An Irish Boxing Buddy

IIt is 2015 and eight years since I posted on this blog. Boxing Buddies no longer seem to be as popular, perhaps due to postal costs, so I have decided to make an Irish Boxing Buddy to travel alongside me as I letterbox around Ireland.

Fireball in his camouflage.

Fireball out of camouflage.

Fireball Lig-na-Paiste is an Irish Dragon. There are several translations of Lig-na-Paiste but the one I like is 'Last Great Reptile'. Saint Patrick chased all the serpents out of Ireland, which is why there are no snakes here, but the dragon called Lig-na-Paiste remained overlooked. This dragon outlived Saint Patrick, terrorising the neighbourhood until St. Murrough defeated it.

As I mentioned Boxing Buddies seem to have gone out of fashion and the Atlas Quest Boxing Buddy board is very quiet, so Fireball might be the Last Great Boxing Buddy. In addition to this he lives with me in Ireland, which was not the original purpose of Boxing Buddies, but he will be helping me to maintain or plant Irish Letterboxes, blogging as we go.

Letterboxing in Ireland seems very different from letterboxing in England. To begin with there are no ancient footpaths or bridleways with rights of way as in England, so it is difficult to get away from the roads and traffic when walking. There are some long distance hiking and cycling tracks that have been created recently in places like the Wicklow Mountains which are wonderful, but that is different to being able to ramble around the local countryside.

Looking back over the years I have done a lot of walking on moorland, as can be seen in the photos in the old blog posts here. Now I have swapped moorland for the seashore and coastal areas here in Ireland.

Fireball and I have been itching to get out and start letterboxing. We have lots to plant and all the old boxes to check and maintain as we go. There are one or two to find as well, but a lot of the existing letterboxes in Ireland tend to be on the western side of the country left behind by letterboxers visiting the country for holidays. The majority of letterboxers seem to fly into Shannon airport (possibly because they come from America) and travel on from there. Dublin airport and the east coast does get a few visitors however, and we have been pleased to see a steady trickle of visits to our boxes over the years.

The letterboxing bug has never left me since I started in the early 1980's, but it waxes and wains over the years mostly due to real life commitments. Now I am settled here in Ireland and the letterboxing bug has hit me in full force once again.

As usual, whenever you are dying to get out and letterbox it starts to rain :-( We had a glorious sunny (if cold) April but now it is pouring down. This would not have deterred me once upon a time, but old bones tend to prefer dry comfortable conditions. Besides I want sunny weather to take some good photographs for this blog!

Letterboxes Ready To Go

 In the meantime I have been busy indoors. Housework I hear you ask? Good gracious me no, more like carving, making visitor books, sewing little stamp covers and searching the map for possible interesting spots. I can never decide whether to cover my boxes with dark paint or not. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. I reckon if a letterbox is hidden properly it shouldn't need to be covered with camouflage, but then again it does make it so much easier to hide and also less easily seen if someone else doesn't re-hide it properly.

Tomorrow rain, hail or thunderstorms we are going to get out there, so watch this spot!
..