The lanes near here don’t have names. Or they do – the old names, the ones the farmers use – but they’re not on any map and nobody’s made a walking route out of them. That suits me. There’s something about a waymarked trail that puts me slightly on guard, the little posts telling you where to look. These five are just roads I keep taking, most of them since before the B&B, some of them since before I came back to Kerry at all. March is a good month for them. The mud has mostly decided what it’s going to be. The light stays a bit longer each evening and comes in lower and slower than it will by summer, which means it catches everything sideways – the lichen on the walls, the small stones in the verge.
The lane behind Tom’s gate is the one I do most often, usually in the morning. It runs between two drystone walls for the first four hundred metres, and the walls are so thick with moss that in wet weather you can hear the water working through them – a very faint sound, almost interior. In March the blackthorn is just starting at the tips. Not open yet, just the pale suggestion of it along the top of the wall, and the smell in the morning is cold and green and faintly of sheep, which isn’t unpleasant once you’ve known it long enough. Bess sometimes follows me part of the way and then peels off into the field on the right as if she’s just remembered an appointment. I’ve been walking this lane for years and I still don’t know what’s at the very end of it – there’s a gate I’ve never gone through, and a way down to somewhere, and I keep meaning to follow it.
The lane off the R560 before you get to the village is shorter and I walk it when I’m not in the mood for distance. It takes maybe twenty minutes out and back, and in that time you pass an old shed with corrugated iron on the roof that moves in any wind, two large hawthorns that have grown over the lane and made a kind of ceiling, and a gap in the wall on the right where you can see all the way out to Tralee Bay on a clear day. In early March the bay is usually a flat grey, not unfriendly. The shed makes a sound I’ve never quite got used to – a low ticking rattle, as if the iron is counting something. I went last Wednesday after the rain had cleared and the lane smelled of mud and last year’s leaves and something faintly sweet I could never identify, some plant in the bank that I probably know the name of and keep forgetting.
There’s a boheen up past the small beach below Tom’s field – a proper boheen, barely wide enough for a car if the car was thin – that goes along the edge of the hill and turns back on itself twice before opening out into a rough grazing field. I don’t go there in winter because the mud gets serious, but I went last Sunday and it had dried enough. The hedges on both sides are high and close and you walk in a kind of tunnel of bare hazel and ivy, and the light in the morning falls in from the east in long pale strips. There’s a strand of field rose already putting out new growth in the bank, and one clump of primrose I always check for. It was there. Pale yellow, not quite open, and I stood and looked at it for probably longer than was necessary. You can hear the sea if the wind is right, but only just – more a sense of it than a sound.
The one I call, in my head, the round lane – though it doesn’t come back to the same point, which makes the name misleading – starts about two kilometres up the road from the cottage and follows a contour of the hill in a long slow curve. The surface is loose stone over compacted clay and in March it’s firm enough but still gives slightly underfoot, which I prefer to tarmac. From the highest point on this lane, on a clear day, you can see the Slieve Mish mountains to the north and Beenoskee to the south, and sometimes the Brandon range to the west depending on the cloud. Last Sunday, walking back from Tom’s field boheen, I went out this way in the late afternoon, and the light was already going amber and the mountains were that particular colour they go in March – a dark heathery brown with the sun on the west face – and I walked slowly because there was no reason not to.
I still have the coat from the Kenmare window in my head, months later. I’m no closer to buying it.
The fifth is not strictly a lane. It’s a track along the top of the wall field – the field I call that because there’s a long freestanding wall in the middle of it that goes nowhere in particular – and it runs for about a kilometre before dropping down through a gap to rejoin the road. In summer it’s overgrown and I avoid it. But from November through to April it’s walkable, and the ground is rough boggy grass that holds the moisture, and your boots come home dark. I go here when I want to walk without thinking, which sounds grand in principle but is harder than it sounds. In March there’s stonechat on the top of the gorse – usually two, sometimes three – and they make a sound like two small stones clicked together. I stop every time I hear them and look. They don’t seem bothered.
The garlic I planted in October has been showing green tips for a week or so now in the raised bed. The apple tree is still bare but there’s a reddening at the end of each branch that I’ve learnt to recognise, and means something is coming. You don’t need to walk far to find that, but it doesn’t hurt.