Country Living with Francis Farragher

It’s kind of hard to credit that we’ve already drifted past our so-called longest day of the year but at least we were blessed with a reasonably sized dollop of good weather to coincide with the summer solstice.

There’s little point in moaning that Christmas, St. Patrick’s Day and Easter only seem like days ago . . . for the moment though a time to enjoy the brightness of the long summer days and maybe take a peep back into some of the traditions of our peak days of brightness.

We’re told not to light them anymore on environmental grounds, but on Bonfire Night, June 23 – the eve of St. John’s Day – there’s still a kind of spiritual, maybe even pagan, ritual in seeing the flames from wood sticks soaring into the air.

In my home patch, there was always tiredness in the eyes after bonfire night as inevitably the following morning sheep would have to be rounded up shortly after the crack of dawn to be given a road journey on foot to the St. John’s Day, Fair of Abbeyknockmoy.

Preparation for the bonfires in those days of the 1960s and 1970s would not sit easily with the save our planet camp of today’s world, as invariably it involved a trip to the local garage with donkey and cart in-tow to source a consignment of used tyres for the blaze.

There were no winners in the bonfires contest but there was always a certain pride in feeding the fire that delivered the biggest plumes of smoke in the village, sending forks of flames into the summer skies.

All these vagaries of the seasons are down to the geometry that applies to our Mother Earth which has a tilt of 23.5 degrees with the sun at its highest [in the Northern Hemisphere] around June 21 [60 degrees] and at its lowest for the winter solstice of December 21 [13 degrees].

Last Saturday, June 21, we came tantalisingly close to achieving the target of having 17-hours between sunrise and sunset, but we never really do get there, having to settle for a potential sun period of 16 hours, 59 minutes and 19 seconds.

We also come within a hair’s breadth of achieving a 5am sunrise, just missing out by seven minutes in 2025 from June 16 to 18 while out midsummer sunsets don’t budge from the 10.07pm mark from June 19 to June 30.

Pictured: A cloudless sky . . . a liner in Galway Bay near Salthill called The World  . . . and a resting cyclist ‘takes it all in’. PHOTO: JOE O’SHAUGHNESSY.