Here’s my latest offering for The Guardian’s Country Diary. It was a wonderful subject to write about and I have come to appreciate and delight in our native hare even more than I did before.

I would like to thank Eugene Cooney of the Irish Coursing Club and Dr Neil Reid of Queen’s University for confirming the species ID and the absence of any record of the brown hare from that part of Donegal.

Many thanks to Paul Fleckney, editor of the Country Diary, for directing my initial ideas toward this subject, and his guidance in writing it.

I’d also like to thank Teresa and Cahir Doherty for yet another wonderful stay in John Ons cottage in Malin Head; and for their wealth of local knowledge.

Finally, I didn’t get a photo of “my” hare but I found this little coin instead. And while reading around the subject, I came across this fascinating article about the minting of the Irish coins not long after the Free State was founded. I still remember the mixture of coinage that could find their way into a hand in my border county childhood. But it’s lovely to see the Irish hare commemorated and to be reminded that it has always been treasured.