Did you fight for the right to ruin your own country?

I hate you. Hate is a dangerous word which I use neither lightly nor loosely, so let’s establish the fact here and now that I have no idea who you are, but I’m pretty sure there’s more than one of you.

Last year an oven appeared on the bog just up from Grassy Knoll. Representing both the pinnacle and nadir of our civilization, that oven sitting proud a hundred yards into the bog bugs me every day I walk Lady dog.

A few feet away bags of hand-cut turf await the traditional journey home, to be burned in a fireplace, as they did hundreds of years ago, with cauldrons and kettles hung low over the slow glow of peat’s heat. Now however we don’t need to make a fire to survive or cook our food. We have ovens to do that.

We also have beds and cupboards and you saw fit to dump them alongside your oven. A metal gate and oh, lovely, a bag of trash right in the middle of the road.

“No girl, stop sniffing at that. Come on Lady! Away!”

A couple of weeks ago some chopped conifers and tree stumps appeared at the end of the bog road. If you dumped them in the field they would eventually return to the earth, but no, you just tipped them onto the tarmac.

Around the same time the smashed pieces of a brown garden wall were left in the middle of the bohreen at Grassy Knoll.

A few days later when you tipped a whole load more conifers onto the edge of the bog, you thought it’d be a great idea to plug those gaps of open air with broken drawers, old kitchen cupboards and - especially lovely for the local wildlife - plastic netting.

The oven is no longer alone. Now there’s all kinds of crap that will never rot on a bog.

500 years hence, when archeologists dig down to discover what kind of a civilization lived here now, will they think we worshipped ovens?

Will they create great legends and mythologies, drawn from these bizarre ancient people who buried their holy broken possessions on the bog, possibly because they knew well the bog would preserve them?

To read Charlie’s column in full, please see this week’s Galway City Tribune.