Ireland day 1556. Thursday 01 January 2026- Godwits

Today’s summary	First day of 2026. Spent the morning starting our 2025 Irish tax return then had beans on toast for lunch. Afterwards, went on a walk to Centra to get refreshments to be enjoyed while overlooking the lagoon. Saw unusual seabirds in the lagoon on the way back which Google thinks are Barr-Tailed Godwits. Had prosciutto salad for dinner then watched “The Night Manager” and “Chef’s Table” later.
Today’s weather	Cold sunny and dry. Moderate north westerly wind. Appx 4c

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): Godwits Lagoon walk

Commentary

Welcome to 2026. A whole new year beckons to be explored and enjoyed. What an exciting prospect!

Anyway we started the day in a rather more mundane note. As readers of this blog will no doubt have realised, anything to do with tax is one of the biggest bugbears of my life. So, as one of our New Year resolutions, we determined to get our tax done as soon as we could, and with the minimum of fuss.

Of course it’s all made more complicated by the fact that we have to do both Irish and UK returns, and also by the fact that the two countries’ tax years are different. But fortunately for us (or not, depending your viewpoint of how New Year’s Day should be spent) the Irish year runs from 1 January to 31 December. So there was nothing to stop us getting on with our an Irish return right away.

And so it was. After the usual breakfast enjoyments, we got the spreadsheets fired up, logged on to the various online portals (when we could actually remember the passwords) and got started.

Because this is the fourth Irish return, now, that we have done, it’s beginning to get a lot easier. The template spreadsheets are completed, we know what numbers we need and where to get them, and we know roughly what the numbers should be.

So we made good progress and by lunchtime the job was well over half finished. Hopefully we will be able to polish off the rest tomorrow and get it to our accountant next week.

Once we had done as much as we felt we could without giving ourselves major headaches, we stopped and had lunch. Just a simple beans on toast preparation, but in terms of easy satisfying comfort food, it’s hard to beat.

Lunch was quickly finished and tidied away and as it was looking sunny outside we decided to head out for an afternoon stroll.

Today we thought it would be nice to walk out to Centra, via the Demesne, for a change, then back via the Lagoon shore. It turned out to be a good choice. Centra was busy as it often is, and we got teas and coffees from the machine, as our routine demanded. Today, though, Centra had had a revamp so it felt a bit like being in a parallel universe where nothing was quite where you expected it to be. The man on the checkout told us that in fact the reorganisation had happened in November – which reminded us, with some surprise, that it’s been quite a long time since we were last out that way.

We had our refreshments at the picnic table in the park down by the shore. The table is another new innovation – it definitely wasn’t there last time we visited.

As we walked back towards Malahide afterwards, we kept a close watch on the wildlife in the lagoon. There’s always quite a lot of seabird activity and today we were treated to the sight of three Barr-Tailed Godwits (at least that’s what Google tells us). These avian visitors are rare visitors to Ireland’s waters – certainly I’ve never seen them before. Normally they live in the Arctic but they do overwinter around the coast in the British Isles and Africa. Some subspecies migrate huge distances to escape the Arctic winter – travelling all the way from Alaska to New Zealand non-stop. Incredible.

We made our way back to the flat, where we had, of course, another cup of tea while Val roast some Jerusalem artichokes, which were absolutely delicious if somewhat volcanic. We followed that up with some more tax work, then shut down the spreadsheets and called it a day.

Finally, we lined up the ingredients for dinner proper. Tonight it’s prosciutto salad followed up with the last of the Christmas pudding. We’re going to enjoy it in front of the TV – catching tonight some more of “Chef’s Table” then probably a re-watch of the excellent “Night Manager” for the 53rd time. So I’d say that 2025 has got off to a pretty good start. Long may it continue!

Today’s photos (click to enlarge)


Arboreal silhouettes in the Demesne	Lengthening shadows over the cricket pitch – and it’s not even 2pm yet!

Checking out the new picnic table in the park next to Centra, overlooking the Broadmeadow Lagoon	Swans serenely gliding in the Gaybrook Stream – it won’t be long before the latest batch of cygnets comes along. The seasons never stop rolling!

Heliotrope (Petasites pyrenaicus). It gets its name, apparently from the phenomenon of helioptropism – the movement during the day of the leaves and flowers of the plant, to follow the sun. NB you might expect it to be a member of the Heliotropium genus but it isn’t, That is a completely different plant grouping altogether. Petasites belongs to the daisy family, whereas Heliotropium belong to the Borage family	Seafield House catching the evening sun on the opposite side of the lagoon

Here’s one of the birds that we think are godwits. There were three of them flitting around but I only managed to get a picture of one. There’s an enlarged view in the header image at the top of this blog