Mistle Thrush are Singing (Mistle Smólach ag canadh)

As a child I wandered the countryside around Inishowen, in County Donegal, with my Dad. Like his shadow, I was never far away from him.

My dad was into birds… of the feathered kind... and would bring my attention to their different songs.

The Mistle Thrush are said to sound melancholic, stilted with repeated phrases, almost like a blackbird but in a minor key.

Thomas Hardy’s poem, The Darkling Thrush, describes how their song can rise and fill the listener with awe.

“At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead,
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited.

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small,
With blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.”

There was once an old ruin of a house beyond Miss Alice’s Orchard where we used to ‘borrow’ the odd apple as children.  The local gun club has a pheasant pen in her orchard.  I used to get up early and run down to feed them before school.  Early winter mornings have a distinctive beauty to them when the air smells of the earth and the colours are constantly changing the play of light across the fields.  Amid the decay there is a definite promise of life and living.  I remember the Mistle Thrush’s repeated, silver song rising into the air and how that made me glad about being there at that one moment, surrounded by Hawthorn, Holly and Whin.

• Original Irish landscape oil painting
• Donegal landscape painting
• Péinteáil Tírdhreach Dhún na nGall
• Original artwork
• Oil on recycled surface.
• Painting size 27.5 x 21.5 cm
• Framed size (approx.) 42.5 x 36 x 3cm
• White limed wood frame with warm grey mount
• Price includes frame.