It was like a creature from another planet. It came towards me out of the early morning mist that lay caught between the low stone walls heaped up between the fields that ran down to the shore.

At first I thought it was a medium sized dog loping along on spindly legs, probably sick with some debilitating disease like Parvo or Distemper, wobbling about from side to side, unable to follow a straight line.

I got off my bike and stood watching whatever it was as it moved through the still, damp grey of the morning. Everything was grey; the sea, the ruin of an old stone cottage, the clouds, and even the faint outline of far-off Benbulbin whose sides swept abruptly into the low mist from the coastal grasslands of County Sligo.

The creature loped unsteadily down the grassy track in my direction. At about ten metres from me it stopped and looked around. It rose up on its hind legs and seemed to sniff the air, lifting its long, black-tipped ears to listen for whatever. This was no dog. I judged its ears to be about as high as my waist when it stood erect. It had the look of an overgrown rabbit, but rabbits were never meant to be that size: perhaps it could be some prehistoric throwback, ancestor to the humble rabbit that had somehow managed to survive unnoticed in the wilds of the west coast of Ireland. Had I discovered a dinosaur?

But no. The creature’s identity came to me when it caught my scent and took off over the fields, no longer awkward and ungainly on shaky, stick-like legs, but swift, sleek and elegant as those powerful, long legs propelled it over tufted, wet grass. It was a hare.

I had always assumed that rabbits and hares were just two versions of the same animal. Bunny-rabbits were fluffy and white and lived in hutches in back gardens, hares were the wild version.

Again no. The distinction between the two is not one dreamed up by pedantic purists, they really are different, and I know of no sight that can so grace a misty, wet morning than the flight of an Irish hare over dry stone walls and through empty fields.