Ireland day 1402. Thursday 31 July 2025- Preparation

Today’s summary	Spent the morning on another video call with another friend in the UK, then packing things ready for a weekend away we’re going on starting tomorrow. After a late lunch, Val and I walked up to the Demesne and discovered some curious oak-apples, then we went to the garden centre for bird food, followed by a walk up over the hill to the Portmarnock shop for refreshments and finally back along the coast to Malahide. Relaxing evening with TV red wine and salad
Today’s weather	Mostly dry with sunny spells but a light shower late afternoon. Light northerly wind. Appx 20c

Today’s overview location (The blue mark shows the location of our route)		Close-up location (The blue line shows where we walked) (Click button below to download GPX of today’s walk as recorded, or see interactive map at bottom with elevations corrected): Galls Gardens Hill and Coast

Commentary

We are going away for a long weekend tomorrow – it’s a Bank Holiday here in Ireland on Monday so we are taking the opportunity to spend some time with a group of friends in a cottage on the west coast. By the way, the bank holiday has the very welcome spin off benefit of there being no Cervantes Spanish on Monday, which means I have a few days longer to do my (extensive) homework. The other spin off is of course that some preparation for our trip is necessary. So we spent part of the morning getting all our stuff together so we can load it into the car first thing, and hopefully make an efficient and quick getaway in the morning.

The other part of the morning I spent on (another) call with a friend back in Kent, UK. We used to work together so it was interesting to reflect on developments in our former policy area since we both moved on. We were speaking for nearly two hours. There was indeed a lot of ground to cover.

We just had a very light lunch – pretzels, dried fruits and nuts, and a cup of coffee – before setting off for a walk in the afternoon. We wanted to catch up on some fresh air and exercise. We have a bird feeder on our balcony which we put peanuts in from time to time and as we had run out, we thought we would go over to the garden centre to get some more. To get there, we walked through the Demesne, where we came across oak trees infested with remarkable galls (see photos below) – which of course caused us to pause for a full investigation. They were really quite unlike anything we had ever seen before, either in their morphology or in their profusion.

After our biology field trip, we walked on to the garden centre on the Back Road and got our peanuts (well the birds’ peanuts, strictly speaking, as they are said to be unfit for human consumption – though I can’t really see why). The weather was holding up well at this point, so that rather than returning straight to the flat, we decided to go on up Seamount, over Paddy’s Hill and down to the coast at Portmarnock. Once there, the temptations of Spar proved irresistible, so we came out with a selection of treats to fire us up for the return journey. In my case that was an ice-lolly and a chilled coffee.

We sat on the shore initially for our refreshments, but a brief shower passed through so we had to decamp hastily into the bathing shelter to finish them off. It soon dried up, though, and we finished our sojourn straightforwardly. We stopped in at SuperValu along the way, to pick up some more essential provisions for tomorrow’s trip, before finally getting back to the flat at about 5pm.

In the evening, I did tackle a bit of my deberes (some more of the Lola Lago story) as I suddenly realised I don’t think that when we get back I will have time to do it all before next Wednesday’s lesson. Then we had a ham salad for dinner, with a good glass of Malbec, before rounding off the evening with some light TV (and when I write “light TV” that is code for “I don’t know what we are going to watch as we hadn’t decided by the time I wrote this blog – but it’s unlikely to be anything too heavyweight”).

So that’s all for now – next instalment from the west coast of Ireland!

Today’s photos (click to enlarge)


An oak apple – there were so many of them on this particular tree that I thought they must actually be some form of acorn. Val corrected me and Google told us they are probably oak marble galls and they are produced as a result of infestation with marble gall wasp eggs (Andricus kollari). The process is similar to the Knopper galls shown at the bottom of this blog, but the species of oak being infected, and the species of wasp doing the infection, are slightly different. Crushed galls mixed with water, iron (from a rusty nail) and gum arabica makes an indelible brown ink. The American Declaration of Independence was written with this gall-derived ink, apparently.	Queen of the Castle!

Summer meadow on Paddy’s Hill, looking over to Lambay Island	Fascinating Fuchsias on Wendell Avenue, leading down to the Spar shop on Portmarnock beach



I must admit I have never seen anything like these before. They are strange star-shaped growths on an oak tree, looking a bit like star anise fruit. A bit of Googling revealed that they are actually Knopper galls, which grow on the acorns of Turkey Oaks and Pedunculate Oaks. The acorns are unable to germinate if they have these growths. They are caused when the female Knopper gall wasp (Andricus quercuscalicis) lays eggs in the developing acorn and the tree produces this peculiar corky outgrowth to protect itself from the developing wasp larva. Presumably it works both ways as the gall prevents the larva from being eaten by predators