Ireland’s Wild Islands (RTÉ One, Sunday, 6.30pm) is not to be confused with David Attenborough’s Wild Isles, the great broadcaster’s swansong survey of nature across Ireland and Britain, which recently concluded on the BBC. This RTÉ series is something else: a soulful quest of discovery in which the Co Cork film-maker and tour guide Eoin Warner navigates the Irish coastline and sees, in its crags and wave-whipped coves, something of the spirit of Ireland itself.
Natural history as a voyage of self-revelation is a well-established genre. It is largely a literary one, championed by authors such as Robert Macfarlane, for whom a quick toddle through the fields almost inevitably becomes a pilgrimage where cosmic truths are revealed footstep by muddy footstep.
Warner brings that formula to the screen. A prowling stoat on Achill Island regards the world through eyes that glimmer like “black shiny pools of mischief”. Gannets are “like daggers” as they “spearhead” the ocean. Birdsong is a “warm duvet of sound”.
Gushing about the glories of nature brings with it the danger of going overboard and ending up in a morass of purple adjectives and overheated metaphors. But Warner negotiates these pitfalls skilfully as he steers his 120-year-old Galway hooker, Naomh Sineach, from Inishtrahull to Tory Island, in Co Donegal, and then on to Achill, in Co Mayo. (He will travel down the west coast and around to Cork over the coming weeks.)
There is lots of wildlife: basking sharks, puffins, corncrakes singing in the long grass in the desperate search for a mate. Yet Warner is spare with his lore. He skimps on mating habits or feeding patterns. Instead he extols a rare Rathlin Island hare as a “blond bombshell” and shares the Celtic legend of One-Eyed Balor, who gives his name to Dún Bhaloir, or Balor’s Fort, on Tory Island.
This is a different sort of natural-history television. The aim is not so much to educate as to stir something deeper in the viewer. “These aren’t wild places ... They’re peopleless places,” he says. “That’s what makes it different. That’s what gives it that strange wild magic.”
Such magic can be elusive, especially in Ireland, where it takes just a passing shower to turn a stunning view into a grim Craggy Island washout. But Warner conjures it with passion and wisdom in a documentary that proves there is life beyond the David Attenborough school of natural history.
