A strange light, rising wind and sudden coolness marked the solar eclipse over Port Laoise.

There was something strange about the light in Port Laoise this evening.

We were nowhere near the path of totality, and cloud meant that there was very little of the eclipse itself to see directly. Yet as the Moon passed across the Sun, the change around me was unmistakable.

The light became subdued and slightly unreal. It was not simply darker in the ordinary sense of an evening drawing in or a cloud passing overhead. The whole quality of the daylight seemed altered.

Then the wind began.

Earlier in the day it had been comparatively still, but during the eclipse the wind noticeably strengthened. At the same time, the warmth went out of the air. What had been a warm summer evening suddenly felt much cooler.

It was a reminder that sunlight is not merely something we see. We live within it.

Take away even part of it for a short while and the world responds.

Meanwhile, on the BBC, pictures from Burgos in Spain showed something altogether more dramatic: totality. The Moon became a black disc against the Sun, surrounded by the pale corona. A few minutes later came the brilliant flare of returning sunlight.

Here in Port Laoise, there was no such spectacle.

Instead, beneath broken cloud, the eclipse was something experienced almost through the skin: a peculiar light, a strengthening wind, and a sudden coolness in the air.

Perhaps that made it more interesting in its own way.

For a little while, an astronomical event taking place hundreds of thousands of kilometres away changed the ordinary atmosphere of an evening in Co. Laois.

Earlier in the day, before the eclipse reached us, I had written a poem for NeuroDivine called The Oldest Shadow. It imagines birds carrying an ancestral memory of earlier eclipses: the strange hush, the retreating warmth and the instinct to wait for the light to return.

By evening, sitting beneath the changing sky in Port Laoise, some of what I had imagined in the poem felt unexpectedly tangible.

The Oldest Shadow can be read on NeuroDivine.ie.

Above the clouds, the Moon continued quietly across the face of the Sun.

Down here, the light changed.