EVERY morning, I get out of bed, brush my teeth, pull on my ‘outdoor’ clothes - tracksuit bottoms and a fleece – get my breakfast and feed our two dogs. When I eat, they eat. It seems perfectly fair to me. They also appear content with this arrangement.
I slip on my runners or wellies (depending on the weather, of course), clip the dogs’ leads into their collars, pull out the door behind me, breathe in the good Waterford air and welcome another day.
Buddy – the undersized one on a permanent sugar rush, Zippy – the oversized one and four legged Buddhist - and I have a traditional walking route.
We turn left out of our estate, onto a stretch of asphalt featuring a magnificently worded sign which reads ‘Foothpath Incomplete’ and then take a left again, away from the suburbs and into the countryside.
Bishopscourt is a typical, relatively narrow country road. Not narrow enough to be labelled a lane or a boreen but certainly not wide enough to accommodate those who have no issue with breaking the 50mph mark upon it. I’d wish such drivers bad luck only that misfortune could hurl me or another pedestrian into a hawthorn.
Over the past two years, Bishopscourt has become the road I negotiate the most by foot, be it with the dogs or out for a run. It has truly become my neck of the woods.
At night, the lights of nearby Tramore line the horizon like a benign bush fire, reminding me of my good fortune to live just a matter of minutes from the foaming sea. By day, looking beyond the old farmhouse that was here long before the city sailed this way to drop a concrete anchor, the Comeraghs and Slievenamon rise above the Suir Valley.
Adjacent to Slievenamon as I look upon it during my many walks stands Carrigadoon Hill in South Tipperary, which I saw from my front door for the five years I lived beneath it in the village of Faugheen.
“You’re going back towards the mountain,” my late Dad said when I moved there, barely seven miles from Kilcash where my paternal great-great-great grandparents and many more ancestors rest. The time in those parts served me well.
The wind turbines at Baylough, a 15-minute walk from where I grew up in Sallyhene, just outside Portlaw, are also visible as I walk along Bishopscourt. Where it all began for me is just over the hill and across a field from my daily vantage point.
That the landscape which has formed and sheltered me for most of my life is all within my line of vision every morning is something I could never have foreseen prior to my coming to know and love this part of Waterford.
During a previous life, so to speak, not living too far from the part of the city where I now reside, I had never happened upon this welcoming strip of tarmac, lined by trees, ditches and farm animals when the elements permit. Now it is a part of my everyday existence and I’m so glad of it.
During lockdown, I’ve come to know several people simply by walking upon this road most days of the week. The pandemic has made a bona fide neighbour out of me and reminded me of the good fortune my siblings and I had to grow up with wonderful, gentle neighbours just down the road from us in the picture perfect cottages built by Curraghmore Estate.
One of them, a lifelong Bishopscourt resident, is as proud a Ballygunner and Gailltír GAA supporter as you’ll ever meet. I’ve happily lost count of our many conversations since home also became the home office and the stretch of road outside her house a welcome acquaintance.
Further up the road, a retired gentleman and his little dog are regularly walking in one direction while I’m heading the other way with my duo of dogs.
Amazingly, the sole farmer on the road is related to a man I travelled to South Africa with on a life-altering trip some 16 springs ago. We salute each other once or twice every week while he busies himself with the work so many families on this island have sustained for centuries.
If a global pandemic hadn’t broken out, I’d never have come to know these people as now I do or the many others who regularly walk along this road. Becoming acquainted with all of them has provided a silver lining during the socially distant times we all hope we’ll never have to live through again.
Such conversations haven’t gone down the philosophical route; indeed most have consisted of sincerely asking each other a question that’s been posed with a tad more regularity over 24 odd months: how are you? Well here we are, restrictions almost entirely behind us and we, human and beast alike within eyeshot, are all fine. How happy I am to report of such an outcome.
There’s been many a morning when a full-throated robin has skipped along the branches while I walk. I frequently hear the thrush and starling along with pheasants, pigeons and gulls as well as dogs on more than one holding a few fields away.
Horses luxuriate in a paddock for a few months here every year and are genuinely curious of human company whenever I approach them.
But the greatest local air-bound soundtrack is provided by Rescue 117, the Search And Rescue helicopter based just a few miles away at Waterford Airport. All life, as well as the means to save it, surround me on my many walks on the road below our home. It’s a present I get to unwrap every morning, followed by a cup of tea at home and then the day’s work. What a life.
Bishopscourt is a place full of its own distinctiveness while also a wonderful reminder of the rural upbringing that made me who and what I am today, aged 42: never happier than when nature is washing over me.
The year’s at the spring,
And day’s at the morn;
Morning’s at seven;
The hill-side’s dew pearl’d;
The lark’s on the wing;
The snail’s on the thorn;
God’s in His heaven –
All’s right with the world!
(Robert Browning)
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