ANOTHER LIFE:AT INTERVALS through the Tiger years, the opinions of many local planning inspectors pitched a sad Greek chorus of resistance to the carve-up of the Irish countryside.
Others, perhaps overwhelmed with work, seemed almost ritually submissive to the blithe beneficence of county councillors. But even county planners could be brought to succumb to golf-course trumpery on a sufficiently brazen scale.
Last year, the voice of authoritative outrage rang out in An Bord Pleanála. “The entire design is obnoxious, obtrusive and overbearing on this unspoiled and pristine coastline,” rasped its inspector. “The site itself is breathtakingly beautiful, and as it unfolds from east to west it exhibits an astounding untamed coastal countryside, which is an unspoiled wilderness worth protecting as part of our national heritage.”
The site was above Gallarus beach, a few kilometres west of Tramore in Co Waterford. Here, on 90 hectares, much of it on the cliff tops, a big new hotel and golf course with attendant tourist lodges and executive homes would have transformed the landscape. It would also, materially, have trespassed on the feeding grounds of choughs, the scarce, red-billed crow of Europe’s western coasts, its conservation at Gallarus already pledged in a special-protection area.
Perhaps, in retrospect, the developers were spared an empty Tiger structure. But their defeat is given generous reprise in a new book by Declan McGrath, naturalist, college lecturer and lifelong activist in defence of his county's wildlife and landscape. The Waterford Coastfollows his earlier guides to the Comeragh Mountains and the wildllife of Waterford city. Full of his fine photographs and maps, it is a testament to desktop publishing skills and the personal freedom of content such enterprise permits.
The Waterford coastwas "known to very few" when Robert Lloyd Praeger was going his way a century ago, and even today the glorious sandy coves beneath the cliffs have been largely unsung. The loftiness of the cliffs, their ancient volcanic ash and sandstone carved by sea and weather, and the scale of the Tramore dune system and the wetlands at Dungarvan can be a stirring surprise. McGrath knows every step and each attendant bird, hawkmoth and wildflower, and in a big book crammed with knowledge, his pages of inviting walks are classic of their kind.
A second new guide celebrates another escape for a pristine Irish landscape. In Burren Country(Collins Press, €12.99), the Belfast writer Paul Clements paints a nightmare vision of the landscape at Mullaghmore if the Office of Public Works had not finally abandoned the building of an interpretive centre, with car parks, within sight – even perhaps earshot, when the wind was right – of the magic mountain.
His future fantasy of milling traffic, noise and queues for the loo may not be his most distinguished passage (his lone epiphany on Mullaghmore’s grey summit does a far more affecting job) but shows appalled concern for a landscape that has drawn him south year after year.
With its many enchantments of natural history, the Burren’s special silence, cloudscapes and shifting Atlantic light are all notoriously conducive to solitary reverie and heightened tone, and Clements’s often finely wrought language is all of a piece with teaching creative writing each spring in Ballyvaughan. His travel writer’s instinct, however, pulls the the book happily back to earth in lively engagement with interesting people, and the music and esoteric whiskeys of the Burren pubs.
The promise and pressure of ecotourism is also an issue for ecologist and writer Philip Watson, whose 50-year love affair with the North's one inhabited offshore island shapes Rathlin: Nature and Folklore(Stone Country, £9.99). There, in the 1960s, as a teenage twitcher, he spotted Ireland's only pair of breeding golden eagles; he has returned again and again, enfolding the whole remarkable life of this chalk-and-basalt rampart halfway between Ireland and Scotland.
This is not, as he says, a guidebook, but a splendidly discursive tour of Rathlin’s natural (and human) history as personally explored. Thus, the sex life of lobsters emerges as a by-catch of Watson’s fisheries research alongside Rathlin’s lobstermen in the North Channel’s surging tides. Rathlin has its natural celebrities – a golden hare, a last few breeding choughs – but its big ecotourist spectacle is the immense gathering of breeding seabirds (some 96,000 guillemots) at the island’s cliffs and rock stacks. This brings thousands of birdwatchers to Rathlin, neatly corralled into buses at the harbour and whisked away to the best viewing point.
But finding the right balance between growing streams of visitors and the private lives of human and wild residents is an issue with resonance from Rathlin to the Burren and the cliffs above Gallarus Beach.
The Waterford Coastcosts €25, including postage, from Declan McGrath, 10 The Estuary, King's Channel, Waterford
Eye on nature
Even county planners could be brought to succumb to golf-course trumpery on a sufficiently brazen scale
Four chicks have hatched in the nest of the great spotted woodpecker at the end of my garden, the first in Dublin in hundreds of years.
Wyn Beere, Kilternan, Dublin 18
The bracken around where I live turned brown and died in great swathes in June. I’m no great lover of bracken but would like to know why this is happening.
Judy Russell, Glencree, Co Wicklow
It may have been sprayed with weedkiller.
I understand that sparrows were in steep decline, but I’ve never seen a reduction in my garden. They dominate feeding and bully other birds. How can I attract other birds to my garden, or reduce the number of sparrows?
Eric Conroy, Sundrive Park, Dublin 12
The sparrow population is stable in Ireland but in decline on the continent. To encourage other birds provide plenty of shelter.
While fishing two miles south of the Old Head of Kinsale on June 28th, I noticed about 50 swallows flying south, away from the land, over a 15-minute period.
I never saw any of them fly back towards land.
Kevin McDonnell, Berrings, Co Cork
Do they know something we don’t?
Last month I saw a great skua harassing a sandwich tern at the Martello Tower at Finvarra Point, Co Clare.
David Walsh, Ranelagh, Dublin 6
Michael Viney welcomes observations at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo, or viney@anu.ie. Please include a postal address
