further inwards. The caves had a quite different meaning for them.