The sun was already sinking fast over the coastal town of Wexford when I arrived at Rosslare Point on a fine summer evening fifty years ago. I had been delayed in Dublin and arrived two hours later than planned so my friend David Cabot had already crossed to the island where the terns were nesting. This was before the era of mobile phones so there was nothing for it but to borrow a small wooden rowing boat from a local man and set off across Wexford Harbour on my own. I had no fear as I had been messing about in boats since childhood and I have a strong rowing stroke. But I had underestimated the tidal currents. Twice each day a vast body of water fills and empties through the narrow mouth of Wexford Harbour and, though shallow, the currents can be faster than a river.
As I reached the centre of the channel in the fading light, I realised that I was being dragged by the tide further and further out into the Irish Sea and away from the sandy island. It crossed my mind that I had no radio or way of contacting help. My foolishness became crystal clear when I remembered that I did not even have a lifejacket. I had only a wooden boat and two heavy oars. For the first time in my life, I tasted that strange mixture of fear and respect for the power of nature. My survival was now a toss-up between the sea and my own resources. Then my years of training kicked in. Summoning all my strength and stamina, I pulled hard on the oars and turned across the tide. Fortunately, after more than an hour of exhausting rowing, the tide turned, and I was able to pull the boat up on a shelly beach and sit down to recover. Thoughts of Robinson Crusoe passed through my mind as the small island was uninhabited. I lay back on the sand and counted my blessings.
The turn of the tide is one of those immutable things in life. Like night following day, summer fading to autumn, middle age after youth, I know it will always come. I cannot stop its steady progress. It never lets me down. Ebb and flow, fall and rise, twice a day, unfailing, dependable, predictable. In a crazy, uncontrollable world, I know that, as long as the moon is in the sky, the tide will never fail. It carries my boat along or stops it in its tracks. It pushes up the beach, slowly erasing my footprints. It leaves behind rich offerings. A spiny spider crab that once crept about the deep seabed, a heap of oyster shells dredged from the sandbanks offshore or the bleached skull of a seabird that did not survive the winter.
When the tide turns against the wind direction, it pushes the sea surface up into small crests that change the motion of a sailing boat, like driving from the road onto a gravel track. Just as the wind moves the air about, tides pull and push seawater around the coast, in and out of rock pools, up and down a beach. But unlike the wind, which is invisible, unpredictable, sometimes gentle, often angry, I can see the tide as it passes, watch its steady progress, make allowances for its effects.
The turn of the tide is a wondrous thing. The constant movement of the ocean pauses for a moment, takes a deep breath, reaches its limits and starts to return the way it came. Curtains of seaweed are swept in the opposite direction, sand grains roll down the beach, and crabs scuttle into deeper water. I feel a different pull on the boat as it implores me to follow rather than resist it. The tide is my constant friend, not a threatening adversary. But I have reached this accommodation after fifty years of experience of the sea. Sitting on that beach, it seemed like the tide had granted me a narrow escape and taught me a lesson for the future.
Tern Island in Wexford Harbour was then little more than a sandy ridge with a thin covering of dune grasses but at the time it held one of the largest colonies of terns in Ireland. Five different species of these small, delicate seabirds arrived to breed here each summer from their African winter quarters. The nests were closely spaced and little more than shallow scrapes in the sand, sometimes lined with a few shells or blades of grass. My friend David, who had travelled to the island ahead of me, had invited me to help him with a long-term research project on the rare roseate tern that nested on Tern Island in greater numbers than any other place in Europe. I was thrilled to be involved with a project where I got to see the birds at close quarters. This research had a practical application for conservation, as fitting a small sample of the terns with tiny numbered leg rings in Ireland demonstrated that these migratory birds were being hunted in Africa and the population was in steep decline. Alas, a few years later, the island was completely destroyed by a series of winter storms and the terns were forced to find other breeding sites.
As a student at Trinity College Dublin, in the early 1970s, I was excited by the idea that there were wild places and species out there somewhere waiting to be discovered. I read avidly the works of the old naturalists like Robert Lloyd Praeger, hoping to re-find some remnants of the pre-industrial Ireland that they described. Praeger began The Way that I Went, his book about a life of wanderings in Ireland, with the words: ‘It is indeed a kind of thank-offering, however crude, for seven decades of robust physical health in which to walk and climb and swim and sail throughout or around the island in which I was born, to the benefit alike of body and soul.’
Praeger was seventy years old when he wrote his famous book. Over the course of my own seven decades, I have often thought of Praeger as we crossed the same paths, although he died the year after I was born. He began life near Belfast and I was born near Dublin. In his twenties, he moved to Dublin for his first permanent job while, at the same age, I moved to Northern Ireland to work. My second job was in the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin where Praeger had been President fifty years earlier. In the Academy’s library, I was fortunate to be able to view the collection of Praeger’s own papers including a signed copy of his ground-breaking research, the Clare Island Survey. Although I will never match his achievements, he has been an inspiration throughout my life which has been enriched by natural history, reading and writing. But, in the near century that separated us, Ireland changed almost beyond recognition.
In my search for ‘wild’ Ireland, I was to be disappointed again and again as I travelled around most of the island. The native forest cover of Ireland had been removed thousands of years earlier. Mechanised farming and forestry had destroyed much of the wildness that Ireland contained in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The landscape was now highly modified from the seashore to the summits of the highest mountains. It seemed virtually impossible to find any places that were untouched by people and their use of the land.
But some small wild areas remained on the salt-sprayed coasts and islands and in the untamed region between the tides where the land and sea overlap. I found that these were the places to look for the best of Ireland’s wildlife. Even walking the wide beaches of Dublin Bay, within sight of the city centre, I experienced a closeness to nature and the natural energy of tides, winds and waves. Slowly, I came to accept that the long history of human activity on the coast was as much a part of our heritage as the wilder areas that seemed to have survived untouched. So for this book, I have given equal attention to the landscape, history and ecology of the coast in the hope of presenting a balanced and realistic appraisal of the most interesting places.
Seamus Heaney once described the coastline as a place where ‘things overflow the brim of the usual’. But what exactly is the coast? Many experts have tied themselves into knots trying to define what constitutes the coastal zone, although everybody knows that this is where we find beaches, waves, seaweed, shellfish and seabirds. The core of the coastal zone is the area between high and low water mark that is covered and uncovered by seawater twice each day. Inland of this are coastal lands such as sand dunes and cliffs that are strongly influenced by marine processes, while to seaward are shallow marine areas that receive sediments from rivers and recycling of beach sands.
Estimates of the length of the Irish coast vary greatly depending on whether the perimeters of every minor rock, peninsula and inlet are included. The best estimate is one based on Geographic Information Systems that arrived at a figure of 7,524 kilometres.6 Nearly half of the total length of coastline is found on the highly indented west coast between Cork and Donegal, now promoted as the ‘Wild Atlantic Way’. The counties with the longest coastlines in Ireland are Cork, Kerry, Clare, Galway, Mayo and Donegal. The largest proportion of the Irish coastline is made up of rock, sand and mud but there are substantial sections with artificial sea walls and harbours. We are essentially a maritime people, as nowhere in this island is more than 100 kilometres from the coast. In 2016 there were 1.9 million people living within five kilometres of the Irish coast, representing 40 per cent of the total population (Central Statistics Office, 2017).
I have always lived close to the coast. As a young man, my father was a naval officer and he remained involved in sailing all his life. He taught me the skills of rowing, sailing, swimming and fishing and he also gave me a love of the salt sea air and the freedom that comes with it. Since I was a child I have been sailing in all sorts of boats, from single-handers to large ocean-going yachts. I get a sense of exhilaration and anticipation when casting off from any harbour. Out on the waves I leave behind the cares and complications of everyday life, focusing just on the weather, the tide, the boat and my companions. I love to walk along the tideline on a western beach, searching the flotsam and jetsam of the oceans for unusual shells, seaweeds and the bleached white bones of dolphins. My grandfather’s house was in Sandymount, just one street away from the shoreline of south Dublin Bay. He told me that, when he dug a hole in the back garden, his spade went straight into beach sand full of seashells. My great-grandfather was an artist who lived on the northern shores of Dublin Bay, sketching and painting the sailing ships and fishing craft that visited the port in large numbers in the nineteenth century. I have saltwater in my veins and I feel uncomfortable living away from the sea.
In my college days, when I was staring out the window of the library, I dreamed of living and working in a wild place close to nature and learning first-hand how the natural world works. My first proper job, when I emerged into the sunlight after four years studying natural sciences at university, was on a nature reserve in Northern Ireland where I was appointed as one of the wardens. The place is called Murlough – a wonderful area of sand dunes with a stunning backdrop of the Mourne Mountains sweeping down to the sea. Here was the ideal opportunity and I couldn’t believe my luck. I caught the train from Dublin to Belfast and arrived at Murlough with a bag on my back and excitement in my head. This was the early 1970s and Northern Ireland was in a deep political crisis with armed conflict and increasing militarisation. Within days of my arrival, Northern Ireland was plunged into darkness as the Ulster Workers’ Council Strike closed down the main electricity-generating station. Before long, the period known as ‘The Troubles’ became just part of daily life and I got on with the work to which I had been appointed.
The accommodation was fairly spartan. I spent the first summer in an abandoned cottage with no electricity or running water, using rainwater that drained from the roof into a barrel. It was right on the edge of the estuary and I could hear the curlews and oystercatchers calling from the shoreline through the night. Early one morning, when I looked out through a cracked windowpane, I saw an otter loping along the edge of the tide stopping occasionally to leave its mark. In August that year, when an unusually high tide started to lap at the door of the cottage, I decided it was time to move on. I packed my rucksack and cycled over the sand dunes to the big house near the beach. This was owned by the Marquis of Downshire, but his lordship was not in residence. The land had recently been transferred to the National Trust and the big house now lay vacant. In an old stableyard nearby lived an elderly couple who had worked for the estate in its heyday. They kindly offered me an upstairs room in the stables as a temporary home.
With winter coming on I made myself as comfortable as possible. I found an old rusting iron bed in a shed, borrowed a mattress and a kettle and started to cut up some firewood to keep the place warm. Although I didn’t know it then, this stable was to be my home for the next five years. Despite the lack of home comforts, it was an inspiring place for a young naturalist to begin his first real job: living in the centre of a nature reserve just a hundred metres from the beach. From the draughty windows, I could hear the waves on the shore and, when the south wind blew, the calls of seals hauled out on the bar were plainly audible. This plaintive sound could be easily mistaken for mermaids singing to attract humans to their watery home. There were many other unfamiliar sounds as well. Herons roosted in the pine trees around the house and their night-time squawks would waken me from sleep. I heard the evocative calls of curlews and wild geese flying overhead. As the winter progressed the trees filled with flocks of thrushes, many of them migrants from Scandinavia or Iceland, and the calls of these birds going to roost at night will stay with me for ever.
My appetite for working and living in remote wild parts of the coast had been whetted by two main influences. I had read avidly the works of Frank Fraser Darling, who farmed a ruined croft on the deserted Isle of Tanera in the Scottish Hebrides. He was a superb naturalist and used his time in the wild to make some ground-breaking zoological studies of seabirds, seals and deer. I treasured his classic book Island Farm which was published in the 1940s on the cheap, low-quality paper that marked the war years in Britain.7 His many later books revealed his own passionate character as well as the science that drove him to these wild places. Fraser Darling went on to become a charismatic if always controversial figure in the world of international conservation. His adventures captured my imagination and I was fortunate, like him, to live and work close to nature.
While I was a warden at Murlough I was lucky to take part in several expeditions to study seabirds. On the Saltee Islands off Wexford we stayed in an old farmhouse, collecting water in buckets from the well. Health and safety were minor considerations here as the team of enthusiastic young ornithologists scrambled among the cliff ledges and boulders counting fulmars, gannets and puffins. We used a strange contraption like a giant butterfly net to swipe through the air and catch guillemots and razorbills as they were startled from their nesting ledges. These birds were caught unharmed, fitted with metal leg rings and released in the hope that they would be found again on some distant coast or, better still, by another ornithologist studying the same species. This was a formative time and it gave me a clear direction for my life.
Shortly after this, my friend David came to visit me at Murlough where I was now well settled into the stable quarters. With our telescopes we spent hours on the beach searching through the seabird flocks that gathered on the beach, looking for coloured rings that might provide a hint of their natal colony. One morning, without warning, gunfire rang out as bullets ripped through the vegetation around us. We didn’t wait to ask questions but dived back into cover leaving behind our telescopes which, in retrospect, could have been mistaken for automatic weapons. The sand dunes across the channel were used by the British Army as a training ground and the shots probably came from a young trigger-happy recruit who thought we were part of the military exercise.
Luckily, I survived these early experiences and began to enjoy life as a warden-naturalist. I learned so much in those years about natural history in coastal habitats but also about the business of managing land for conservation. I met some eminent people involved in coastal research and conservation such as Bill Carter and Palmer Newbould. Thirty years later, I wrote a book called Ireland’s Coastline, to put down on paper what I had learned and to make a plea for the nature and heritage of our maritime fringe.8 Since then, much has changed. The climate is becoming warmer each decade and this has serious implications for seawater and coastal habitats. Overfishing is having increasing impacts on the marine ecosystem. Plastic pollution of the oceans has become a major issue.
International travel restrictions in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic have forced Irish people to explore and appreciate their own beautiful country. This book is a guide to the best parts of the Irish coastline but it is a distinctly personal selection. With over 7,500 kilometres of shoreline, including all the islands and bays, to choose from, I could only pick those places that I know well and give just a sample of the richness and diversity that the Irish coastline holds. The foreshore – the land exposed when the tide drops to its lowest each day – is owned by the state in the Republic, by the Crown Estate and local authorities in Northern Ireland and by the National Trust in the case of Strangford Lough. From the vast tidal mudflats of the Shannon Estuary to the highest rocky cliffs in Europe, it is free to roam and to explore.
As Robert Lloyd Praeger wrote in his classic autobiography The Way that I Went, ‘I have done what I said I would, and roamed at random.’ I often take his book with me on my own travels to different spots around the Irish coast and consult it to see what he found there a century earlier. His memoirs are filled with vivid accounts of the landscape, its flora and fauna, historical and archaeological features, Irish placenames and, unlike most nature writing, frequent quotes from his favourite poetry. In one of his later books, A Populous Solitude, Praeger included memories of many people that he met on his travels:
I strolled downhill towards where the sound of steel on steel told of the presence of human industry and came upon a man engaged in driving a line of wedges into a granite block. Near-by lay the result of previous labour – rough six-foot squarish pillars, to be used evidently as gate-posts. On one of them a woman rested with a basket and ‘billy-can’, waiting for the completion of the work to offer him tea and food.
His penultimate book, Some Irish Naturalists, includes sixty short pen portraits of both amateur and professional natural scientists, including members of his own family, that he knew during his long life. He wrote:
I think my earliest contact with a man of science was when my grandfather, Robert Patterson, took me to Cultra on the shores of Belfast Lough to show me the Adder’s-tongue. By inclination he was a zoologist, but in those days, naturalists were not specialists, and with a wide knowledge of the animal kingdom he was also well acquainted with local plants.9
The chapters of my book that follow this introduction have been written following Praeger’s example on a rambling journey of memories around the coast of Ireland in a clockwise direction. Since my father undertook a complete circumnavigation of Ireland by yacht, I have always wanted to make a similar journey by sea. So far, however, I have only managed to sail the east and south coasts. I am lucky to have visited by land many parts of the west coast mainland and islands while I explored much of the north coast on foot. My yacht Ventosa is a 32-foot sloop with four berths. In it there is a collection of books including those of Praeger and I always find something of interest here during my travels. I have visited all the places mentioned in the text but at different times in my life and using different modes of transport. I start this journey on a yachting passage in the north-east corner of Ireland just a few short miles from Belfast Lough where Praeger began his life and his ramblings.