Enjoy rather than fret over autumn’s embrace

Country Living with Francis Farragher

AUTUMN, I’d welcome, had I known love in summer days; I would not weep for flowers that die, if once they’d bloomed for praise,” . . .  lines from one of our great rural poets Patrick Kavanagh and how well they sum up our mood as we approach the autumnal equinox this weekend, when darkness starts to get the upper hand over light in their relentless annual battle.

If we’d ‘got a summer’ then we all be in better fettle to look forward to the great turn in the year in the year that occurs so poignantly during the month of September when the corn is gathered, the last loads of turf are brought home from the bog, and batteries are recharged in torches that had hibernated so peacefully in dusty cupboards over the days of almost never ending light.

Our summer was, to put it mildly, very disappointing although our expectations for the season generally tend to be over-optimistic given our location in the northern latitudes on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. Sentimental memories of great summers in the past tend to be just that and do not reflect the cold statistics of our weather regimes. Here and there, but not too often, we get good summers – as a general rule, they’re a very mixed bag, bringing us a real mess of pottage in terms of our weather.

Over the past couple of weeks, our sunrise times have edged past the 7am mark while sunset has come back to before 8pm, and early next week we will reach the point where there is more darkness in our day than light. A kind of a sad time really, especially for those of us who are creatures of the land, and who love a stroll through the fields in the evening after a day picking patiently at a keyboard and squinting at a computer screen.

There are two equinoxes in the year: the vernal or spring equinox that occurs around March 20 and our autumnal one, in or around September 20. These dates aren’t set in stone because of the fact that the earth takes a little longer than 365 days to circle the sun – 365 days and six hours to be precise – so each year we lose a bit of time and our leap year trick has to be called in every 48 months when February 29 arrives.

This year in the northern hemisphere, the autumnal equinox date is taken as September 23, although I have to confess to being a little confused by this, given that the closest we come to a 12 hour split between darkness and light across Ireland and the UK is on Wednesday next, September 25. On that morning, our sunrise time here in Galway is 7.27am and our sunset occurs at 7.29pm, giving a maximum sunlight period of 12 hours and two minutes.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.