All leading to the great fall harvests with more pagan-tinged festivities and dances and the smell of fresh-cut hay and the game-season hunting for pheasant, snipe, mallard, and deer and fly-fishing for fat trout and salmon in the dark, peaty-edged loughs, ready to be roasted on the spot over bog wood fires and washed down with fiery “gargles” of potent potato-distilled poteen. And yes—still all this in these days when the homogenizing influences of contemporary changes and the new EU-accelerated wealth of this Celtic Tiger run rampant throughout so much of Ireland. This is the time for seanachais to tell their tales in the pubs by warming peat fires (alas, a declining tradition); for the gatherers to plunder the pastures and woods for mushrooms, hazelnuts, acorns, sweet chestnuts, windfall apples, haws and sloes; for the frolic and froth of Halloween; for allowing the lazy lassitude of the season and the pooled warmth of golden evenings to buoy you up through to the coming chilly times.
