In the long days of an Irish midsummer, sunset is close to 10pm, and the skies are still light at midnight. The long afternoons stretch into long evenings. Although most of my landscapes are in the wilder stretches of the Atlantic seaboard, this sylvan idyll is in the lush Irish midlands. The still uncut long grasses are sometimes called a 'late meadow'. The bird emerging from the tree shadows is a hooded crow, called a 'scald crow' in rural areas, associated in Irish mythology with the goddess of war, and its cry was thought to resemble (or to be) that of the banshee (Irish, bean sí), or fairy woman. This, as far as I know, is an ordinary non-

mythological hooded crow.

Private collection