Some Irish Goats.

Frolicking kid and hobbled goat, Inis Mór. Photograph Juliet Clark, ⓒ 2011

Poet and blogger Tom Clark sent me these two photographs of Irish scenes.  They are part of a marvelous collection all taken by Juliet Clark, Tom’s & Angelica’s daughter, who spent three weeks driving round the country last April.

Beara Peninsula between Ardgroom and Eyeries. Photograph Juliet Clark, ⓒ 2011

I love the goats’ hole in the hedge.

All these goats have much longer tails than ours.

Inis Mór (aka Inishmore) is one of the Aran Islands, off the coast of Galway, in the west of Ireland.  If you think of the map of Ireland as a face Inis Mór is hovering like a grain of pollen under the nostril, and the Beara Peninsula is part of the straggly beard in the far south west.  I think Beara has more to do with bears than beards – at least, there’s a Bear Island to its south.  These locations are all coloured magenta, below:

Update:  Juliet’s pictures of Ireland are well worth looking at.  You can see them all here: http://flic.kr/s/aHsjutjDPw

The Tourist Industry.

Yesterday lunchtime, I was taking some pictures of the old-witch tree at the top of our drive.   I like the two figures on her right-hand arm, one of them looks like a high-heeled shoe, and I’m wondering whether I ought to do something with it or if it wouldn’t be best to just leave it alone…Anyway, I turned around because there was a young couple oohing and aahing about the goats, who were just behind me

This kind of thing happens all day long at the weekend.  They enjoy the attention

and Vesla in particular has no qualms about asking people for spare change.

Sometimes she follows them as far as the next bend, and you see them start to worry she’s not going to turn back.

You can see that Misty’s got a thing round her neck.  It’s an inverted dog collar that we got from the vet and it prevents her turning her head to lick a wound – a bite she got on the bottom, probably from a dog.

She seems to rather like her collar.

She was very appreciative of the medical help she got as well as enjoying the extra feed she was offered as an inducement to put it on.

Now I think she kind of associates it with the food.

Høst.

When it’s not raining, I rush out and pick Victoria plums and apples so that

when it starts again I can be in the kitchen making jam Norwegian-style (really just pots of stewed fruit with a little sugar that we take one-by-one out of the freezer during the year).  The plums go lovely colours:

Askur And The Cows.

Askur and Betty, the horses, have spent the summer with a different herd of cows from the usual lot.  Actually the usual lot was auctioned off last autumn, and it’s been redistributed all over southern Norway.  They were a herd of one hundred and twenty; we won’t be able to visit them in their fjøs during the winter as we always did, but Alma thought the fjøs was way too overcrowded so it’s probably good that they’ve gone elsewhere.

This year, the field next to our house has been rented to another, more capable farmer, who’s let us keep the horses with his cows.  There’s a funny beige-coloured breed that we haven’t had here before, you’ll see one of them below.  Alma (the girl) was out with Betty (the horse) when I took these pictures, so Betty doesn’t appear, and Askur looks a bit lonely, but most of the time they’re together.  They and the cows remind me of neighbours who have a nodding acquaintance in a rental apartment building: they peacefully coexist, sharing the facilities and minding their own business.

Although it looks as if the first picture has been taken during a balloon flight, in fact it’s merely from the hillside below our garden: