Treasures on the Falls and on our shelves

I picked up a beautiful bilingual brochure for the Bog Meadows — Cluain an Bhogaigh — in the Cultúrlann today, a joint publication of the Friends of the Bog Meadows and the Ulster Wildlife Trust (at the risk of being shouted at, someone should send one to the National Trust heroes on the Black Mountain so they can emulate).

The Bog Meadows also came up in my chat with young students here from London Metropolitan College, under the tutelage of Michael Corr from Ballymena, who have been undertaking a project focused on the Gaeltacht Quarter.

In just nine days, they've done a fabulous amount of work and have come up with some great ideas of how we can enhance and celebrate the road from the former Andersonstown Barracks (I note there's a design competition reannounced for this site but how can you have a design competition without knowing how the site is to be used — even the basic outline of use?) to Dunville Park.

The students had a great word for the many wonderful assets which they identified — most known to me and you — and put up on a map covering the entire wall of the offices of Fáilte Feirste Thiar, the Falls tourism group, on the falls: "Treasures". That sounds nice in Irish too: "Taiscí".

Bog Meadows is one such treasure but we discussed again the idea of having a festival which would kick off the day each spring with the sedge warbler completes its 4,000 mile journey from Senegal to the Bog Meadows; a marathon journey which the warbler has completed without fail for 5,000 years, touching down in the same west Belfast spot each year. A miracle and a treasure.

I have a video of Michael Corr (with genuine Falls barking dog in background) on the web and commend Forbairt Feirste for hosting this visit.

John Foley emails from Boston to say that Boston is the world's greatest marathon. It's the oldest (excluding the Greek early entry), I'll give him that, and also one of the hilliest. But to run in Boston you have to post a finishing time way beyond my abilities so I suspect I'll never get to test the truth of John's claim that it's Number Uno. But it has featured several times in this blog and also in a new book I've just read about long-distance runners, 'Going Long, Legends, Oddballs, Comebacks and Adventures. The Best Stories from Runner's World.' A wonderful read which does Boston full justice. (I buy these books on Amazon and would love to pass them on to our local libraries — the ones not being closed by the authorities — rather than have them gather dust on a shelf, or indeed to a reader on the Balcony. Shouldn't our libraries be asking amazon buyers to donate their read books?)