By the end of the 19th century, Praeger was clearly exhausted after the massive effort to complete his huge work, Irish Topographical Botany. He had been lodging with his friends the Tatlows near Dundrum, County Dublin, and would have walked or cycled from there to and from the National Library each day. Mrs Tatlow was a naturalist interested in marine molluscs, and about this time she and her husband left Ireland to live in Germany. In the autumn of 1901 Praeger, now aged 36, was persuaded to visit them to help him relax after his intense work in the previous five years. It was there he met a young woman named Hedwig Magnussen and, following a whirlwind romance, they were married the following year. A letter from one of their Dublin friends noted:
Dr. and Mrs. Praeger were always so happy together that it was a pleasure to be with them. Each, in turn, told me the story of their engagement. Praeger said that he had ‘no thoughts of matrimony in his mind’ as he started off on his holiday and met Hedwig, a friend of the Tatlows. He could not speak German and she could only speak what he called ‘schoolgirl English’ (she had been for a while at an English school). Yet within the fortnight they managed to get engaged. From the first she learned to share his interest in botany and also to share his love for the beautiful scenery of the coasts of Ireland.’1
In the early 20th century, due to Praeger’s extensive experience of all Irish counties, he was invited to write guides to different parts of the country for tourists travelling on the new railway lines. This was followed by publication of a whole series of ‘Official Guides’ for routes such as those managed by the Belfast and County Down Railway. In his autobiographical book The Way that I Went he often slipped easily into the role of a tour guide to the landscape. ‘If you ask what is the best county in Ireland to walk in, I reply Donegal; the best region to cycle in, Connemara and its natural adjunct West Mayo, or alternatively Kerry.’
The successful collaboration organised by Praeger for the Lambay Survey of 1905–06 now appears like a trial run for the much larger Clare Island Survey that was to follow. The Mayo island was chosen by Praeger because it offered a large enough unit, well separated from the mainland, and could also provide a small hotel as a base for the dozens of naturalists that he planned to attract. He was absorbed by the question of how species colonised isolated areas of land and their methods of dispersal. It should be remembered that this was just a few decades after the publication of Darwin’s landmark book On the Origin of Species, and the biological community was puzzling over how different races of plants and animals, isolated from each other over long periods of time, could evolve into separate species. Darwin had demonstrated how small oceanic islands, such as the Galapagos off South America, can have a whole suite of species that are not found anywhere else, and naturalists in Ireland were searching for any endemic Irish species to show that nature in Ireland was equally special. Praeger was especially interested in how the flora of Ireland differed from that of the neighbouring island of Britain, and from the near continent of Europe. This movement was also happening at a time of great cultural and nationalist revival, when Irish art, literature and language were coming more into focus. The concluding remarks in The Way that I Went capture the inspiration that Praeger found in the west coast and its outstanding value for tourism: ‘The Atlantic fringe, with its tall brown hills, its tattered coast-line and its snowy foam, is the region to which one’s errant thoughts recurrently stray, and which remains a lodestar to people of many lands – a magic region which, once viewed by the stranger, rests forever in his memory.’ Today, the west coast is branded for tourism as the Wild Atlantic Way, forming one of the longest defined coastal routes in the world. It stretches all the way from West Cork to north Donegal, following a tangled trail of coastal roadways. It was along this route that I set out to explore some wilder areas, mainly on foot.
Sheep’s Head
Lying between Dunmanus and Bantry bays, the long Sheep’s Head Peninsula is the smallest of the five narrow ridges of land that jut out into the Atlantic Ocean. Although remote by road, the Sheep’s Head Way was one of the first long-distance walking routes in the country. It is a 200-kilometre waymarked route that follows the perimeter of the peninsula and includes eighteen looped walks for shorter outings. It includes some fine cliff coasts, a ruined village and old copper mines. Some of the old cottage ruins on this route, abandoned in the 1940s, are known as the ‘Crimea’. This strange name arose as a result of constant arguments among the families who lived here after the Great Famine. This prompted a visitor to liken it to the Crimean War, which was taking place at the time.2 On a fine winter’s day, I followed one of the looped walks on the south side of the peninsula. This started at the small village of Ahakista, where I strolled along a quiet country road turning south on the coast around Farranamanagh Lough and ending at the next village of Kilcrohane. Trumpeting calls coming from the lake alerted me to the presence of a small flock of whooper swans, winter visitors from Iceland. The outlet from the lake flows beneath an impressive stone clapper bridge. The path also passes by some ruined buildings which were once a Bardic School. Bards (or file) were highly respected people in Irish clans, as they were part poets, part prophets who were expected to know the history of their people and give them insights into the future. Young men were sent here to be trained for at least seven years. When qualified, a bard was assigned to a particular clan chief, where he was responsible for continuing the spoken traditions of the clan.3
Just above the village of Kilcrohane lies a farm that was home to Jack Sheehan from 1920 to 2003. This ordinary man’s long life paralleled the development of the Irish state. He was one of eleven children born into an impoverished family and grew up in hungry times, when emigration offered the only prospects for most of his siblings. He took over the farm when his father died and cared for the fields throughout his eighty-three years. He lived alone here through the period when all farming depended on manual labour and horsepower, leading into the phase of mechanisation and rural electrification and finally to farming supports from the European Union. For Jack this was home, and he rarely left it except to bring his milk to the creamery.4 I felt that the story of Jack and his farm was probably representative of many smallholders in the west of Ireland over the last century.
At Ahakista, I went to visit the Heron Gallery, which showcases the work of artist Annabel Langrish. Her compelling paintings focus on the diversity of wildlife that surrounds her home here on the Sheep’s Head Peninsula. The gardens around the Gallery, designed with an artist’s eye, were a great spot to enjoy the gorgeous, wholesome local food I found in the lovely café. The organic gardens are informal, with colourful flowerbeds and a walk around a large pond surrounded by wildflower meadows and young woodland. There is also an orchard of Irish heritage apples, two polytunnels and raised vegetable beds growing all the salads and vegetables used in the café. I followed a path leading up to the ridge, where there is a great view down to Dunmanus Bay.
Bantry Bay
When he was a young man in his twenties, Praeger was selected to join a pioneering expedition in 1888 to study marine life in the deep waters off the West Cork coast. In common with the north-western Rockall Trough, this is one of the areas where the continental shelf at the edge of Europe comes closest to the Irish coastline. The leader of the expedition was a remarkable man with the delightful name of William Spotswood Green. He was thirteen years older than Praeger and was, at the time, a Church of Ireland rector in the parish of Carrigaline on the west side of Cork Harbour. But Green’s real love was the sea and, when his church duties allowed, he spent his time exploring the seashore around the harbour and studying fish and marine life.
Earlier in 1888 Green had presented a report ‘On the Fisheries of the South and South-West Coast of Ireland’ to the Royal Dublin Society (RDS), in which he highlighted the quality of the Irish spring mackerel and the high returns that could be achieved. He wrote that the mackerel were ‘very large, from two and a half to three pounds each and fetch nearly twice the price in Billingsgate of the mackerel caught on the English coast’. Later that year the Royal Irish Academy agreed to fund one of his deep-sea research cruises in a ship called Flying Falcon. After some initial trawling in Bantry Bay, West Cork, the expedition turned west and sank the dredge in 345 fathoms (631 metres) of water almost 100 kilometres from land. Praeger wrote that ‘the introduction of steel-wire rope for dredging and thin steel wire for sounding, had made these operations much simpler than when hemp had been employed’. (WW)
The next dredge reached down to almost 2,000 metres to explore a then unknown world of the deep sea, which was in total darkness. A further sample from over 2,300 metres took an hour to recover from the seabed and ‘in its net a variety of strange and beautiful animals’, which must have appeared exciting to these Victorian naturalists. After surviving a gale at sea, the scientists made a final haul which contained, ‘a splendid catch of marvellous creatures. There were great sea-slugs, red, purple and green; beautiful corals, numerous sea urchins with long slender spines, a great variety of starfishes of many shapes and of all colours including one like a raw beefsteak, which belonged to a new genus; strange fishes and many other forms of life.’ Battered by further storms the ship turned for Bearhaven in Bantry Bay. Praeger wrote, ‘I remember that when at last grey dawn gladdened our sleepless eyes, Green’s face, ghastly white under a sou’-wester, appeared at the cabin door and looked around the wreckage strewn on the floor.’ In 1890 Green left his parish and became Inspector of Fisheries for the RDS. Two years later he was appointed to the Congested Districts Board, which had been set up by the government to try to relieve poverty and improve the prospects of the people on the western seaboard. It focused on the potential of fishing by building local piers and supplying new boats and nets.
Castletown Bearhaven, near the entrance to Bantry Bay, is today a thriving fishing port. Opposite the harbour I walked right around the island of Dinish, which has been developed as a fish-processing centre and is cluttered with the modern paraphernalia of fishing – nets, winches and boats under repair. Towards the head of Bantry Bay is the village of Glengarriff and another island known as Garnish (or Ilnacullin), which contains a unique garden with many rare plants that survive here because of the frost-free conditions. Travelling out by boat to the island I was fascinated by the groups of harbour seals that lay on rocks apparently undisturbed by local ferries that pass close to them several times each day. One tree on the island was chosen in 2014 by a pair of recently released white-tailed eagles to build their large, bulky nest, but they only managed to successfully rear chicks in a few of the subsequent years. In the summer of 2020, I was transfixed by live video footage of these magnificent birds as they ferried fish and seabirds that they had caught in the bay, back to a single growing chick in the nest. These eagles were once a relatively common sight on the west coast, but they were gradually exterminated by shooting, poisoning and egg collecting, until the last pair nested in County Mayo in 1912. The reintroduction of these eagles to Ireland began between 2007 and 2011, when a hundred young white-tailed eagles were brought from Norway and released at Killarney National Park. They have since spread throughout the west of Ireland, with up to fourteen breeding pairs formed in some years, most of these on inland lakes. The pair breeding in Bantry Bay has the only known coastal nest site in Ireland.5
Just off the town of Bantry is Whiddy Island, which had a population of over 500 in the mid-19th century. The pilchard industry was the main source of income for the islanders, who processed the fish for export as they came ashore. The island remained relatively unknown until the late 1960s, when a large oil terminal was constructed here. This was designed to accommodate the largest supertankers sailing directly from the Middle East. In 1979, a French tanker, the Betelgeuse, exploded while it was unloading a cargo of crude oil at the terminal. The blast and subsequent fire killed fifty people, while the oil continued to leak into the bay for weeks afterwards. This is still considered to be one of the worst maritime disasters in Irish history. The terminal was never fully repaired but was transferred to the Irish government in 1986 and used to hold the Irish strategic oil reserve. The long, semi-derelict jetty has now become a novel artificial nest site for breeding seabirds, with fifty-three individual black guillemots found there during a pre-breeding survey in 2017. There are also up to ninety shag nests and plenty of gulls breeding on it.
While visiting Bantry, I managed to attend a lecture about the life of an exceptional local scientist. Ellen Hutchins was born in 1785 at Ballylickey, near Bantry. One of twenty-one children, of whom only six survived to adulthood, she later became a cryptogamic botanist, who collected and catalogued over 1,100 species of plants in her area. She was generous with her knowledge, and sent preserved specimens as well as drawings of plants to leading botanists throughout England and Ireland. She found around twenty seaweeds, lichens, mosses and liverworts that were ‘new to science’, while a number of her rarer finds – three species of lichens, two species of seaweed, and a moss, Hutchins’ pincushion – were named in her honour. Her specimens and records are preserved at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, London; Trinity College Dublin; the Natural History Museum, London; and the New York Botanical Garden, where they are still used for research. Ellen Hutchins never published on her own behalf, but her finds, her observations and praise for her as a botanist appeared in botanical publications of the day. Ellen suffered from poor health, and she died in 1815, just before her 30th birthday. In her short life, she had excelled in botanical discovery in an era long before women were accepted in the sciences. Praeger called her ‘a botanist of great promise’6 and, had she enjoyed a longer life, she might indeed have rivalled his own botanical prowess. The annual Ellen Hutchins Festival is held in her honour each year at Bantry.
Skelligs
At the end of the Beara Peninsula, the aerial cable car that crosses high above rough waters to Dursey Island is a spectacular feature. From the clifftop here I could see the distinctive triangular outlines of the Skelligs to the north. Praeger wrote that these islands were ‘one of the few places in Ireland, to my sorrow, I have not succeeded in reaching. Thrice I waited about Valentia for a good day, but the sea continued to run high, and landing was declared impossible, though it was midsummer.’ Then, in a philosophical mood, he added, ‘I suppose it is salutary that some of one’s desires in this world should remain unfulfilled, even if they are as modest as this one.’(WW)
I was more fortunate to arrive in good weather. Joining a ferry from the shelter of Portmagee at the western end of Valentia Island, we headed southwest towards the two Skellig Rocks lying fourteen kilometres away. The sea surface was relatively calm, although there is always some swell as the ocean rolls in from North America. As our boat made its way offshore, we were accompanied by a school of common dolphins, bow-riding and playing in the wake. All around us there were seabirds – puffins, guillemots, razorbills, shags and increasing numbers of gannets – diving vertically into the sea. With the boat finally tied up at the old stone-built pier in Blindman’s Cove, the larger of the two islands, Skellig Michael, towered above us in a menacing way. Climbing ashore involved a tense wait until the boat reached the top of the swell and then a quick jump before the deck dropped again several metres. I was on a much-anticipated family visit to this iconic island and, with two small boys on board, we had to take extra care, especially on the long climb up the stone steps, with a two-year-old on my shoulders.
The boys, Rowan and Derry, were fascinated by the tameness of some of the birds, with puffins standing just a few metres from the path and some of them even nesting beneath the steps. This island also holds a sizeable population of storm petrels nesting in crevasses in the old stone walls, the only evidence of their presence during the day being a churring sound that I could hear as I walked along the path to the lighthouse. The climb to the monastery site, at over 180 metres above sea level, was rewarded with a wonderful view of the west Kerry coastline and the heaving Atlantic far below. It is hard to believe that a small band of early Christian monks built this complex of tiny beehive huts entirely by hand without the aid of any modern machinery and lived here in such an isolated spot far from civilisation. They must have subsisted by collecting rainwater and harvesting seabirds and their eggs, but I wonder how they survived in winter, when the islands could be cut off from help for many weeks or months.
The playwright and author George Bernard Shaw wrote a letter to a friend in 1910 in which he expressed his amazement following a visit to the Skelligs:
Yesterday, I left the Kerry coast in an open boat, 33 feet long, propelled by ten men on five oars. These men started on 49 strokes a minute, a rate which I did not believe they could keep up for five minutes. They kept it without slackening half a second for two hours, at the end of which they landed me on the most fantastic and impossible rock in the world: Skellig Michael, or the Great Skellig, where in south west gales the spray knocks stones out of the lighthouse keeper’s house, 160 feet above calm sea level … An incredible, impossible, mad place, which still tempts devotees to make ‘stations’ of every stair landing, and to creep through ‘Needle’s eyes’ at impossible altitudes, and kiss ‘stones of pain’ jutting out 700 feet above the Atlantic. … I tell you the thing does not belong to any world that you and I have lived and worked in: it is part of our dream world.
The smaller neighbouring island of Little Skellig is even more precipitous than Skellig Michael, and there is no safe landing place. Here is Ireland’s most numerous breeding colony of gannets, the largest seabird in the North Atlantic. Gannets spend most of their lives on the open sea and feed by diving on small shoaling fish such as sandeels as well as mackerel, herring and discarded fish waste from fishing vessels. The most recent estimate of the size of this colony came to over 35,000 nest sites, making up about three-quarters of the Irish gannet population.7 Circling the rock in the boat, I was in awe of the sheer mass of birds nesting on every ledge and space available, the whirring of wings and loud calls, but most of all by the pungent smell of guano, or bird droppings. The fat young gannets in late summer were a valued resource for coastal communities in previous centuries, leading to serious competition between the people of the Blasket Islands and neighbouring coasts. Tomás O’Crohan, in his famous book The Islandman, tells of an expedition to collect the birds for winter food:
A boat with a crew of twelve men used to be guarding the rock, well paid by the man who owned it. This time a boat set sail from Dunquin, my father among them, and they never rested until they got to the rock at daybreak. They sprang to it and fell to gathering the birds into the boat at full speed and it was easy to collect a load of them, for every single one of those young birds was as heavy as a fat goose.8 Des Lavelle, the boatman on our visit, told me that as late as 1869, the Little Skellig was rented annually for the taking of feathers and young gannets, many of which were sold to the local population. Now retired, Des is an accomplished photographer and the author of an excellent book about the Skelligs.9
Valentia Island
As most of the ferries for the Skelligs leave from Portmagee, it made sense for us to stay overnight on nearby Valentia Island, so we booked into the comfortable guest house run by Des and Pat Lavelle at that time. This is one of a line of houses named Cable Terrace because they were built at the time of the first commercial transatlantic cable that was laid from here to Newfoundland in the mid-19th century. Prior to this, two weeks was the fastest time that a message could be delivered to North America from Europe, as all communications were then sent by ship. The first attempt to lay the cable in 1857 was a failure, when the line snapped just 380 nautical miles from Valentia, and could not be recovered from the seabed. A number of other unsuccessful attempts were made, but it took several years before the final cable was pulled ashore at a tiny fishing village in Newfoundland, some 1,686 nautical miles from Valentia Island. To mark the new communication link, Queen Victoria sent a message to the President of the United States at the time, James Buchanan: ‘The Queen congratulates the President on the successful completion of an undertaking which she hopes may serve as an additional bond of Union between the United States and England.’ This cable served its purpose for some eighty years, until the first satellites changed global communications forever and the Transatlantic Cable Station on Valentia closed its doors for the last time in 1966.
Valentia was also the home of a famous marine biologist, Maude Delap, who was born in 1866, just one year after Praeger. Maude and her sisters were fascinated by the diverse marine life on the shores of the island, so they sent specimens to the Natural History Museum in Dublin for identification. This led a team of leading biologists of the day to undertake a survey of the island in 1895 under the auspices of the Royal Irish Academy. Maude also conducted her own experiments on rearing jellyfish, and she was the first person to get them to breed successfully in captivity. She wrote a series of influential articles, all under her own name, which was quite unusual for a woman at the time. She once discovered an extremely rare True’s beaked whale washed up on the shore of Valentia. She buried the carcass in her garden and dug it up again a few years later when asked for the skeleton by the Natural History Museum. Due to her significant contributions to marine biology, Maude was offered a position in the Marine Biological Station at Plymouth in 1906, but her father, the local rector, refused to let her go without marrying first. However, she remained single and spent her entire life on the island, where she continued to collect samples and study them in her home laboratory. Even in old age she continued her scientific work, and often went out fishing in a small rowing boat.
While I was staying on Valentia I went to visit the old slate mines on the north side of the island. Entering one of the mine openings I was greeted by a family of choughs that were nesting on a ledge, high on a rock wall. The parents shrieked their warnings and the chicks froze, hoping they would not be noticed. Valentia Slate Quarry was first opened in 1816 to supply slates, mainly for roofing and flooring. Valentia Slate was used extensively in many famous buildings in London, including the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey and Cathedral, St Paul’s Cathedral and many of the stations on the London Underground, such as Waterloo, Charing Cross, Liverpool Street and Blackfriars. It was also used in the Paris Opera House. During its best years in the 1850s the quarry employed up to 500 workers, but competition from cheaper and softer Welsh slate forced the historic quarry to close in 1911. In recent years, a new business has been established in the slate quarry, producing a wide range of quality products including floor tiles, countertops, windowsills, fireplaces, bath surrounds, garden furniture, stairs and grave memorials. The rocks near the slate quarry were the location for the remarkable find in the 1990s of a series of large footprints of an ancient creature known as a tetrapod. At least eight separate trackways were found here, with the longest being fifteen metres in length. Thought to have been made around 360 million years ago by a four-legged amphibian up to a metre in length, the tracks provide the oldest reliably dated evidence of four-legged animals moving over land.10
The fascinating geology and archaeology of Valentia were studied in great detail by Professor Frank Mitchell of Trinity College Dublin. The bedrock here, as in much of south-west Ireland, is Old Red Sandstone, but this comes in both coarse and fine versions, the latter forming the slate. In his autobiography, Mitchell wrote:
I know Valentia well because I worked there for twelve years – often staying a month at a time – chiefly trying to trace the archaeological features that were swallowed up by the growth of peat and later partly revealed by turf-cutting over a long period of time. The island is extraordinarily rich in antiquities, which stretch from the Mesolithic peoples about 6,500 years ago to the industrial archaeology, quarries, cable-stations and lighthouses of the past century.11
In his scholarly book, Man and Environment in Valentia Island, Mitchell charted in great detail the ebb and flow of human activity that he interpreted from heaps of stones in the fields and bogs. Pollen analysis from remains in the peat also allowed him to unravel the vegetation history from the ancient woodlands to the farming practices of the 20th century.12
Castlemaine Harbour
The long sand dune points of Rossbeigh and Inch act like baffles at the mouth of Castlemaine Harbour, which lies between the Iveragh and Dingle peninsulas. On the sheltered mudflats behind each of these dune systems there are extensive beds of eelgrass. This marine flowering plant is a magnet for migrating brent geese, which arrive here in large flocks in the autumn and leave again in spring. In the early 1990s, I walked most of these areas at low tide, aiming to map and evaluate the area for conservation. At about the same time, the sand dunes at Inch became the centre of a controversy over an attempt to develop a golf course here. The dunes and intervening damp hollows are so extensive that it is easy to become disorientated while walking in this wild area. Legal action was threatened to prevent a golf links being laid out on the dunes at Inch following a decision by the planning appeals board, An Bord Pleanála, that the proposed development did not require planning permission. The board ruled that the proposal for the sand dunes, made famous by the film Ryan’s Daughter, was exempt from planning control because it was started before new regulations requiring planning permission took effect in May 1994. However, an appeal by the National Parks and Wildlife Service was successful in preventing the destruction of the dunes.
In 2008, severe Atlantic storms breached the dunes at Rossbeigh, causing consternation in the local community, as a gaping hole left hundreds of metres exposed, putting low-lying homes across the bay at risk and leaving a large sandy island isolated at the end of the peninsula. The width of the breach later became more than a kilometre, which has given rise to even more concern about what the future holds in the light of rising sea levels. However, research by coastal engineers from University College Cork has found signs that the dunes are rejuvenating themselves, and the erosion may simply be part of a long natural cycle of sand movement around the bay.
Travelling by road around the head of Castlemaine Harbour near Killorglin, I headed out along the south side of the Dingle Peninsula to the village of Annascaul, where I wanted to see the home of a very famous explorer. Tom Crean was born here in 1877, but he ran away from home as a youth to join the Royal Navy for a life of adventure. He ultimately played a central role in the dramatic events of three British expeditions to the Antarctic in the Heroic Age of polar exploration. Crean was one of the last people to see Captain Robert Scott alive before his ill-fated final push to the South Pole in 1912. He also played a leading role in Ernest Shackleton’s legendary Endurance expedition, sailing a small boat across the stormy South Atlantic before walking across the snow-covered mountains of South Georgia to fetch help for the remaining stranded seamen. After World War I, at the age of 42, Crean retired from the navy and returned to his home village on the Dingle Peninsula, where he married a local woman and adjusted to the quiet life of a rural publican.13 I was delighted to visit the pub, named appropriately the ‘South Pole Inn’ and, after a pint of stout, I walked the short distance up the track to Annascaul Lough, passing Tom Crean’s grave on the way. Having read extensively about his feats of endurance in the Antarctic, I was struck by how peaceful this place was, and what a contrast it must have seemed to the modest explorer after surviving for years on the ice in one of the most inhospitable places on earth.
Blasket Islands
The fishing boat carrying me to the islands departed from Dingle Harbour at first light. Rounding the iconic Slea Head into the open Atlantic, the full canvas of the Blasket Islands came into view. Dominating the foreground was the long, whale-shaped back of the Great Blasket, its grassy flanks falling away steeply to the sea. On either side, scattered in a choppy sea, were the other five main islands in this famous archipelago. Most dramatic and furthest west was the conical shape of Inishtearagh, while to the east, closest to the mainland, I could see the flat outline of Beginish. Crowded around the mother whale of Great Blasket were the three remaining islands of Inishvickillane, Inishnabro and Inishtooskert, and a number of small islets. I was travelling to the islands with a photographer working for the National Geographic magazine, such is the fame of these islands in the United States. This was reminiscent of a visit to the islands made in the 1930s by the well-known Dublin photographer and optician, Thomas H. Mason.
More words have been written about the Great Blasket than almost any other island in the hundreds that dot the Irish coast. This is largely because it became an almost mythical symbol of Irish native culture and language in the early 20th century. In contrast with other islands, where most traditions were handed on verbally from one generation to the next, the Blaskets produced a remarkable collection of native writers whose works have achieved the status of classic Irish literature. The approach to the main island from the sea is across the narrow sound known as An Bealach. Praeger related his experience here, ‘in a dancing curragh on the Sound between Dunmore Head and the towering mass of the Great Blasket. The Sound is full of fish, and hundreds of gannets, from their breeding haunt on the Skelligs are at work. They dash down as thick as hailstones, and the blue water boils with their commotion.’(BS)
The broadcaster Muiris Mac Conghail described the view of the Great Blasket from the sea:
The island looks massive enough rising out of it with a green front, and depending on the weather and light conditions a series of humps protruding from behind the green face which can alter from purple brown to very dark green. As we move closer, you become less concerned with the massive bulk of the whole landmass but rather begin to notice, to the right of the island, An Trá Bhán and the green fields with little zigzag enclosures outlining them, the first discernable evidence of habitation. When the boat moves closer to the Island you begin to notice the height of the cliffs and the fact that the Island itself is virtually raised on cliff stilts way up out of the water.14
On landing in the narrow creek that serves as a harbour, I walked up the village ‘street’, now a grassy path, between the rows of tiny stone-built houses, most now without roofs. To combat the strong winds, they were mainly built end-on to the sea with one gable end tucked into the hill. Thomas Mason commented in the 1930s that ‘when one walks on the main road the chimneys are frequently on a level with one’s head’.15 This was a time when there was still a reasonably vibrant population of about 150 people here. I could imagine turf smoke drifting from the houses, children playing in the fields, fishing nets drying outside the houses, and the island full of life and activity. But by the 1940s, due to the twin problems of isolation and emigration, most of the young people had left, and the number of islanders had dwindled to just a few hardy souls. In 1953, the final evacuation took place, when the remaining islanders moved to houses on the mainland facing the island.
Praeger visited the Great Blasket at the beginning of the 20th century, when most of the islanders were still in residence. He wrote that the village was then ‘a prized sanctuary of the Irish language, a place of pilgrimage for students of the ancient tongue. Hence one is able to stay there, if fish and potatoes are deemed a sufficient diet.’ His memories of the islanders are illustrated by one amusing event:
When I botanised there one of the party was A.W. Stelfox of the National Museum who was investigating the Mollusca. The island children, consumed with curiosity, followed us about, and watched with astonishment the collecting of box-snails and slugs. Presently we went home to our usual dinner of one herring and potatoes. When we emerged again a deputation was waiting for us – half the children of the island, bearing cans, boxes, saucers, cloth caps and what-not all full of crawling molluscs, which they told us, a penny or two might add to our possessions. It was difficult to explain to them that only certain rarer kinds were sought for; when they realized that their labour had been in vain, the whole of their spoils was emptied at our feet, and for the rest of our stay at the cottage, inside and out, was alive with these interesting but unwelcome animals which, with misdirected energy, penetrated to every corner, and wrote their slimy autographs on wall and floor and ceiling.(WW)
When I read this passage, I guessed that the reason Praeger and Stelfox found it difficult to communicate about the molluscs was that neither of them spoke Irish (both were born in Belfast) and none of the children spoke any English. In any case, Praeger collected a large number of plants here, and in 1912 he published a note on the visit in which he described the work done by previous botanists.16 Today, it is unlikely that any of the rarer species survive, as the Great Blasket is grazed to a short sward by flocks of hardy sheep that survive the harsh oceanic conditions by sheltering behind stone walls and buildings left by the islanders.
As I walked around the clifftops on this long island, I came upon numerous nests of fulmars, tucked into grassy ledges. First recorded breeding in 1918 on Inishnabro, with less than ten pairs, these stiff-winged birds now number over two thousand pairs on five of the main islands. Despite some visits by ornithologists in the 19th century, the birds of the Blaskets were not described in any detail until a visit in 1890 by an English ornithologist, W.H. Turle.17 Apart from individual visits to one or other island in the group it was not until 1988 that a significant Irish team attempted a full survey of the islands’ birds. Twelve intrepid ornithologists, led by Hugh Brazier and Oscar Merne and supported by the Wildlife Service and the Irish Wildbird Conservancy, set out in exceptionally calm summer weather, and a team of three landed on each of the four outer islands. Combining land-based and boat-based surveys, they managed for the first time to carry out a complete census of the seabirds on all six main islands in the group. The results confirmed that the islands held fifteen breeding seabird species, with internationally important colonies of Manx shearwaters and storm petrels, both nocturnal species that breed underground or in rocky crevices.18
As I walked across the main island, there were flocks of choughs above me, wheeling in the strong winds and loudly announcing their presence with distinctive ‘chew-chew-chew’ calls. These red-legged birds differ from other members of the crow family in that they are largely confined to the fringe of the Atlantic with Ireland as their stronghold in northwest Europe. This is because they feed principally by probing the soil and turning over animal dung in maritime grassland searching for ants, beetles, insect grubs and other invertebrates. To do this they rely on frost-free conditions along the Atlantic coastline to keep the soils soft throughout the year. Salt spray in onshore winds and extensive grazing by sheep, cattle and rabbits keep the grass short and create some bare earth, which the choughs seem to favour.19
I also saw a family party of choughs turning over seaweed along the driftline of the beach to collect sandhoppers that live in the rotting algae. Here, below the Blasket village, on the long white strand known as An Trá Bhán, the islanders played hurley and collected seaweed to transport to their fields above, as fertiliser for the potatoes that were grown around the houses. Since the final evacuation of the human population in the 1950s, the beach has become the headquarters for a huge assembly of grey seals. By 2005 the breeding population on the Blaskets was estimated at 650 to 830 animals, although over a thousand seals may haul out here in the late summer, when they are moulting. The heaving mass of enormous animals, some lying still in the sun and others sparring for space and dominance, is one of the most impressive wildlife spectacles in Ireland. Some of these seals have been tagged, with several travelling as far as the west of Scotland. One animal travelled almost 10,000 kilometres in less than a year.20
A century ago, the seals were an important source of food for the islanders, and the oil from their bodies kept the lights burning in every house in the long, dark winter months. They were hunted by crude, primitive methods on the remote beaches and in the caves where they bred. Tomás O’Crohan, in his famous book The Islandman about the life of the community here in the 19th century, described one such hunting expedition which involved a man swimming into a cave and clubbing seals to death, whereupon they were roped up and towed out to the waiting boat.
O’Crohan also recounted a memorable occasion when he was just eight years old, as a school of ‘porpoises’ (in fact probably pilot whales) was driven ashore on the beach. These animals are quite tolerant of the presence of humans, and I have seen them drift around near the sea surface with the sound of their exhaling breath quite audible from the boat that I was on. O’Crohan wrote:
When we got home, my mother cried out that the boats were coming and that some of them were making a ring around the porpoises, trying to drive them ashore. At last one of the porpoises went high and dry up on the strand. One able fellow drew his blood and when the rest of the porpoises smelt the blood, they came ashore, helter-skelter, to join the other high and dry on the sand.21
Boats from the island and also from Dunquin were involved in this slaughter of the whales, and when the mainland fishermen tried to take ‘boatloads’ of them home they were attacked by the island people until ‘the men there were as bloody as the porpoises’ and were driven off. O’Crohan described how the islanders then hacked up the dead animals and, when one old woman was finished, he recalled that ‘she was thickly smeared with blood’.
Dingle Peninsula
The small country roads that follow the northern side of the Dingle Peninsula from Dunquin pass by the spectacular cliff coastlines of Sybil Head and Ballydavid Head, which wrap around the wide bay of Smerwick Harbour. Just to the east of the bay is the tiny Brandon Creek, which is where the famous transatlantic adventure of the Brendan Voyage began. In 1976 the maritime explorer Tim Severin led a re-enactment of the journey of St Brendan and his crew of monks in the 6th century from Ireland to North America by way of Iceland. The sailboat used was a larger version of the traditional Irish curragh, with animal hides stretched over a timber frame. Hand-crafted with traditional tools, the eleven-metre, two-masted boat was built of Irish oak and ash, lashed together with leather thongs and wrapped with a patchwork of forty-nine traditionally tanned ox hides. The seams were then sealed with wool grease.22 I have an image in my mind of the type of frozen seas these explorers would have crossed as I read Tim Severin’s book while on a flight from Iceland crossing the Denmark Strait to east Greenland.
Towering above the north coast of the Dingle Peninsula is Brandon Mountain, which is one of the highest peaks in Ireland. Praeger was in no doubt: ‘Brandon is to my mind the finest mountain in Ireland’. He wrote:
Brandon is a very wet place, and the summit is often enveloped in cloud for days at a time – in winter for weeks – yet I have always had luck there; bad mist only once in half a dozen visits, and once deterrent rain. I remember a whole week during which the summit stood up bathed in sunshine all day, while at night the black peaks rose clear against the starlit sky, looking extraordinarily near.(WW)
On the day I climbed Brandon, I was lucky too and, dropping down the steep valley on the east side of the peak, I had a wonderfully clear view of Brandon Bay and the Castlegregory Peninsula, with the Magharee Islands spread out to the north.
Castlegregory
I walked through the reedbeds that fringe the landward side of the sand dunes at Castlegregory when, suddenly, I noticed several small amphibians walking on the sandy path at my feet. These creatures are distinguished by a bright yellow stripe down the spine and the fact that they do not hop like frogs. They were natterjack toads and they were moving between the shallow ponds where they breed.
The natterjack is widely distributed along the coastal fringe of Europe, from Iberia to the Baltic, with populations in the more northern parts of its range being of more localised distribution. In Ireland, the populations are restricted to coastal sites in County Kerry on the Dingle and Iveragh peninsulas, mostly concentrated around Castlemaine Harbour and in the vicinity of the Magharees. There is a small population in south-east Wexford, introduced from Kerry in the 1990s. The species’ range is estimated to have contracted by over 50 per cent between 1900 and the 1970s.23 As a result, the toad is classified as being ‘Endangered’ in Ireland.24 Toad spawning usually begins in April, with each breeding female laying a single string of spawn. Eggs usually hatch within ten days and tadpoles develop into toadlets, usually in six to eight weeks. They favour temporary ponds where there are no predators such as fish, dragonfly larvae or diving beetles to kill the tadpoles. The species adapts quickly to new breeding sites, producing large numbers of juveniles in good years and suffering high spawn and tadpole mortality in bad years. In dry years there may be no breeding or no emergence of tadpoles, but ‘boom years’ can replenish a local population. The amphibians are quite vulnerable due to the small number of ponds in which they live, and drainage of these habitats would be a disaster for the species.
In 2008 a new scheme was launched by the National Parks and Wildlife Service to restore the natterjack toad to its former range in Kerry. This aimed to get farmers involved in conservation by digging ponds, all within the former range of the toad, and maintaining them, for example, through hand clearance of vegetation and by grazing the surrounding sward, in a suitable condition for toads. The programme had an ambitious target of reinstating the natterjack toad around Castlemaine Harbour and along the coastal strip west of Castlegregory on the Dingle Peninsula. Farmers entered a five-year agreement with the NPWS and received annual payments related to the number of ponds they dug and maintained.
By 2017 the pond creation scheme involved fifty local landowners, resulting in 100 new ponds created and, so far, twenty of these have shown natural colonisation by toads. To help the population expand, the NPWS has also been working with the Aquarium in Dingle and Fota Wildlife Park near Cork to develop a ‘head-start’ programme for tadpoles. This involves rearing tadpoles, mostly rescued from dried-up ponds, in controlled conditions and returning them as toadlets to new ponds in Kerry. This captive rearing has proved very successful, and a modest programme of translocations has also taken place.
I spoke to Ferdia Marnell, who has guided this initiative for the NPWS. He says, ‘The involvement of local landowners has been key to the success of the pond creation scheme to date. Looking forward, I would like to see this programme put on a more sustainable footing as a biodiversity component of an agri-environmental scheme.’ This is the rarest of only three amphibian species occurring naturally in Ireland, and we cannot afford to lose it. Expanding the number of ponds used by the toads makes the population less vulnerable in the event that one of the main ponds is damaged. It’s about not putting all the toads in one basket.
North Kerry
The coast of north Kerry is often overlooked by visitors in favour of the more famous west Kerry area with Killarney at its heart. However, there are many interesting and quieter places on the coastline of Tralee Bay and points north of this. One landmark on the road to Blennerville is a restored windmill which is open to visitors. This produced flour from local grain using the constant renewable power of the wind. It was from this port that the famine ship Jeannie Johnson made her maiden voyage to Quebec, Canada in 1848, with 193 passengers on board. After sixteen transatlantic voyages she had transported 2,500 desperate Irish emigrants to North America. Blennerville was also where a replica of the ship was built. Over 300 shipwrights and craftsmen were involved in the construction, which took six years and was completed in 2002. The wooden ship now lies moored permanently in the River Liffey close to Dublin’s Custom House, where it is open for tours.
Just north of Fenit was where the revolutionary Roger Casement and companions attempted to land guns and ammunition, at Banna Strand, in support of the 1916 Easter Rising. Casement was landed from a German submarine and promptly arrested by the authorities, but the accompanying ship, Aud Norge, failed to land its much-anticipated cargo of arms at Fenit, and was scuttled in Cork Harbour by its German captain to prevent the British forces taking possession of the arms cache. History repeated itself in 1984 when the Marita Ann, a Fenit-registered boat, attempted a similar operation on behalf of the Provisional IRA. This shipment was also discovered by the authorities and the crew arrested off the coast.
I stopped for a while to watch the wintering waterbirds in the nearby Cashen River Estuary, which enters the sea through a narrow channel just south of Ballybunion. As the tide fell, great flocks of golden plovers and lapwings circled overhead and dropped into their roosts on the expanding areas of sand that fill the estuary at low tide. Here I saw a peregrine hunting the plovers, dipping and diving as it worked the flocks to seek out a likely victim. Praeger was not impressed by what he called this ‘dull country’ but, nevertheless he spent ‘three days along the estuary of the sluggish Cashen River in a vain search for the rare three-angled bullrush, reported to have been gathered there’. His determination to find and record the rarest of Irish plant species is well-illustrated by this quest.
Hour after hour I concentrated my gaze on the fringe of muddy vegetation at the base of the dyke which restrains the Cashen from flooding the rushy fields on either side; and I can remember with longing my eyes turned towards the glorious outline of Slieve Mish and Brandon, towering to the southward, and running far to the west out into the ocean. But for the botanist the muddy Cashen offers an ample compensation, for it is one of only two places in Ireland where the rare dwarf spike-rush is found … It is so rare that it is almost worth pilgriming to that dreary tract to gloat on its very insignificance.(WW)
It is clear from this passage that Praeger was uninspired by some of the places he visited, but nevertheless felt the urge to go there to complete his botanical work. I did not find the Cashen a dreary place, as I have always loved estuaries for their wide-open spaces and the opportunity to walk unimpeded across wide sand flats between the tides.
Shannon Estuary
Back on the Atlantic coast, I entered the mouth of the enormous Shannon Estuary, where the longest river in Ireland finally enters the sea. In the distance to the north was the outline of the other gatepost of this estuary at the cliff-bound Loop Head. Regarding this huge inlet of the sea, Praeger wrote:
There is much to be seen along the fifty miles of the Shannon estuary, whether one’s interests are antiquarian or biological or general, and the proper way to see it is by water, which allows of exploration on either shore. With a small motorboat and headquarters at Foynes or Tarbert or Kilrush you can have a pleasant and leisurely holiday here in a region unknown to the tourist, but possessing much quiet beauty and all that goes with the unspoiled Irish countryside. … The place may become less lonely now, as these sheltered waters form the terminus of the projected Atlantic air route.(WW)
The final comment above by Praeger refers to the transatlantic crossings by seaplanes (or flying boats) which first landed at Foynes in 1937, the year that his book was published. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, land-based planes lacked sufficient flying range for Atlantic crossings. Survey flights for the flying boat operations were made by Charles Lindbergh in 1933 and a terminal was then built at what is now the Port of Foynes. As a result, this would become one of the biggest civilian airports in Europe during World War II. But its importance was short-lived and, following the construction and opening in 1942 of Shannon Airport on flat land on the north bank of the estuary, Foynes flying-boat station closed four years later. This area is now an expanding modern port linked with the port of Limerick. I spent some time surveying the shorebirds around Foynes Port to determine if they would be affected by the extension of the jetties here.
Opposite the modern port of Foynes lies a wooded island which was the last resting place of Conor O’Brien, an adventurer who was the first Irishman to circumnavigate the globe by sailing boat. Born in London in 1880 to a Limerick family, he moved to Dublin as a young man, where he practised as an architect and was a founding member of the United Arts Club, with W.B. Yeats, George Russell and George Bernard Shaw. In 1913 he climbed Mount Brandon in Kerry with George Mallory, who died a decade later close to the summit of Mount Everest. O’Brien was renowned for climbing in his bare feet with a pipe in his mouth. In 1914, having joined the Irish Volunteers, he smuggled guns into Ireland in his yacht Kelpie. In an apparent contradiction, he served in the Royal Navy during World War I and, on his return to Ireland, was appointed by the newly independent Irish Free State to work on fisheries development. But he was a restless soul, and in 1923 he set out from Dún Laoghaire Harbour to circumnavigate the world in his yacht Saoirse, returning to Ireland in 1925. He spent much of his later life on Foynes Island writing adventure novels and practical books on sailing, until he died here in 1952.25
The first settlers in the Shannon Estuary go right back to the Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age), when farming was unknown in Ireland. Before modern reclamation attempts, the river and its tributaries would have flowed through a network of channels, wetlands and wooded islands. In this landscape small parties of hunter-gatherers fished in the creeks, gathered wild plant food and hunted for wild pigs, hares and wildfowl in the wetlands and woodlands. From the early historic or medieval period some remarkable fishtraps survive in the mudflats. Made of post and wattle fences, these V-shaped structures were laid out across tidal channels. Fish swimming down the shore with the ebbing tide were forced by the fences to swim towards the centre of the traps, where they were caught in baskets, boxes or nets. One of the best-preserved traps still lies in situ on the shoreline near Bunratty on the Clare side of the estuary.26
Arriving at the town of Kilrush, I joined a dolphin-watching trip in a high-speed inflatable boat. The bottlenose dolphin occurs throughout the world, but the population in the Shannon Estuary is the only known resident group in Irish waters, and only one of six such groups in Europe. Each year calves are born between May and August – newborn dolphins are easily recognisable from their small size and the neonatal folds, which line their bodies. The adults vary in length but can be up to four metres long and weigh as much as 200 kilograms. They can travel at speeds of forty kilometres per hour and stay underwater for twenty minutes. We finally encountered a pod of the dolphins, bow-riding ahead of a giant tanker that had just embarked from Foynes Port. Children shrieked with delight, camera phones clicked as adults pointed avidly at anything which broke the surface. I feared that the boat would topple over as people stood in their seats and leaned over the side to get a better look at these fascinating mammals, most people seeing them live for the first time.
West Clare
The long peninsula that ends at Loop Head is the most westerly part of County Clare. I spent a few days here exploring the cliffs on the west side and the sandy bays on the south side at the mouth of the Shannon Estuary. In summer, the lighthouse on the headland is surrounded by acres of sea pinks in a rocky habitat regularly covered by salt spray from the Atlantic. This is a wonderful location for watching passing seabirds, whales and dolphins rounding the headland from Kerry to Clare. I saw long lines of gannets commuting past from their breeding colony on Little Skellig and hundreds of Manx shearwaters that have their European headquarters in south-west Ireland. The largest coastal town here is Kilkee, which Praeger described as a recent development of the 19th century:
Kilkee is no longer the solitude where the only sound was the voice of the seabirds in a sort of vocal accompaniment to the dirge of the ‘melancholy ocean’. The waves on the coast of Clare roll and break into caverns with a sound like thunder. At Kilkee, however, under the surface of the agitated waters runs a bar which breaks the force of the ground swell. The delighted tourist can watch here the waves of the blue sea and the playful dance of emerald waters on a silver sheen of strand. Nature has furnished a walk for miles a few feet from the cliffs on a green velvet carpet all the way where this glorious accumulation of sublime grandeur can be seen.27
Travelling north, I came to a small harbour at Quilty, where a large bank of rotting seaweed had accumulated after a series of storms the previous winter. By now the kelp was decomposing and providing a habitat for swarms of flies and sandhoppers. Running across the heaps were dozens of small wading birds, darting here and there catching their prey. There were oystercatchers, redshanks, dunlins, turnstones and purple sandpipers. The latter species is relatively scarce in Ireland, and tends to be found mainly on exposed rocky shores rather than the sheltered estuaries that hold most of the others. A study at this harbour managed to catch and examine a total of eighty-three purple sandpipers. From the length of their bills it was thought that this group of small birds bred in arctic Canada, undertaking a marathon migration in the spring via a stopover in Iceland.28
Just a short distance north of Quilty is Spanish Point, which was named after the invaders who died here in 1588, when some ships of the Spanish Armada were wrecked during stormy weather. Those who escaped from their sinking ships and made it safely to land were later executed by the English authorities, who suspected that this was part of a Spanish plan to invade Ireland. Before news of the English victory reached William FitzWilliam, the Lord Deputy of Ireland, he had issued a blanket command that all Spanish found in Ireland were to be executed with their ships and treasure seized. Local legend says that the Spanish forces were buried in a mass grave, but the location of this was unknown until archaeologists, investigating the location of the wreck of San Marcos and San Esteban, announced in 2015 that they had found the grave mound at Spanish Point, where up to a thousand bodies of the Spanish sailors were buried.
Just a year earlier, the people of this coastline were reminded of the power of Atlantic storms when enormous waves battered the town of Lahinch on an eventful night in January 2014. This was the tail-end of Storm Jonas, which broke over the seafront town with such force that the waves spilt over the seawalls there. It was only the following morning that the full extent of the damage became apparent. The road had disappeared, and in its place there was a huge gaping crater just two metres from the front door of a pub. The sea walls had been wrecked and the sewerage pump house in the adjoining car park was ‘blown apart’.
North Clare
Large numbers of tourists attracted to the famous Cliffs of Moher make this a busy place, often with heavy traffic. The managers of the visitor centre here recorded over 1.6 million visitors in 2019, so I avoided the area, searching for quieter refuges. It is easy to find such places, as the high cliffs extend for about ten kilometres from Fisherstreet to Cancregga Point. Reaching over 200 metres vertically above sea level, they are formed of alternate layers of shales and sandstones laid down like the pages of a book lying flat on its side. Praeger wrote, ‘they are too steep to support plant life and provide few ledges whereon sea-birds can nest or rest, which gives them a savage look’. However, more detailed study later showed that the Cliffs of Moher now support the largest seabird colony on the west coast of Ireland, with over 50,000 individuals of eight species using the ledges and stacks throughout the summer.29 This is one of the best places on the mainland of Ireland to see puffins in full breeding attire, with their large, colourful bills. Praeger wrote:
If you want to feel small, go out in one of the canvas curraghs on a day when a ground-swell is coming in from the ocean, and get your boatman to row you along the base of these gigantic rock-walls. The rollers and their reflections from the cliffs produce a troubled sea on which your boat dances like a live thing, like a tiny cork, and the vast dark precipice above, vertical and in places overhanging, seems to soar up to the untroubled sky. It is a wonderful experience.(WW)
Doolin Pier is the place to catch a ferry to Inis Oírr, the easternmost of the three Aran Islands. Unlike today, a trip for Praeger to one of the many offshore islands on the west coast meant being rowed out in a curragh. There were no powerful ferries or even outboard engines. He wrote, ‘I must sing the praises of the curach or curragh, the canvas boat used everywhere along the western coast of Ireland, for inshore fishing, lobster work and as the usual means of communication in the island regions.’ Having described in some detail the construction and use of the boats, he recounted a particular incident on this coast which impressed him:
I remember landing with George Francis Fitzgerald from an egg-shell curragh on the great boulder beach at Fisherstreet in Clare when the Atlantic wavers were dashing over it incessantly: our men backed the boat so skilfully that we stepped ashore without even getting splashed. (WW)
The north coast of Clare is dominated by the remarkable landscape of the Burren. This is the name given to a unique area of north Clare and south Galway that is best known for its bare limestone landscape, but it contains much more. The major habitats in the Burren are limestone pavements, orchid-rich calcareous grasslands, limestone heaths, scrub and woodlands, wet grasslands, turloughs, calcareous springs and fens. Sometimes a number of the diverse habitats of the Burren are found within the same field, where a few steps may take you from a limestone pavement, across a heath and into an orchid-rich grassland. But the significance of the Burren is the presence of so many relatively rare habitats over so large an area, offering excellent ‘connectivity’ in contrast with the fragmented nature of such habitats elsewhere.
I spent a few days walking in the Burren, rejoicing in the quiet places and beautiful wildflowers far from any roads or towns, listening to the sounds of nature – cuckoos calling and the wind whistling over the rocks. I began on the coast road just south of Black Head, which juts out into the Atlantic. Stretching from the road right down to the edge of the waves is the classic smooth limestone pavement with its clints and grikes with occasional large, erratic boulders perched on the surface. Here is a unique botanical mix of plants, some of which are known from the arctic and alpine regions and some from the Mediterranean area. I walked among the magenta-coloured bloody cranesbill, the deep blue of spring gentian and the delicate green fronds of the maidenhair fern, forming what Praeger called ‘a veritable rock garden in spring, brilliant with blossom’.(WW)
First captivated by the Burren in the early 1970s, the artist and writer Gordon D’Arcy has spent over thirty years living on its edge and exploring its remarkable natural heritage and rich human history. In his latest book he celebrates the flora, fauna, people and places of the region with stories from his diaries and original watercolours that convey a deep affection and intimacy. One of the keys to management of the Burren is the long-established practice of transhumance – the ancient tradition of moving livestock from one grazing ground to another in a seasonal cycle. However, D’Arcy writes, ‘the Burren style of transhumance is unique in that the movement reverses the norm: animals grazed on lowland pasture in the summer are moved to the uplands in the winter’.30 To celebrate the ancient practice of moving livestock to the Burren Hills, a festival is held in October each year led by the local farming community and coordinated by the Burrenbeo Trust. It culminates in communal processions of cattle herds, farmers and many followers to the upland winterages.
The exposed limestone of the upland pasture retains the heat of the sun, ‘something akin to the effects of our underfloor heating’ in modern houses.31 Frosts are rare due to the warming effects of the North Atlantic Drift, and growth continues in the winter. While the lowland areas are frequently flooded, the limestone drains readily and the hill pastures are available for grazing throughout the winter. Cattle graze on the native grasses while most of the herb species are dormant over winter, preventing them from being damaged. Grazing checks the grass, which would otherwise dominate, leaving space for more sensitive species such as orchids. Winter grazing also prevents the spread of scrub, thus keeping the famous limestone pavements open and rich in plant and animal species.
One memorable day I joined a field visit with Dr Brendan Dunford, the main driver behind the innovative Burren Farming for Conservation Programme. The current Burren Programme involves more than 300 farmers and covers over 80 per cent of the designated area of the Burren landscape. Brendan explained how this programme is different from other agri-environmental schemes. ‘It has pioneered a novel “hybrid” approach to farming and conservation which sees farmers paid for both work undertaken and, most importantly, for the delivery of defined environmental objectives. Most farmers across the world are familiar with a system where they invest time and money in the rearing of livestock or growing of crops and they get paid when they sell the product at market, the price paid usually being reflective of the product quality. The Burren Programme has adopted this approach in that it pays farmers for a conservation “product” that depends on good farming practice.’
At the very northern tip of the Burren are several flat peninsulas stretching out into Galway Bay, and I walked out along one of these to the Flaggy Shore, made famous through the writing of Seamus Heaney in his poem ‘Postscript’: ‘In September or October, when the wind and the light are working off each other, so that the ocean on one side is wild with foam and glitter …’. Heaney is referring here to the road that divides the Flaggy Shore from Lough Murree, a brackish lagoon ‘… and inland among stones, the surface of a slate-grey lake is lit by the earthed lightening of a flock of swans, their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white’.32 The swans in ‘Postscript’ are described as having ‘fully grown headstrong-looking heads tucked or cresting or busy underwater...’ Gordon D’Arcy says that ‘this is a vivid description of the character of mute swans to my mind’. The convoluted shoreline between the lake and the sea has colourful clumps of thrift, its bright pink flowers mixed with white blossoms of sea campion and a backdrop of the yellow-flowered sea radish. I didn’t see any of Heaney’s swans, but I did hear the distinctive repetitive whistle of the whimbrel. Migrating north from their winter quarters in West Africa, these long-billed waders often stop off here in May on their way to their breeding grounds in Iceland.
Marine biologist Dave McGrath knows this area well, and has a special interest in the Carrickaddy reef. At low spring tide he finds an enormous number and variety of marine plants and animals here, probably due to the combination of sheltered conditions and the multiple niches available in the rockpools among heavily eroded limestone. Here he has found porcelain crabs, iron crabs, shore crabs, velvet crabs, squat lobsters and purple sea urchins, all kinds of molluscs, rock-pool fish including pipefish, scorpion fish, blennies and gobies. There are also some rare seaweeds here too.
Aran Islands
My first visit to the Aran Islands was very memorable. I was the passenger in a small, single-engined aircraft piloted by Con O’Rourke, who later wrote a Nature Guide to the Aran Islands.33 We flew in dense mist, using only the instruments, out over the Atlantic but, as we descended below the gloom, a remarkable landscape emerged below us, looking like a network of lace. The three limestone islands are covered by thousands of small fields, divided by stone walls, with winding roads and paths between them. Botanist Cilian Roden wrote that navigation on the ground, ‘especially on the two smaller islands, bears comparison to making your way about the blocks and alleys of an unfamiliar city’.34
Praeger had a special affection for the Aran Islands that form a line across the outer part of Galway Bay. He gave an excellent introduction:
If I wished to show anyone the best thing in Ireland I would take him to Aran. Those grey ledges of limestone, rain-beaten and storm-swept, are different from anything else. The strangeness of the scene, the charm of the people (I don’t refer to the rabble that meets the steamer), the beauty of sea and sky, the wealth of both pagan and Christian antiquities, the remarkable vegetation (without a parallel in western Europe save in the adjoining Burren of Clare) – all these help to make a sojourn in Aran a thing never to be forgotten.(BS)
Despite this appreciation, Praeger gave little attention in The Way that I Went to the unique flora of the islands, relegating discussion of it to his section on the similar flora of the Burren, although the islands are scarcely mentioned there. Several plant species that were probably common in Praeger’s time are now rare in the Aran Islands and in the whole of Ireland. However, in 1987, botanist Tom Curtis was surprised to find several rare and threatened arable weeds, such as cornflower and darnel, growing from the thatched roofs of houses on the islands, where their seeds had germinated from the rye straw traditionally used for thatching.35
I walked across all three of the islands, marvelling at the unique landscape with cliffs dropping vertically to the Atlantic Ocean and a rich flora that grows on the limestone grassland. The Aran Islands are administratively within County Galway but resemble more closely the rocky landscape of north Clare, with a marked oceanic influence. The three inhabited islands – Inis Mór, Inis Meáin and Inis Oírr – cover a total of 4,330 hectares and have supported farming communities for over 4,000 years. This has left behind a rich cultural legacy most dramatically seen in the spectacular great forts on the islands and the dense web of field wall systems.
Today, the agricultural system on the islands is mainly low-intensity production of cattle and sheep, with a small area of tillage for on-farm use. The soils are thin with low fertility, and livestock are frequently exposed to high winds. The farms are tiny, with over 85per cent being smaller than 20 hectares in area, less than half the national average size. Farms are highly fragmented, often made up of several different habitat types, such as calcareous grassland, limestone pavement and machair, a rare type of coastal grassland. The cattle are grazed in summer on the richer fear glas (green grass) on the more sheltered northern side of the islands. The mild climate and dry fields mean that cattle are not housed but wintered on specific areas of the farm. This is critical in ensuring the presence of such a distinctive flora as, without adequate winter grazing, bramble and blackthorn would become dominant. Cattle diets are often supplemented with hay, which is still cut by hand and often dried on the surrounding walls.
While some past agri-environment schemes benefitted the islands through the provision of economic support to farmers, they failed to adequately address a number of conservation issues, including the maintenance of priority habitats. Farmers on the islands felt a different approach was required. The AranLIFE project got going in 2014 and worked with farmers across the three Aran Islands to improve the conservation status of habitats of international importance. This scheme was prompted by the success of the Farming for Conservation Programme in the Burren. A key measure here was improved access to the many scattered land parcels to facilitate management, including grazing. Scrub and bracken were controlled while livestock management was enhanced by installing new water features, and hundreds of existing rainwater tanks were repaired. This secures the harvesting of rainwater, which would otherwise drain away through the limestone rocks. The AranLIFE project ended in 2019, but this work is continuing under a new project called Caomhnú Árann, run by the same team.
On the largest island of Inis Mór, I walked along the dramatic cliffs on the west side near the stone fort of Dún Aonghasa. Thousands of seabirds, mainly kittiwakes, guillemots and razorbills, lined the ledges formed by softer shale bands between the limestone strata far below. In previous centuries these birds and their eggs were harvested by the islanders to supplement the food produced on their small farms. In his classic book, Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage, Tim Robinson described how this hunt was conducted:
The men would walk across to the cliffs at dusk with the rope, which was often a communal investment. One end would be tied around the cliffman’s waist and between his legs, and the other made fast to an iron bar driven into a crevice or wedged to a cairn on the clifftop. A team of up to eight would lower the cliffman, guided by signals from a man stationed out on a headland from which he could watch the progress of the descent. The cliffman would carry a stick to keep himself clear of the cliff face while swinging on a rope and wedges to help him round awkward corners of his climbs. Having reached the chosen ledge the cliffman would remain crouched in it until darkness came. When all the birds had flown in from the sea and settled down to roost he would begin to crawl along, and would silently murder the first bird he came to … He would then move on, pushing the dead bird before him until it was up against the next victim, which thus would not feel his hands until it was too late. The dead birds would be strung on a cord by running a loop around the neck. At dawn the cliffman would be hauled up again, bent and rigid with cold and cramp.36
Today the people of the Aran Islands do not have to subsist over winter on the dried flesh of seabirds, but they have managed to protect a unique landscape with much of its rich biodiversity still intact. As I walked along the cliffs, I marvelled at the colourful wildflowers, thriving bird populations and the power of the Atlantic Ocean far below.
Galway Bay
I visited Kinvara, on the south side of Galway Bay, for the festival of Cruinniú na mBád (Gathering of the Boats). This annual event celebrates the living tradition of the sailing Galway Hookers and related boats. Up to a hundred traditional boats, once the workhorses of the coast of Connemara and north Clare, gather here for a weekend of racing and celebration. There are few more inspiring sights at sea than a fleet of Galway Hookers in full sail with the landscape of Connemara behind. They developed as cargo boats ferrying turf and other local goods across Galway Bay to the Aran Islands, to Galway city and to north Clare, to avoid the long road haul by horse and cart. None of the latter regions had their own turf bogs. To make the fastest delivery, the boats would race each other. By the 1960s, improvements in road transport and the widespread use of bottled gas as a fuel on the islands led to the demise of the working Hookers, and many were left to rot on beaches and quaysides.
In the late 1970s, a few dedicated traditional boat enthusiasts stimulated a revival of the boat-building tradition in Connemara, rebuilding some of the original boats and constructing others from scratch. This led to the sport of Hooker racing, with a series of annual regattas. Today, the Galway Hookers Association organises races all over Connemara and the Aran Islands. With its trademark red sails and wide-beamed black hull, the Hooker is now a well-known symbol of Connemara. Since its revival in 1979, Cruinniú na mBád has become one of the most unique and successful weekend festivals in the west of Ireland. The event also promotes the art of traditional music and the culture that surrounds it, including Irish dancing, sean nós singing, the Irish language and more.
During the festival I had arranged to meet my friend Cian de Buitléar, who is skipper of Star of the West, built in 1994 and named after an older boat that foundered off the Codling Bank on the east coast in 1948.37 Cian gave me the helm for a few minutes but I scarcely had the strength to turn the rudder. A modern racing yacht can change direction in a short distance, but the massive Hooker takes a fair bit of effort to tack. There were races for the four types of Galway Hookers, including the Bád Mór (big boat), which is the largest vessel, measuring over 12 metres in length, the Leath Bhád (half boat), the Gleoiteog and the diminutive Púcán. The smaller boats were originally used in shallow water to gather seaweed for fertiliser or production of kelp for export. As we arrived back at the quay, a fiddler and tin whistle player tuned up on the deck of Cian’s boat. During the festival, all the pubs in Kinvara were alive with the sounds of music, as this event attracts the very best traditional Irish musicians.
Travelling around inner Galway Bay, I passed by the extensive saltmarsh of Tawin Island, well grazed by sheep but still rich in plant species such as sea pink, scurvy grass, sea lavender and yellow horned-poppy. I also found the beautiful herb sea wormwood, a greyish plant that flowers in late summer. It has a wonderful aromatic perfume and is quite localised but abundant around Galway Bay. None of the Galway Bay saltmarshes are associated with sand dunes, and this may have arisen because of marine flooding of glacial deposits rather than by vegetation colonising mudflats, as happens on the east coast. There are places at sea level where the saltmarsh soils lie on top of peat, similar to that which occurs on the lowland blanket bogs of Connemara. This shows that there was a gradual submergence of the land as sea levels rose after the melting of glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age. Tawin is also a great place to watch the flocks of wintering wildfowl and waders like curlew and lapwing as they gather here at high tide. Up to fifty harbour seals haul out on the storm beach, where they are rarely disturbed.
On the north side of the bay is Galway, the ancient city of the tribes, strategically located where the River Corrib empties a vast quantity of water each day into Galway Bay. This marks the junction between limestone rocks to the east and south and the granites of Connemara to the west. I went there in 2009 to see some of the fastest yachts in the world, as an estimated ten thousand people gathered to welcome the Volvo Ocean Race fleet into Galway Bay. In the early hours of the morning bonfires were lit on the Aran Islands as the yachts finished this leg of a race that circles the globe. I joined the crew of a Galway vessel as a spectator to watch these high-speed racing machines arriving into the bay. With enormous black sails, they sped past us towards the finish line, setting up a wash that shook our own boat.
Just off the Salthill shore of the city is Mutton Island, connected to the land by a narrow neck of slippery rocks at low tide. I began a survey of shorebirds here some years ago by rowing out from Nimmo’s Pier to land on a slipway below the long-abandoned lighthouse. The door to the tower lay open, so I was able to climb the winding stairs to the top and poke my telescope out through the broken windows. Below me at high tide the rocks around the island held a large wader roost, with up to 2,000 birds, including oystercatchers, curlews, dunlins and ringed plovers, just one or two kilometres from the city centre. As there is little human disturbance here the birds continue to use the island, where a large sewage treatment works for the city has been built.38
South Connemara
Praeger never drove a car in his life but he was fortunate to have the use of the most extensive network of small railways ever built in this country. One such line crossed the boggy region of south Connemara, and he revelled in the beauty seen from a train journey here in 1896.
One of the most important Irish railway enterprises of recent years was unveiled last Spring by the opening of the new railway from Galway to Clifden. Leaving the capital of the West, the line skirts the wooded shores of Lough Corrib as far as the little town of Oughterard, and then strikes westward across a picturesque wilderness of lake and bog to meet the Western Ocean. … Many rare plants were obtained both in sea and on land, many a strange insect that will delight the entomologist, many a pleasant impression of the cheery peasants, clad in their rough homespun, with hearts as warm and bright as the April sun that streamed down day after day, who told us wonderful folk takes and sang us crooning songs, in their own Irish tongue.39
Praeger was also a strong advocate of walking as much as possible so that he could study the vegetation and record interesting plants. A century later, I too was walking the coast of Connemara, the large region that lies west of Galway city and Lough Corrib, occasionally taking a dip on the numerous beaches. I camped overnight on a remote, sandy peninsula and looked west over the ocean until the round, orange sun dropped below the horizon. Tim Robinson described this fringe of Connemara as ‘a rope of closely interwoven strands flung down in twists and coils across an otherwise bare surface’.40 Here, much of the shore is covered in a thick blanket of brown seaweeds, obscuring the rocks at low tide. Snorkelling among the weed at high tide is like exploring a forest on land. Above my head the canopy of seaweed swayed back and forth in the tidal currents and sunlight poured through the gaps, illuminating the sandy bottom.
In between the rocky outcrops there are many sandy shores and small coves. Some spectacular beaches surround the village of Roundstone, which gives a fine view of the Twelve Bens, a mountain range which forms the boundary of South Connemara. Praeger admitted that he ‘dwelt long on Roundstone, because it is at that spot a kind of concentration of interests, as well as a delightful combination of hill and moor, sea and lake, rock and sand’:
Dog’s Bay is one of the greatest attractions that Roundstone offers. A narrow mile-long granite island set half a mile offshore has got joined to the mainland by a sand-spit, which forms two curving bays – Dog’s Bay and Gorteen Bay – set back-to-back and filled with the clearest of Atlantic water. The sand, excessively white, is in itself remarkable, for it is formed not of quartz grains, as is usual, but of shells – mostly the tiny perfect tests of Foraminifera (of which no less than 124 species and varieties have been found here), the rest being the comminuted shells of the more familiar Mollusca.(WW)
After a long walk above rocky shores I reached Bunowen Pier on the south side of the Slyne Head Peninsula. It was a welcome surprise to find the Connemara Smokehouse here, run by the Roberts family. More than forty years ago, John Roberts, a lifelong fisherman, purchased a 1946 fish-smoking kiln – fondly dubbed ‘Old Smoky’. The unique flavours created by the kiln helped the smokehouse become famous for producing fine smoked fish. Since the 1990s, when John’s son Graham and his wife Saoirse took over the reins, the family smokehouse team has grown to include their four children.
I bought some smoked mackerel and a delicious side of smoked albacore tuna caught on pole and line (troll-fished) in Irish waters and smoked here. The smoking process has been perfected over generations of the family business. Beechwood smoke is fanned through the fish for up to ten hours, depending on the size. A similar amount of time is required to dry the fish. Because of the age and simplicity of the kiln, even the weather conditions from day to day affect the way the fish are cured. Having undergone some major surgery and now enjoying some tender loving care, ‘Old Smoky’ still has pride of place at the Connemara Smokehouse.
Emerging from the smokehouse I noticed that a small inshore fishing boat had just tied up at the end of Bunowen Pier. My curiosity aroused, I wandered down to find out what they had caught. Skipper Pat Conneely was already unloading boxes of live lobsters and crabs that he had captured in lines of pots some ten kilometres off the coast. Pat told me that the pots were laid near the Skerd Rocks, a cluster of jagged reefs which mark the change from the shallow coastal ledge running out from land to the steep underwater cliff that slopes rapidly down to depths of over a hundred metres. This underwater landscape is a rich fishing ground for lobsters, just as it was a century ago, when the local fisherman-naturalist Séamus Mac an Iomaire sailed out with his father from the island of Maínis to catch fish here. In his unique book, Cladaigh Chonamara (The Shores of Connemara), Mac an Iomaire later accurately described the ecology of a wide range of marine creatures such as an gliomach (the lobster):
Many are caught in pots in summer and autumn. During that time they come in large shoals in from the strange deep. They are big and small depending on age. You would often see the young ones swimming on top of the water during fine weather. They are only as big as a shrimp, about two inches long. It’s hard to notice them as they are the same colour as the water; nevertheless, other fish slaughter them. Only a small number escape. Indeed, if it happened that all of the seed matured, then the sea would be full of lobsters. Nature prevents this. It’s wonderful the way that it can keep the fish under control so that they won’t be too plentiful and won’t be destroying each other.41 This remarkable understanding of the key principles of population dynamics was by a man with little formal education but with a deep knowledge of the natural world, learned over years of close contact with the sea and its creatures. Back on Bunowen Pier, Pat gave me a large bag of crab claws for my dinner but, with the typical generosity of his people, he would not accept any payment for these delicacies.
Mannin Bay
Following the low rocky shores towards Slyne Head, which marks the most westerly point of Connemara, I found secluded sandy beaches hidden away from the average tourist. I scrambled from the beach at Mannin Bay up a steep sand cliff and onto a level plain of sandy grassland that stretches away along the coast. This is a unique type of sand dune known as machair that occurs at a few places along the north-west coast of Ireland from Galway Bay to north Donegal. Unlike normal sand dunes, the machair is almost flat, sculpted by the constant winds from the Atlantic Ocean. In fact, the word machair comes from the Gaelic maghera, meaning a plain. During the winter, ocean storms carry great clouds of sand from the beach, spreading this across the machair. The sand is rich in calcium from the broken seashells that litter the shore. The grasslands are almost universally grazed by cattle, sheep or horses. The rich mixture of plant species makes for a mineral-rich diet, and the animals are healthy and hardy as a result.
Back in the 1980s, machair attracted the attention of a group of naturalists in Ireland. Tom Curtis led a team of botanists mapping the boundaries, flora and condition of over a hundred such sites along the west coast.42 A typical suite of lime-loving grassland plants, including red fescue, plantain, daisy, bird’s-foot trefoil, lady’s bedstraw and white clover, is found in virtually all machair sites. Occasionally, a flush of beautiful pyramidal orchids provides a highlight in the grass. Walking over the flower-rich grassland, I dodged the cattle that graze this highly nutritious sward. Suddenly a loud ‘chew-chew’ call announced the arrival of a family of choughs. They whirled and dived in aerobatic manoeuvres that would qualify them for any airshow.
Similar habitats in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland were found to have some unique populations of breeding waders. So, forty years ago, with several other ornithologists, I decided to have a look at the Irish machair sites identified by the botanists to see if they were similar. Over a period of months in the summer we walked over fifty sites in six counties. Here we found lapwings, circling about the sandy grasslands with their loud mewing calls, snipe drumming above the marshy areas, tiny dunlin with black plumage on their bellies and ringed plovers nesting among the shells on the strandline. Occasionally, we found a pair of oystercatchers, our attention drawn by the loud piping noise that they made to distract us from their chicks. The richest sites were those with both wet and dry machair in close proximity.
Today there have been dramatic changes in the breeding wader populations of the machair, and the sandy grasslands of Mannin Bay are no exception. Dunlin have all but disappeared, and lapwing declined by about a third in the following twenty years.43 Although lapwing have attempted a comeback, with thirty-two pairs found here in 2019, few young survive, and productivity remains relatively low. Today, the overall numbers of breeding waders on these sites have declined by a further 80 per cent, and many sites are virtually deserted. The machair itself is under a number of serious threats, including pressures for recreation, subdivision by fences facilitating more intensive grazing and the application of artificial fertilisers. Changes in the grassland structure are evident, with much lower coverage of tussocks, which many waders require for nesting. This is thought to be the result of increased grazing pressure in recent decades, with sheep densities markedly higher at numerous sites. These changes in habitat structure are also likely to exacerbate predation pressures, where scavengers like foxes and hooded crows can more easily find the nests. These threats can change the nature of flora and the birdlife permanently.44
Walking the beaches in Mannin Bay, it is clear that this is a most unusual sort of ‘sand’. Looking closely at a handful of the white material, I could see that it is coarse, branched and coral-like in appearance, and it felt rough under my bare feet. In fact, it is not sand at all but a material called maërl that is created by several seaweed species which concentrate the minerals from seawater with calcium forming tubes around the living plant. When alive they are bright pink in colour, but when broken up by storms and washed ashore they become bleached and white-looking, like tiny interlocking bones. So much of this material is present that it makes up the entire beach in some places, like the ‘coral strands’ of Mannin Bay.
Once used by west coast communities as a fertiliser on lime-poor soils, maërl is mainly composed of calcium, but it contains much higher proportions of magnesium, iron and other elements than ground limestone. It also has a more porous structure than the normal lime fertiliser, which may help bacteria to break it down more easily in the soil. It is found in some sixty offshore banks on the bottom of shallow inlets along the west coast, from Roaringwater Bay in West Cork to Mulroy Bay in north Donegal. In Europe as a whole, these algae are found from the Mediterranean to the Arctic Ocean, but are best known from Brittany in north-west France, where the word maërl originated. Maërl creates a structurally complex habitat on the seabed that is colonised by a wide range of other plants and animals, especially algae (seaweeds) and crustaceans (crabs, shrimps and amphipods). So it is of high conservation value, and when there are proposals for large-scale commercial exploitation of the maërl for its value as an agricultural fertiliser, I feel that this is the coastal equivalent of mining the bogs and sending the turf up in smoke. Short-term use creating long-term damage.
As I walked the beaches of west Connemara I picked my way between large piles of partly rotted seaweed cast up on the strandline by recent storms. But there were also long blades of what appeared like the grass from a meadow. In fact this is a flowering plant called eelgrass that grows in shallow water and is frequently torn from its roots by stormy seas. When seen growing beneath the sea these seagrass beds look exactly like an unmowed meadow, with the leaves waving back and forth in the current. Like all green plants they depend on sunlight to photosynthesise and grow, so clear water and shallow seas provide exactly the right conditions. Just like a hay meadow on land, healthy seagrass beds support a wide diversity of animal life, both above and below the seafloor. They offer safe nursery areas for fish like cod and herring and shellfish such as scallops. Like leopards stalking through the African grasslands, sharks and rays also use the cover of these marine meadows to hide from their prey. Globally, at least fifty species of fish live in or visit seagrass beds, and about one-fifth of the world’s biggest fisheries are supported by seagrass meadows as fish nurseries. Seagrass habitats support thirty times more animals, mainly invertebrates, than other nearby habitats. Importantly, in the current climate crisis, seagrass meadows store carbon as effectively as forests, at about 400 kilograms of carbon dioxide per hectare each year.
Seagrass communities are declining across the world’s oceans, and Ireland is no exception to this. Globally, estimates suggest that we are losing an area of seagrass around the size of a football pitch every 30 minutes. One of the main causes of this decline is pollution draining into the sea via rivers from agriculture, forestry and urban settlements on land. Nutrient enrichment through the discharge of phosphates and nitrates causes other more vigorous plants to grow on top of the seagrasses, blanketing them from the vital sunlight. Declines of this sort have been noted in bays all along the west coast, from Castlemaine Harbour in Kerry to Mulroy Bay in Donegal. In Wales, a new project called ‘Seagrass Ocean Rescue’ has been launched to trial methods of restoration. Seeds are collected from the eelgrasses when they mature, and these are grown in laboratory conditions so that the plants can be later sown back out on the ocean floor.
Inishbofin
Following the indented coastline of northern Connemara, I passed through the lively tourist town of Clifden and came, after a short distance, to the extensive strands opposite Omey Island and the coastal village of Cleggan. This was the location of a terrible tragedy in 1927, when twenty-six fishermen, including some from the island of Inishbofin, were caught out in their curraghs in a sudden storm and drowned. Known as the ‘Cleggan Disaster’, this same storm also took a toll on fishing communities in several other west coast locations.
A regular ferry runs from the pier in Cleggan to Inishbofin, entering one of the most sheltered natural harbours on any of the islands. The entrance is guarded by the impressive ruins of Bosco’s Castle, so-called because it was once occupied by the Spanish pirate, Don Bosco. From the pier where the ferry lands, I walked around to the castle to explore the remaining walls and substantial defences. According to local lore, Bosco had an alliance with the O’Malley clan, which ruled much of this western seaboard in the 16th century. In the mid-17th century, following the Tudor conquest of Ireland, the castle was garrisoned by Cromwell’s soldiers when Inishbofin served as a transportation centre for priests.
The origins of the island are rooted in a legend which is often quoted to explain its name Inish Bó Finne. The most common version relates how two fishermen, lost in fog, landed on the island and lit a fire. The flames broke a spell and the mist lifted to reveal an old woman driving a white cow along a beach, which ran between a lake and the sea. She was seen to strike the cow, whereupon it turned to stone. Another story tells that the old woman and the cow emerge from the lake every seven years to forewarn of some impending disaster. The lake in question is Loch Bó Finne (Lake of the White Cow) in West Quarter village.
I have a soft spot for Inishbofin, as my father found a safe anchorage for his yacht in this harbour during a major storm when he undertook a circumnavigation of Ireland in the 1990s. On my own visit, as I stepped off the ferry, I could hear the distinctive ‘crake-crake’ call of a corncrake from the fields behind the houses. Now largely confined to some remote islands and coastal fields, this threatened bird is clinging onto Ireland by its wingtips. It makes an impressive migration each year to the tropics south of the Sahara Desert, returning in May to search for long vegetation such as nettle beds, where it will hide before nesting in the growing meadows. Early summer mowing of hay or silage often leads to the death of the flightless chicks and failure of second breeding attempts too.
South Mayo
Killary Harbour is a long, narrow inlet, extending sixteen kilometres in from the Atlantic to its head at Leenaun, below the famous Aasleagh falls. It forms the border between Galway and Mayo and boasts some of the most spectacular scenery in the west of Ireland. Praeger described it as ‘the best example in Ireland of a true fiord – a submerged river-valley which has been greatly deepened by ice-action … but, as in the manner of fiords, its entrance is less deeply excavated than its middle part, and requires careful navigation.’(WW) The main part of the inlet is extremely deep, reaching down to 45 metres at its centre. This offers a very safe, sheltered anchorage among high mountains to the south and north. It is a centre for shellfish farming, with lines of floats and hanging ropes that are used to grow mussels. Clams and mussels grown in Killary Harbour are sold at the Westport Country Market every Thursday morning.
Entering County Mayo, Praeger was also familiar with the coastal strip north of Killary Harbour; ‘a flat sandy stretch with shallow lakelets and a curiously mixed flora intervenes between the Atlantic and the steep gable of Mweelrea – a lonely and fascinating place, known as Dooaghtry’.(WW) This description hardly does justice to a wonderful natural mix of beaches, dunes, saltmarsh, machair, lakes, fens, native woodland and rocky outcrops that still retains much of the magic and fascination hinted at by Praeger. I have stayed here many times as a guest of my friend David Cabot, who lives in the centre of this amazing landscape. He has shown me some of the hidden wonders of this place. The lakes, which are surrounded by species-rich alkaline fen and sandy grassland, have a rich community of aquatic plants including few-flowered spike-rush, carnation sedge, water mint, grass-of-Parnassus and the marsh helleborine orchid. The lakes are also used by migratory whooper swans that fly in from Iceland in the autumn, their loud trumpeting calls echoing across the nearby machair. On an early morning walk I saw an otter emerge from one of these lakes and, with its characteristic weasel-like gait, it ran across the rocky outcrops and disappeared into the reeds in a neighbouring waterbody. On the soft sand of the beach I picked up its tracks, looping up and down the shore as it searched for stranded prey on the driftline. In the rest of Ireland otters are mostly nocturnal, but here in the west of Ireland, where they are little disturbed by the local residents, they emerge to feed during the day. Usually associated with freshwater, these wonderful mammals are equally at home in the sea, where they swim among the seaweed and frequently bask on the shoreline.
Behind the wind-battered dunes is a classic area of flat machair plain, grazed over centuries and formerly a top breeding site for waders like lapwing and dunlin until the national population crashed in the late 20th century. One of the factors which has protected this complex area from development or tourism is that to reach it you have to wade or drive through the shallow tidal outlet from the lakes, and few people are willing to do this. When I first visited this unique area in the 1970s there was a large pyramid of sand on the beach. This was a famine graveyard, where countless victims had been buried in the mid-19th century. Climbing up the sides of this iconic structure I could see bleached human bones being eroded from the sand and I thought of the great hardship faced by the poor people of this area a century and a half ago.
Close to the road to Louisburgh I walked down to see a historic clapper bridge that was built in 1863. This is a low, curving construction, some fifty metres long and formed of thirty-eight boulders spanned by flat slabs of stone. I was able to walk on the bridge beside a wide but shallow ford across the river. The former village here was known locally as ‘The Colony’, but its past is seldom talked about, and few are willing to recall the painful memories of its brief existence. During the famines of the 1840s many local people converted from Catholicism to Protestantism in return for food to keep them alive. In 1853, the landlord Lord Sligo granted the local Protestant minister an acre of land here, on which to build a new church. As this was in an extremely remote area and there were no roads to it, numbers began to fall and the congregation eventually petered out. The Society for the Protection of Rights of Conscience took control of the church and built ten or twelve houses for the converts together with a school for its inhabitants. However, the local people strongly objected to the presence of the society and after only twenty years it disappeared from the district and the church was demolished in 1927. All that remains of the Colony today are the ruins of three houses.
Inishturk
From Roonagh Quay, I caught a local ferry to the island of Inishturk to find some space and rest. Slightly less well-known than either of its neighbouring islands, Inishturk is sandwiched between Inishbofin to the south and Clare Island to the north. Praeger and his wife, Hedwig, spent ‘an interesting week’ in the island in 1906. His comments on the accommodation illustrate how his new wife was unshakeable in her support of the naturalist and his work:
There is no inn there but, by the kindness of F.G.T. Gahan we secured the use of a shed belonging to the Congested Districts Board, perched on a low rock with deep water half surrounding it. In bad weather the beating of the rain on the galvanised iron roof, combined with the roar of the waves just outside the door, made a wonderful noise at night. When we arrived, after a lively passage from Renvyle, I was sent off to botanise for at least two hours, and when I returned my wife had removed from the floor a half-inch compacted layer of Portland cement, herring scales, petroleum and sawdust. Then we settled down, surrounded by coils of wire, boxes of dynamite, and bags of cement, and we fried fish, baked bread and cooked bacon and eggs on a small pan over a smoky stove.(WW)
My own accommodation in a comfortable guesthouse was much more amenable. The hosts were very welcoming and even took me with them to a musical evening in the community centre. Today, the island has a permanent population of about sixty, although in 1861 more than twice as many people lived here, and they were then entirely Irish-speaking. I wandered right around the cliff-bound island, regularly leaving the circular road, following choughs and puzzling over heaps of rocks that might have been the remains of deserted cottages. The western side often experiences huge Atlantic waves, and there is a blowhole near the north-east tip of the island. The waves enter a cave below sea level and the pressure forces a fountain of seawater up through the boulders on top. I was greatly impressed by the Gaelic football pitch wedged between steep rocks in the centre of the island. This must be the most remote sports pitch in the country, and is well sheltered from the regular strong winds.
I got used to the constantly patrolling fulmars and gulls along the cliffs but I was surprised when a large dark bird started to hover over me and made a few attempts to chase me away from one of the more remote parts of the clifftop. This was a great skua, the newest addition to Ireland’s impressive list of breeding seabirds. It was traditionally confined to the northern islands of Scotland, but has recently been expanding its range as it adapts to preying on fish discarded by vessels at sea. These large, aggressive birds will chase other seabirds, forcing them to drop the fish they are carrying, which they will then steal. Later in the season the skuas will patrol the cliffs searching for seabird chicks to prey on. In 2010 breeding by skuas was reported on Rathlin Island in Northern Ireland, while more of these birds were seen prospecting cliffs in Donegal. The latest surveys for the National Parks and Wildlife Service estimated breeding by thirteen to fifteen pairs in the Republic in 2015–18, but Stephen Newton of BirdWatch Ireland thinks that there may be a minimum of about twenty-five pairs of skuas by now on the island of Ireland. They have now been confirmed breeding on a number of other islands around the coast between Galway and Antrim.
Praeger repeatedly mentions the many values of the curragh, the traditional boat design in remote western islands. ‘The curragh serves as a tent also, for the lobster-men often spend a night on homeless islands, sleeping comfortably under the overturned boat whatever the weather may be’. He recalled an event where one of these traditional rowing boats saved him and some colleagues from spending an uncomfortable night on Caher Island near Inishturk in 1910:
In the evening the wind and sea suddenly got up; our boat after many attempts failed to get alongside the rock at the landing-place; some of the party could not swim, or we might have reached her that way. Rain was clearly not far away, and the wind increased as we wandered around the little island, looking before dark for a sheltered place for sleeping. We found one – already occupied. The sight of an overturned curragh and a face peeping in amazement from underneath it was as welcome as it was unexpected: in a few moments two lobster-men had their boat in the water, and one by one we were safely ferried to our tossing hooker.(WW)
Some curraghs are used on the island today, but now they are powered by outboard engines. Their characteristic raised bows are designed to break through the big Atlantic rollers.
Clare Island
As the powerful ferry pulled away from the pier at Roonagh Quay into the rough Atlantic waters, I could clearly see the great hump-backed outline of Clare Island across the mouth of Clew Bay. Famous as the ancestral home of the legendary Pirate Queen Grace O’Malley (Granuaile), the island’s silhouette is dominated by the peak of Knockmore at 462 metres high on the north-western edge and the more gently sloping Knocknaveen in the centre. The western cliffs are among the most dramatic in Europe, and are home to large numbers of nesting seabirds, including a recently established colony of gannets.
I had come here to join a gathering of scientists and naturalists to explore the natural history of the island, to attend the launch of a biography of Praeger by Timothy Collins and to celebrate the Clare Island Survey of 1909–11. The original survey had been organised almost single-handedly by Praeger, who explained his reasons for choosing this location for intensive study:
The unexpectedly interesting results arising from biological team-work on the island of Lambay near Dublin led to a proposal that a similar survey should be made of one of the western islands, embracing everything connected with its geology, zoology, botany and so on. Clare Island was selected, as board and lodging for working parties were possible there, and transport was not too difficult – qualifications which scarcely held for the Great Blasket, a close runner-up. Clare Island had also the advantage of a diversified surface, made up of rocks of various ages, and a hill of 1,520 feet dropping into the Atlantic in a grand cliff covered with alpine plants above and with great bird colonies below.(WW)
Praeger set to, with characteristic energy, organising multiple teams of up to a dozen of the leading experts in their specialist fields in Ireland, Britain and other European countries. They scoured Clare Island, neighbouring islands and the seabed for records of plants and animals and to describe placenames, agriculture, climate, geology and antiquities. In total, a hundred workers took part in the surveys, including many well-known scientists. ‘For three consecutive years six or eight parties went out in spring or summer or autumn, and indeed there was no month of the twelve in which one of our collectors might have not been found investigating seaweeds or earthworms or mosses.’ His own work in organising the massive undertaking including the publication of the results in three large volumes ‘occupied his leisure time for six years’.45 He found the whole exercise to be ‘a full, stimulating and interesting time’. Praeger also found the results rather surprising, ‘especially as regards the fauna and flora, in view of the fact that the island and adjoining areas are barren and wind-swept in comparison with lands further east, and much of them covered with unproductive peat-bog’:
Of a total of 5,269 animals observed – ranging from mammals down to microscopic rhizopods – no less than 1,253 species were found to be hitherto unknown in Ireland, of which 343 were unrecorded also from Great Britain, and 109 new to science. Of the 3,219 plants collected, from phanerogams to diatoms, 585 were new to Ireland, 55 new to the British Isles and 11 new to science.(WW)
For its time this was a substantial result, but there were disappointments. Unlike other marine islands throughout the world, no species was found that was endemic to Clare Island, and it was difficult for Praeger to reach any conclusions about colonisation of the island other than it was an extension of the neighbouring mainland. By this stage, the old pursuits of simple collection of records were beginning to be overtaken by more modern scientific investigations of the ecological processes involved in change in the natural world. Today, the overriding cause of changes is human-induced climate warming and all the attendant impacts on nature.
In retrospect, Praeger’s ground-breaking Clare Island Survey is now seen as a thorough baseline measurement of an undeveloped area which has not been immune from the pervasive and long-term effects of habitat loss and land-use change in Ireland and Europe. This was the understanding that led, almost a century later, to the Royal Irish Academy repeating the exercise with the intention of assessing and evaluating change on the island over the intervening years. Over fifteen years, modern teams of specialists used Praeger’s baseline to assess the environmental changes that have taken place over the last century on a typical island off the west coast of Ireland. The results have been published by the Academy as a series of thematic books.46
This time, the surveys found that some of the wilder parts of the island appear to be unchanged, but a quarter of the island’s wild plants recorded by Praeger have disappeared in the previous century. Some new plants have arrived in the intervening years, but these are mostly garden escapes. Many of the new animals recorded were found among forests of kelp examined using sub-aqua equipment unknown in Praeger’s survey, which had to rely on offshore dredging.
The lives of the islanders have also changed radically since then. In Praeger’s time, the people were largely self-sufficient, growing and raising most of their own food needs. Today, the farming enterprises, which are dominated by sheep grazing, depend completely on EU support, and many of the young people have left to find better-paid jobs on the mainland. The pre-Famine population of 1,600 was devastated, and the number of residents in 1851 reduced to just 545. By now only around 150 people live here, but almost half of the houses are holiday homes occupied at most for a few months each year. During the long, dark winter there are few lights in the windows.47
During my visit I camped on the flat, sandy grass above the beach where Praeger and a group of his eminent colleagues posed for an iconic photograph sitting on a traditional wooden boat in front of Granuaile’s castle. Again, Praeger extolled the virtues of the curragh as ‘the usual means of communication in the island regions’:
On Clare Island one day, when some heavier boats were anchored close in against the sand in the sheltered bay by the castle, a sudden violent squall came in from the east, raising a sea which threatened to drive them ashore and smash them to pieces. The islanders dashed out from the little harbour in curraghs, and through the breaking waves to the boats, which they towed out to safety. It looked a crazy and dare-devil performance, but to them it was all in the day’s work.(WW)
During my three-day stay, I walked to all corners of the island, including the seabird colonies of the northern cliffs and the old abbey in the west with its recently restored wall paintings. The building dates from the 12th century, being rebuilt around 1460, and is unique in Ireland because of the extent of its surviving medieval paintings on walls and ceiling. The abbey offers one of the best opportunities to experience what a medieval painted interior would have looked like. In one of the most stunning clifftop locations in Ireland I passed by the lighthouse, from which I could look out over the rough sea to Achill Island in the north and Clew Bay to the east.
Clew Bay
As I look back into Clew Bay from the summit of Clare Island, the conical peak of Croagh Patrick dominates the scene and below it is laid out a scatter of hundreds of small islands, each one a rounded hill or drumlin formed after the melting of a substantial glacier in the last Ice Age. Some of the islands are joined together by narrow gravel banks that can be topped by the tides. These are similar to the islands and pladdies in Strangford Lough, and both bays hold the best examples of this type of drumlin landscape in Ireland. Lying in the shadow of Croagh Patrick is Bertragh Beach, a long, narrow sand dune spit that links into an island at the northern end. I camped here one night on my way north and walked to the end of the dunes. At one point, the spit is so narrow that it is in danger of being breached by the sea. Yachts entering Westport have to navigate carefully between the islands to avoid running aground on one of these gravel banks.
So far, my sailing experiences around Ireland have all been fairly manageable, but I have the advantages of a depth sounder, good weather forecasting based on satellite imagery, high-precision instruments including a GPS chartplotter as well as the comfort of an ocean-going yacht. In Praeger’s time things were largely dependent on the skill and experience of the boat handler. He clearly took risks both on land and sea to reach the remoter areas which held natural history secrets. This passage illustrates that clearly:
Several islands lie off the South Mayo coast which are well worth a visit by those to whom the heave of the ocean is an exhilaration and not a burden. … Many a wild crossing I have had among these islands. I remember one from Achill Sound to Clare Island when it was blowing a gale. Our boatman rather begrudgingly agreed to take half his usual complement of passengers but, when he came out from the tail of Achillbeg into the open, he would have turned had it been possible. There was nothing for it but to carry on, and away we went under one scrap of sail, over great waves roaring in from the west. The boat rushed down into deep troughs where there was no breath of wind, and only water all round, and up again over high crests … where the wind half choked us, and we got a momentary glimpse over far-stretching angry seas to distant black foam-rimmed cliffs. Half-way across the waves threatened to comb and one of them spilled a plentiful cascade of white frothy water over us. Down crashed our rag of sail, and we flew down wind under bare poles, while each following sea was a wall of water hovering high over our stern and threatening annihilation…. There was no thought of panic, nor time for it: only a sense of intense exhilaration, coupled with thankfulness that our boatman is experienced and cool-headed.(WW)
I had long held an ambition to cycle along the Great Western Greenway that runs from Westport to Achill Island along the east and north sides of Clew Bay. So I borrowed a bike and set out on this forty-two-kilometre cycling route, one of the first long-distance cycleways in the country, which follows the line of a disused narrow-gauge railway. In the late 19th century Arthur J. Balfour had introduced an Act of Parliament providing State assistance for the construction of light railways to disadvantaged areas in Ireland. The Westport line was extended to Achill Sound in the 1890s, and this became one of the so-called ‘Balfour Lines’. Stations were built at Westport, Newport and Mulranny, while the full line to Achill was completed in May 1895. The railway company opened the luxury Mulranny Hotel in 1897, and a combined rail and hotel ticket was available to patrons. The hotel was equipped with every modern convenience of the time, including electric light and, by 1900, hot and cold water baths were also available. The railway became disused in the 1930s with the wide availability of motor cars, and today the embankments and cuttings provide a wonderful, quiet way to see the coastal landscape of this part of Mayo. It was a tent overnight on the Mulranny sand dunes for me instead of a luxury hotel bed.
Achill Island
The Greenway ends at the bridge onto Achill. People from this area have strong links with Scotland, as they frequently went in the past to work on the potato harvest there to make some much-needed cash. At the end of the 19th century it was a remote and poverty-stricken region, with Achill Island being one of the worst-hit by famine and emigration in the 1840s. In the summer of 1894 four Hookers carrying hundreds of islanders set out to sail from Achill to the mainland at Westport, where they were due to meet a steamer bound for Glasgow and the Scottish potato fields. Some people who had walked the forty miles by road were already on board the ship. Many of the young people from the island had never seen a steamer before and, as their vessel, named locally as ‘Jack Healy’s Hooker’, approached the ship, the passengers rushed on deck to one side of the boat to hail their neighbours. Within minutes the hooker heeled over and capsized. Some were thrown into the sea, while others were trapped below deck as the big wooden boat sank to the bottom. In the end, thirty-two people were drowned, twenty-five of them young women and the youngest only twelve years of age. This was the kind of risk that many islanders faced every year, as their connection to the rest of the world depended on taking to the sea.48
Praeger wrote that Achill was ‘an island only in name for the narrow passage which cuts it off from Curraun is crossed by a substantial bridge. Achill, wind-swept and bare, heavily peat-covered, with great gaunt brown mountains rising here and there, and a wild coast hammered by the Atlantic waves on all sides, but the east, has a strange charm which everyone feels, but none can fully explain.’(WW) My own first visit to Achill Sound was by inflatable boat when surveying the whole west coast for harbour seals. The channel narrows to extensive shallow mudflats that weave in and out of smaller islands, where we found a small group of seals. Our crew landed close to the bridge and took to the nearest pub in Achill Sound for refreshments. Praeger had read about Achill in a book published in 1838 but, he wrote:
My first glimpse of it at first hand was sixty years later, in 1898, following which, in 1904, I made a careful botanical survey of this highly interesting area. The eagles were gone, save that an occasional itinerant golden eagle was reported still; but the flora was unchanged – as it still is – except that an increase in the amount of tillage, due to better drainage, tended to provide a habitat for additional colonists from the east. … In August the rye stands up white against the bogland tinged purple with heather, with an increasing golden tint as the tufted spikerush assumes its rich autumn colour, among patches of crimson cotton-grass and white mat-grass.(WW)
On the slopes of Slievemore facing south across Keel Bay I visited a deserted village that consists of up to a hundred ruined stone cottages located along a stretch of green road. I spent a while wandering among and inside some of the old houses and through adjacent fields with their lazybed cultivation ridges, imagining what life would have been like for people living here in the early 19th century as they eked out a subsistence lifestyle on the hillside. The whole of Achill was badly hit by the Great Famine of the 1840s and emigration became the only remaining option for many of the surviving villagers.
The old village on Slievemore is the largest and most recently abandoned of several ‘booley’ settlements on Achill Island. After the permanent residents left the village it was still used in the summer. The villagers from Pollagh and Dooagh would take their sheep and cattle to graze on the rich mountainside pastures of Slievemore during the summer months. They stayed in the old cottages, returning to their lowland villages for the winter. The practice of booleying, or transhumance, was continued in Achill long after it was abandoned in other parts of Ireland and western Europe. Praeger may well have met some of these booley occupants when he walked all over the hillsides of Achill. Typically, he claimed that, ‘the ascent of Slievemore (670 metres) from Dugort is easy, and you obtain a bird’s-eye view over the whole island and a vast extent of sea and intricate coast besides’.(WW) He recalled coming down the steep mountainside one stormy day:
There was half a gale blowing right up the slope from the ocean, and I had to fight my way downhill. I came to one of the little flat platforms that sheep make when they stand for shelter behind a stone. And in the middle of it a fox sat, contemplating the ocean – a fine fellow, with a grand tail and much white about the muzzle. I approached quietly till I stood only a yard behind him, but the roar of the wind prevented his hearing me, and he kept his head steadily fixed down the slope. I studied him for a long time; then put out my stick and touched him on the back. He was so taken by surprise that he stared at me for quite two seconds before making off with remarkable speed.(PS)
I went for a swim at Keem Bay at the very western tip of Achill. This is a cliff-bound cove with a beautiful sandy beach at the head. Throughout the early 20th century this was the location for the capture and killing of basking sharks, the largest fish in the Atlantic. Kenneth McNally, by profession a photographer with Ulster Television, filmed the fishery and wrote about it in his book The Sunfish Hunt.49 A shortage of fuel after World War II led to an increasing market for shark oil for use in certain industrial products. The slow-moving sharks swam into the bay to feed on dense swarms of plankton near the sea surface. Here they became entangled in nets set by the islanders, who then launched their lightweight curraghs and killed the struggling fish, stabbing them with scythe blades attached to long poles. Over the thirty-year period up to the 1970s more than 12,000 basking sharks were landed on Achill – an average of at least 400 fish per year. These harmless sharks were caught at a number of regular haunts along the west coast in the preceding century and large quantities of the valuable oil were exported to England. Not surprisingly, catches declined markedly towards the end of this period and, with the availability of alternative mineral oils, the market for shark oil disappeared, allowing the few remaining animals to survive.
Today, the sharks are back, their population slowly recovering from this classic example of overfishing. Jane Clarke has written a moving poem about this experience called ‘At Purteen Harbour’:
At Purteen Harbour
basking sharks, docile as seal pups,
harpooned and netted from currachs,
were towed one by one to the fishery
at the slipway. Fathers and sons
sliced off dorsal fins and hacked
through blubber to reach oil-filled livers.
Sweating in burn-house heat,
they shovelled bleeding flesh
into the rendering machine.
They couldn’t wash the smell
from their skin, not if they swam
to Inis Gealbhan at the end of every shift.
Year by year the catch grew less,
then disappeared.
But late last April, old men cheered
from the headland, and said,
It was as if they’d been forgiven—
a school of twelve cruised into Keem Bay,
moon tails swishing, fins proud
as yawl sails above the waves.50
Elsewhere I have watched a basking shark surface beside my boat, lazily cruising through the rich waters. They are truly impressive fish, completely docile and harmless, unlike some of their relatives.
Bills’ Rocks
Although I have never managed to visit them, the Bills’ Rocks, some ten kilometres south-west of Achill, must be among the most remote parts of the Irish coastline. These are three rugged rocks rising almost vertically from the Atlantic. The Bills’ Rocks were called after the Danish Captain Mathias De Bille. In 1781, the Royal Danish Navy frigate Bornholm left Copenhagen bound for the Danish West Indies. The following January, as the ship reached the Irish coast, a hurricane drove it south towards Clew Bay. The foremast and bowsprit were lost but the captain managed to steer the ship into Melcombe Bay near Newport to avoid the vessel being smashed against the Bills’ Rocks.
Praeger clearly did visit these isolated rocks, measuring just over one hectare in total area, probably as part of the Clare Island Survey in 1909–11. He wrote:
I remember a lovely belated spring display of sea-pink and scurvy-grass on the Bills, those lonely stacks away to the south-west of Achill. It is not easy to land here, for on the calmest day the almost imperceptible heave of the Atlantic changes to foaming breakers against the rocks. One chooses a vertical rock-face (with a sufficiency of foot-holds and hand-grips), for there the wave goes straight up and down, and there is no danger of a capsize. Then one notes a niche for one’s foot, and steps ashore on the top of a swell. The return is mostly more difficult; sometimes the driest way is to throw one’s clothes into the swaying boat and swim for it. Swimming, indeed, is the primitive and proper way of approaching an island.(BS)
The Bills’ Rocks have held a fascination for ornithologists for over a century, but there have been few attempts to survey the birds here. David Cabot has made five visits over a period of fifty years, with the most recent in 2018, when he was the first person known to camp here overnight. Just four seabird species were definitely recorded breeding, and there was a tantalising suggestion that a few Leach’s petrels, one of the rarest birds known to breed in Ireland, were nesting here.51 They are extremely difficult to observe, as they nest deep in underground burrows. Five years earlier, Eoin McGreal had confirmed their presence by playing the bird’s call on his mobile phone outside a nesting burrow and eliciting a response from an incubating bird.52
Blacksod Bay and Broadhaven
While surveying seals on the west coast I was on a large inflatable boat as we passed through the town of Belmullet via a narrow canal linking Blacksod Bay to Broadhaven. In 1715 Sir Arthur Shaen began building the town at Belmullet on a wet and marshy area that linked the Mullet Peninsula to the mainland of Mayo. To drain this area and to form a passageway for small boats between the two nearby bays, Shaen had a canal excavated and a sluice was erected at the Blacksod Bay side to allow boat traffic to and from the Mullet Peninsula to pass along the shore. Development of the town proved to be a slow process, and the canal fell into disrepair by the mid-1700s. A century later work began to restore the canal, but it was not completed until 1851 due to the Great Famine, which had a particularly devastating effect on the Erris region. A report in that year stated that the canal was then being used extensively and also mentioned the use of a swivel bridge. This has been replaced by a modern road bridge, while the original footbridge was demolished in 1989 and replaced by a cable-stay bridge named, appropriately enough, ‘Reconnections’.
The shallow, sandy waters of Blacksod Bay provide ideal seabed habitats for the specialised communities of maërl (algae that create a hard calcareous structure) and seagrass meadows similar to those found in some other west coast bays. On the west side of Blacksod Bay there are also significant submarine reefs constructed by marine worms known as Serpulids. These habitats are so rare in Europe that the whole bay has been designated as a Special Area of Conservation. There are currently problems here with unsustainable fisheries. Reports by the Marine Institute and the NPWS conclude that scallop dredging is incompatible with maintenance of maërl and seagrass communities, and may significantly impact reef fauna, including Serpulid and Laminaria in Clew Bay and Blacksod Bay. Impacts of scallop dredging in sedimentary habitats may be significant in Clew Bay, Broadhaven Bay and Blacksod Bay given the spatial extent of the fishery and the protracted fishing season. The seasonal oyster fishery will add cumulatively to this effect. The marine worm-dominated community complex in Blacksod Bay, which had previously (2008) been shown to be comprised of large aggregations of biogenic reef formed by Serpula, now consists of broken tubes. Very few living aggregations are still present, and the total habitat area of this marine community type has been negatively impacted. The cause of this impact is physical damage due to benthic dredging.53
The Irish Wildlife Trust pointed out that the NPWS report also found maërl habitat to be damaged, even though the Marine Institute recommended this should be avoided by the bottom fishery. The protected sedimentary habitats in Blacksod Bay are frequently dredged, and this is adversely altering these protected ecosystems despite legal protection.54 The marine biologist Bob Brown says that it even destroys the hydroids upon which scallops depend for larval settlement.
Passing through Belmullet, the wide shallow bay of Broadhaven stretches away to the north. Praeger remembered a trip here, probably during the 1914–18 period.
The first time I saw Broad Haven was before sunrise on a lovely morning in May many years ago, when as a war correspondent, I joined a landing party of a mate and two seamen from the Congested Districts Board steamer Granuaile. Their fell purpose was to capture and forcibly abduct a Spanish jackass which was roaming the hills ‘somewhere in Mayo’. We landed on a stony shore where a couple of cottages gleamed white against miles of bog, and for a while I was left alone in the company of some ducks and three contemplative goats, who watched with profound attention the first sunlight gilding the cliffs of Erris Head out to the west. … I think the Congested Districts Board had a number of these tall Spanish beasts on the west coast for a time, in an endeavour to improve the stamina of the local donkey population.(WW)
The Congested Districts Board for Ireland was established by the British government in 1891 to alleviate poverty and cramped living conditions in the west and north-west of Ireland. Devastated by the Great Famine and the mass emigration that followed, the remaining people in these areas were still extremely poor, and there was much political pressure for change. The government response was based on a Conservative policy of ‘Constructive Unionism’ or ‘killing Home Rule with kindness’. The Board was set up to alleviate poverty by paying for public works such as building houses, constructing new piers, assisting the development of fishing, modernising farming methods and sponsoring local industries, such as the knitwear business on the Aran Islands, to give employment and stem the continuing emigration from Ireland. Many of its constructions, such as the hundreds of small stone piers on the west coast, remain to be seen today.
Apart from its physical works the Board had a fundamental impact on land ownership, especially on some of the offshore islands. For example, extreme poverty on Clare Island forced many evictions, so the Board purchased the entire island from the landlords in 1895 and resold it to the tenants five years later. The Board was wound up in 1923 by the new government of the Irish Free State and its functions were absorbed into the new Department of Agriculture. However, the historian Diarmaid Ferriter believes ‘the bald reality and deep irony was that more was done for the islands under British rule than was done in the early decades of native rule’.55
The Mullet
When I first started to work for the Irish Wildbird Conservancy (now BirdWatch Ireland) I set out to visit all of the sites where the organisation had undertaken conservation work. On a fine summer’s evening in the early 1980s I arrived on the Mullet, about as far west as it is possible to go on the wild Atlantic landscape of Mayo. Praeger knew the area too, and he gave a colourful description:
Belmullet has as a stopping-place the advantage of allowing easy access to The Mullet, that remote peninsula, half bog, half sand, full of bays and queer lakes and outlying islets; treeless, sodden, storm-swept and everywhere pounded by the besieging sea; beautiful on a fine day, with wondrous colour over land and ocean, desolate beyond words when the Atlantic rain drives across the shelterless surface.(WW)
I camped in a field near the coast, west of Belmullet, and close to a small wetland at Annagh Marsh. The grassland around me was rich with wildflowers, including sheets of yellow bird’s-foot trefoil and purple seaside pansy. As I cooked up a meal in the setting sun, I could hear corncrakes belting out their electric calls into the warm air and a snipe drumming overhead. Even a century later this was still clearly a magic place. When I wandered around the marsh early next morning, I spotted an unusual-looking wader which, unlike most related species, was actually swimming in circles on the shallow pools. Praeger wrote:
On the edge of the Atlantic, in a place that shall be nameless, my wife and I had the most interesting ornithological adventure that has befallen us. We found ourselves suddenly among fairy-like birds, quite unknown to us, but evidently belonging to the Plover family. The most extraordinary thing was that they displayed absolutely no fear of us, darting around our feet, running over the slender water-plants which filled the pools and which, one might have thought, would scarcely have supported even a dragonfly, uttering even a small sharp cry. It was only when we got back to Dublin that we found that we had stumbled on the sole Irish breeding-haunt of the Red-necked Phalarope, which had been discovered only the previous year.(WW)
For most of the 20th century, Annagh Marsh was the only regular breeding site in Ireland (and the most southerly breeding site in the world) for red-necked phalarope. These small arctic waders are distinguished by the bright red neck colour of the females. The males are more camouflaged, as they take on the role of ‘mother’ by incubating the eggs and rearing the chicks. First discovered here in June 1900, there were various estimates of up to fifty pairs breeding until 1929. Thereafter they started to decline, despite the fact that the location of this breeding place remained confidential. This was thought to be because of pressures from egg collectors, along with the trampling of nests by cattle. In 1937 the Irish Society for the Protection of Birds acquired the ground and fenced the area to restrict access and cattle grazing. By 1968 this site held between three and five pairs, along with twenty non-breeding birds. While the sanctuary at Annagh had been protected for many decades, the decline in numbers of the birds continued, and it was recognised that the pools were becoming overgrown with vegetation. Local volunteers organised several work parties to create more open water, which the birds need for foraging. Unfortunately, the historical decline in the breeding population continued, and the last documented breeding was in 1980, with only occasional birds being seen over the next ten or so years.
More recent management of the area for other important breeding wader populations has resulted in the return of red-necked phalaropes to breed each year since 2015, as well as an increase in the numbers of breeding lapwings. Between 2002 and 2005, funding support from an EU LIFE-Nature programme enabled BirdWatch Ireland to restart active management and to graze up to 156 hectares surrounding the nearby Termoncarragh Lake through management agreements with farmers and direct land acquisition.
In addition to Annagh Marsh, the reserve at Termoncarragh is an important area for grassland biodiversity. The area has generally been enhanced and managed as species-rich, semi-improved grasslands, while the coastal heath and grassland have been maintained as such. The management of the meadows is primarily focused on breeding corncrakes, with up to two calling males holding territories in most years, while the coastal grasslands are managed for wintering geese. This area has attracted, on occasions, up to a thousand wintering barnacle geese. These are part of the bigger flock that flies daily from the offshore islands to feed on the grasslands adjacent to Termoncarragh Lake. However, other species of importance have benefitted too, including breeding skylark and meadow pipit. The meadows have also become important for rare invertebrates such as the great yellow bumblebee.
These wet grasslands are nationally important for the suite of species mentioned, and there are multiple threats to them. Dave Suddaby, BirdWatch Ireland’s Reserves Manager says: ‘Our knowledge of the impacts is ever-increasing but we still need to have a better understanding of these in order to manage the site. The whole ecosystem, including the birds, insects, vegetation and the farmers associated with the site, need to be taken into account to enable them to flourish into the future.’
Inishkea Islands
The Mullet and nearby sites on the Mayo coast were among the areas of sand dune machair that held the largest numbers of breeding waders when I undertook a full survey of these birds from Donegal to Galway in the mid-1980s.56 Noisy pairs of lapwings circled overhead, snipe chipped from the wetter areas and redshanks perched on fence posts between the grazing cattle. I remember finding a clutch of eggs laid by a dunlin in the hoof print of one of these beasts. But all this was to change in following years. Dave Suddaby has led the most recent breeding wader surveys on these western coasts and he has recorded dramatic declines of seventy to eighty per cent in most of the species. Among the last coastal areas to still hold significant numbers of waders in summer are the remote Inishkea Islands about five kilometres west of the Mullet.
These islands are almost frozen in time. In the 19th century, each of the two main islands had a busy village. I have been here many times over the last few decades, usually to help out with bird research projects led by David Cabot, who has been visiting the islands since 1961. Walking down one of the old grassy village ‘streets’ between rows of ruined cottages I could imagine the children, a century ago, playing among the wildflowers, women working in the potato fields and men hauling their curraghs up the beach below. Surprisingly, the population of the two islands grew over the period of the Great Famine in the 1840s, reaching a peak of 319 people in 1861 at a time when there was a huge decline on the mainland due to disease, death and emigration. While numbers living on the South Island started to decline in the early 20th century, the North Island village was growing, and had its own school, a police barracks and even a pub.57
To reach the Inishkeas I drove to the very southern tip of the Mullet at Blacksod, where I met the rest of the team and we boarded a small fishing boat to take us out across the sea to the substantial pier on the South Island. Sometimes, the alternative was to launch an inflatable boat and risk the big Atlantic swell and currents around the headlands. Just off the island pier is the small islet of Rusheen, which is linked to the South Island at low tide. Walking around the rocky shore I noticed large pieces of rusting ironwork, the remains of heavy machinery and fallen brick walls lying about the island. This was the site of a whaling station in the early years of the 20th century. A Norwegian company had bought the site on the islands from the Congested Districts Board, whose chairman, W.S. Green, had championed the whaling industry as a source of much-needed employment on the west coast. In 1908 the station was built from a shipload of imported timber, a slipway and flensing stage (for cutting up the whale meat) were built and three large winches were installed to haul the whale carcasses from the sea. Over 200 fin whales were caught and processed here in the next five years, as well as smaller numbers of blue, sei, sperm, right and humpback whales. However, declining catches and the onset of the First World War caused the closure of the whaling station, and a similar one on the mainland at Blacksod, after a few years.58
After this extraordinary episode in their history, life for the islanders returned much to normal. Fishing was the main source of income, and the total number of islanders remained around 300 until the 1920s, when disaster struck. Without warning, a huge storm hit the west coast in October 1927, and ten of the young men from the islands were caught out in their small fishing boats and drowned. The same sudden storm on the west coast, known as ‘the Cleggan disaster’, killed thirty-seven more fishermen from different harbours on the west coast. The remaining population of the Inishkeas was subsequently relocated, at their own request, to houses on the mainland, from where they could see their former homes.
This very isolation and lack of disturbance during the colder months is the principal reason why the Inishkeas host a large number of wintering birds, notably flocks of up to 5,000 barnacle geese that fly in during November each year from their summer breeding grounds in East Greenland. With David Cabot, Michael Viney and Steve Newton, I was fortunate to visit the arctic end of this long migration route in the 1980s in support of David’s long-term studies of the geese. The Inishkea Islands are like an international airport hub for geese, as about half move quickly on to other coastal areas in Ireland, while the remainder spend the winter here. He has renovated one of the small stone cottages on the island, from where he watches the flocks through a powerful telescope. A sample of the birds are caught and marked with numbered leg rings, each of which has a unique identifying code, similar to that on a vehicle registration plate. From this information David has built up a detailed picture of these geese as they stay together in families throughout the winter. He notes all this information in a set of unique journals, which detail a lifetime’s knowledge of the islands and their natural history.
The reduction in hunting pressure from the 1970s onwards led to a recovery in the population of grey seals on these uninhabited islands. The animals assemble in the autumn and the young are mainly born in the months of September and October. The white-coated pups are unable to swim for the first few weeks of life, and lie around among the boulders moulting and waiting for occasional feeds when their mothers come ashore to suckle them. I was able to scramble close enough to one pup to stare into its large watery eyes while it watched me carefully. Its mother was not far away, waiting in the surf for me to retreat. Up to a thousand of these seals gather on the islands in winter, when the local breeders are supplemented by incoming animals from Scottish breeding colonies.
North Mayo
Leaving the long inlet of Broadhaven and rounding Benwee Head, the coast turns directly east, and from here I descended to the isolated settlement at Portacloy, where curraghs were still stacked upside down just above the beach. Caesar Otway, in his Sketches in Erris and Tirawley, gives an account of exploring the north Mayo coast around Portacloy in what was presumably a large curragh. Otway was a man of great energies and curiosity, though he was not shy of saying what he thought of the poor natives in the 18th century:
I consider the coast-guard establishment one of the greatest blessings ever conferred on Ireland—a positive blessing in not only putting an effectual stop to smuggling, the nurse of profligacy and crime; to wrecking, the stimulus to dishonesty and cruelty, all-around our shores; but also, in locating prudent, honest, humanized, and often religious men, with their nice wives and children, and all their clean and decent habits amongst a dirty, ignorant, and careless people.59
Otway was completely overawed by the cliff scenery of north Mayo. The naturalist Richard Ussher was equally impressed by these cliffs many years later, when he was searching for sea eagles as he prepared his landmark book on The Birds of Ireland with Robert Warren.60
Just two kilometres off this coast is a small group of five cliff-bound rocky islets, with the highest rising to almost 100 metres above sea level. The sea has cut a tunnel entirely through one of the rocks, An Teach Beag. The Stags of Broadhaven are a popular site for visiting divers, sub-aqua teams and kayakers. The historian David Gange landed here during his epic sea kayaking voyage around the Atlantic fringe of Britain and Ireland. ‘We reached the Stags with tides running south and swell driving north. This stirred a vortex of sea like a mile-wide whirlpool round the rocks. I ploughed into the rocks, seeking respite, and scrambled up the cliff …. I remember breathing far more heavily than the level of exercise merited, my chest tight with nervous energy.’61 These rocks were one of the few places in Ireland thought to hold a breeding colony of the rare Leach’s petrel. Several of these elusive seabirds were seen and heard by ornithologists who managed to land on the rocks in 1946 and 1947. They were not surveyed again until 1982, when the petrels were found in burrows, a number were trapped and an estimate of at least 200 breeding pairs was made.62
To the east near Belderrig, the extensive blanket bog runs almost to the top of the cliffs, and here I called into the modern visitor centre at the Ceide Fields. In the Neolithic (New Stone Age) period this landscape would have looked entirely different, as it supported a thriving farming community. The secrets beneath the bog have been uncovered over the last few decades by archaeologists who carried out a painstaking process of probing the soft peat with long metal rods. These slip easily through the surface layers of the bog, but when they hit a line of stones beneath the peat, a map of the subsurface landscape can be produced. These stones were cleared from fields by Neolithic farmers and built into walls similar to those in the farms throughout western Ireland today. During my visit I followed the archaeologist Seamus Caulfield around the path as he explained how he and his colleagues found this ancient farming landscape of field walls stretching over at least 1,000 hectares. Pollen remains from the bog and the dating of ancient pine stumps at the base of the peat showed that the building of the walls coincided with a period of farming around 4,500 years before the present.
Sligo
Stopping briefly at several more spectacular cliff sites, including Illaunmaister and Downpatrick Head, I reached the wide inlet of Killala Bay, where I crossed the River Moy at Ballina.
Just above the rocky shoreline at Enniscrone on the east side of Killala Bay I found the traditional seaweed baths that have been run by generations of the Kilcullen family since 1912. Praeger would have passed by this building in his ramblings, as bathhouses came to Ireland during the Edwardian era, with about 300 facilities scattered around the country. Nine of those were in County Sligo. Edward and Christine Kilcullen are the fifth generation to own this bathhouse, which replaced a much older establishment from the middle of the 19th century. Inside, original fittings such as the enormous, glazed porcelain baths, solid brass taps and panelled wooden shower cisterns, give the place its unique historical atmosphere. The practice of immersing the body in steaming hot water filled to the brim with fresh seaweed from the local shores is said to provide relief from painful symptoms of rheumatism and arthritis. These therapeutic properties are attributed to the high concentration of iodine that occurs naturally in seawater, and the brown seaweed concentrates it in its fronds. As I sank into the silky, aromatic water I became totally relaxed and refreshed for another day’s adventure.
I spent a year studying the water birds of Sligo Bay, during which time I gained a detailed knowledge of all the laneways that lead down to the shore. Walking the sandy beaches and rocky points gave me a wonderful opportunity to explore this complex stretch of coastline. Praeger also visited this coast:
Sligo Bay, which enters the land between Roskeeragh Point and Aughris Head, breaks at once into three long fingers of complicated outline, with points and islands, making an extensive shallow area of calm water invading the limestone country, with miles of bare sand at low tide. The southern finger runs up to Ballysadare. (WW)
At low tide, Ballysadare Bay is a maze of shallow channels and sand banks. One of these is marked on Ordnance Survey maps as ‘The Great Seal Bank’, and I imagine that it was once a place where local people hunted the seals, hauling their quarry back to the shore in small boats. I was here in the 1970s as part of a team of biologists undertaking the first complete census of harbour seals in the island of Ireland.63 Travelling in two fast inflatable boats, we surprised hundreds of the animals hauled out on the sand banks. They shuffled down to the water and, with typical curiosity, swam around our boats at a safe distance, puzzling at the strange human beings. The main seal herd sometimes left behind some young pups, as they were not able to move so quickly into the water. Occasionally, all the seals had already entered the water, having heard our engines before we saw them, and we were limited to counting their distinctive tracks on the sand.
The mouth of the central bay is largely filled by the flat Coney Island. When the tide was low I walked out across the sand towards the island following a line of marker posts. Several vehicles passed me as I walked, rushing to beat the rising tide. It is a long walk across a kilometre of hard sand, and I was anxious that I would not be stuck on the island for a full cycle of the tide. At the northern edge of the bay a channel has been dredged to allow small cargo vessels to reach the quay walls in Sligo Town. It is also used by leisure boats that tie up in the mouth of the Garavogue River.
North of Rosses Point lies the third inlet of Drumcliff Bay, best known for the historic house of Lissadell, which was a favourite holiday destination of the poet W.B. Yeats and birthplace of the revolutionary Countess Markievicz, born Constance Georgine Gore-Booth. Her leadership role in the Easter Rebellion of 1916 and the subsequent struggle for freedom in Ireland led to her arrest but, because she was a woman, she narrowly avoided execution. I joined a guided tour of the house and was amazed to see that it remained much as it would have been at the time of the Gore-Booth family. Sir Henry Gore-Booth, father of Constance, was an adventurer who sailed his own yacht Kara to the Arctic where, in 1882, he was involved in the rescue of a fellow Arctic explorer called Benjamin Leigh Smith. He made several voyages sailing to Norway for salmon fishing, to Spitzbergen Island, to Nova Zembla in arctic Canada and to northern Greenland over a period of twenty years. He was keen to see a whale harpooned and asked that he be called as soon as one was sighted. The entry for his log on 27 May 1884 records ‘the report of the gun awoke me. The noise of the line running out fetched me out of my berth, and the watch yelling out “A fall! A fall!” caught me with one leg only in my trousers’. Sir Henry’s library of books from the Kara is on display at Lissadell, together with a stuffed polar bear he brought home from the Arctic and a 19th-century model of a rigged yacht. Sir Henry was also a prolific writer on a variety of topics, including Arctic exploration, yachting, whaling, polar bear hunting and shark fishing.
At home, his lordship must have been reminded of the arctic each winter where, on a large field right next to the wooded boundary of Lissadell, I watched a huge flock of barnacle geese, peacefully grazing on the grass that is kept short to attract them to this sanctuary. These handsome black-and-white birds breed in the frozen wilderness of east Greenland in summer, arriving here in October after a long migration via Iceland. As the flocks moved across the field, I could hear a constant low murmur as the geese carried on a conversation with each other. The goslings of the previous summer stay in close family groups with their parents through the winter, including the return trip to Greenland the following spring. This flock that moves around Sligo is the largest concentration of these geese in Ireland, with over 4,400 recorded in the latest census in 2018.64
North of Lissadell, the coast straightens out and breaks into a series of beaches and headlands. The shallow sandy shoreline here proved to be a disaster for no less than three of the tall ships that were part of the Spanish Armada. Hundreds of soldiers and seamen were drowned on the beach at Streedagh in 1588 when their ships were driven ashore and battered to pieces in a gale. Most of the survivors who reached the shore were beaten and robbed by the local population, with any remaining Spaniards being brutally murdered when the English garrison arrived from Sligo. One of the officers later reported, ‘I rode along that strand …. there lay a great store of timber of the wrecked ships …. in one strand lay eleven hundred corpses’.65 One of the few to escape was Captain Francisco de Cuellar, who recorded that wolves were seen on the shore eating some of the bodies. He walked inland as far as Lough Melvin, where he and a few companions were hidden by the Clancy family on a lake island at Rosclougher. He eventually made his way back to Madrid, where his memoirs were found much later and form the main source of information on the disaster at Streedagh.
Today the long sandy beach at Streedagh is one of a number of popular surfing waters in the northwest coast of Ireland. At the back of the sand dunes were parked lines of distinctive camper vans with surfboards strapped to the roofs. As I walked along the beach, lines of rollers were driven ashore in a strong westerly wind. I reached the stepped cliffs at the end of the beach, where I found an abundance of fossils preserved in the limestone. Large single corals the size of a wine bottle and massive colonies of tiny coral tubes appeared white against the grey stone. Many of these can be found in the large boulders that make up the huge storm beach at the top of the sand.
Inishmurray
Looking offshore from the beach at Streedagh I could see the flat island of Inishmurray, marked by a line of breakers along its shoreline. The island is best known for its remarkably well-preserved monastic remains, which date from the early medieval period. Founded here in the 6th century, the monastery was raided by Vikings in 795AD, suggesting that it had valuables worth stealing. The main feature today is a massive circular stone enclosure protecting a number of churches and beehive cells. It is now thought that these were an important destination for early pilgrims coming to worship at the tomb of Saint Molaise.66
Praeger, who first visited the island in 1896, wrote:
Right opposite to Mullaghmore, four miles out lies Inishmurray. It is a low islet a couple of hundred acres in area, much exposed to Atlantic storms; yet the place is full of early Christian antiquities, pointing to considerable importance in old days; and it still has a population numerous in relation to its size and agricultural possibilities, largely dependent on fishing for its livelihood.(WW)
The people of Inishmurray also had another trade that kept them in business. The distilling of illicit whiskey, known as poitín, was carried on here, out of reach of the strong arm of the law. Barley was grown on the island as one of the main ingredients. The distilled alcohol was stored in wooden kegs and hidden on the island until it could be transported under cover of darkness for sale on the mainland. Occasional raids by the authorities achieved little, as the approaching boats could be clearly seen and the islanders quickly hid the delicate equipment and kegs of whiskey among the extensive boulders on the shoreline. According to Dr Patrick Heraughty, an islander who left to study medicine and later wrote an account of the island, ‘there were 102 people living in fifteen houses’. World War II brought serious difficulties for the island people. Wartime fuel shortages led to the end of a motorboat service bringing supplies to the island. Sugar, one of the main ingredients in the manufacture of poitín, was rationed, and it became impossible to obtain enough to continue making the valuable product. Emigration increased steeply as islanders left to find a new life in Scotland or America. As island life became more difficult, evacuation of the last six families, with a total of forty-six people, became the only option left in 1948.67
As so often happened on the offshore islands, the departure of the human population led to an increase in wildlife. In July 1962, David Cabot spent five days on the island observing birds, and he found a healthy population of eider ducks and gulls.68 Since then the eider numbers have reached about 100 breeding pairs, making this one of the most important concentrations of the species in the island of Ireland. These ducks were first recorded breeding in Ireland in 1912, so they were probably present when the last of the islanders lived here. In Iceland, where they are common, the people collected the soft feathers lining the nests when breeding was finished and these were sold as eiderdown, best known for its use in pillows and duvets. Perhaps more important is the colony of storm petrels found to be nesting here in crevices in the many stone walls. These tiny seabirds are active mainly at night to avoid predation by large gulls, so counting them is extremely difficult. Nevertheless, in 1979 it was estimated that there were 500 pairs. A ringing study of the birds has shown that there are many interchanges with other breeding colonies on the west coast, as well as with those in the Irish Sea.69
Donegal Bay
Donegal Bay is an enormous inlet that stretches from north Mayo to the south-western extremity of County Donegal, dominated by the spectacular cliffs of Slieve League. I called into the Smuggler’s Creek Inn, a hostelry founded in 1907 above the cliffs at Rossnowlagh. Here I enjoyed a wonderful seafood meal while gazing out the front windows at dozens of surfers on the wide beach below. The inn gets its name because pirates and smugglers used the creek below the inn to land their vessels and haul their contraband up an old hidden path. To the north of Rosnowlagh I explored the shores of Inner Donegal Bay, the almost land-locked estuary of the River Eske, which lies behind a set of sand dunes at Murvagh. This sheltered sandy inlet is used by a group of harbour seals, which can be seen easily from various vantage points on the top of low drumlin hills.
Sticking out in the centre of Donegal Bay is the long, narrow arm of St John’s Point, the end of which is marked by a lighthouse. This point is permanently fixed in my memory, for the only time I rounded it by sea was during a survey of the seals, when our powerful inflatable boat met enormous waves here. Amid near gale force winds we rose up to the crests and slapped down the other side with huge Atlantic breakers rolling in behind us from the west. Marine biologist Bob Brown described the waters at the point as ‘one of the most beautiful and striking dives I ever had, outside of the Caribbean’. His description is stunning. ‘A dive here reveals a spectacular garden of marine life, thriving in the productive and mobile waters. Most dramatic are colonies of jewel anemones, brilliant pinks, purples, greens and yellows, in patches or clones generated by prolific asexual budding. Because the water here is very clear with good light penetration, the scene is breathtaking with outcrops bursting with psychedelic colours.’70 I visited St John’s Point myself in beautiful summer weather and walked among wildflowers with wonderful unbroken views on all sides from the north Mayo cliffs to Ben Bulben in Sligo and Slieve League in west Donegal. Praeger wrote of this place that,
From Killybegs also you can visit St. John’s Point, which forms the extremity of a narrow five-mile promontory jutting far into Donegal Bay, and differing from all the land to the westward in that it is made of limestone. It is indeed the last outpost of the Carboniferous limestone which extends southward across Sligo and the whole Central Plain of Ireland: and it is interesting to note that a few of the characteristic plants of the limestone, such as the Bloody Crane’s-bill, the Northern Bedstraw and the Blue Moor-grass, have followed their favourite rock to this remote spot.(WW)
In one respect, Praeger made a rare mistake in his observations here. I know this because I spent a summer on this coast as a university student mapping the limestone rocks, which actually stretch well beyond Killybegs and westward along the coastline to Muckross Head near Kilcar. But the wildflowers near the lighthouse at St John’s Point are still just as Praeger found them. The limestone in places forms classic bare pavements broken into slabs just like that of the Burren in County Clare. Here, among the clints and grikes, I found such beautiful plants as hart’s-tongue fern, devil’s-bit scabious, eyebright and harebells. Wild mountain hares scattered across the unfenced grassland as I strolled along, and the few bushes of hawthorn and willow were bent almost horizontal by constant strong winds from the ocean.
The western extremity of the south Donegal coast is marked by a line of high cliffs that Praeger also knew well:
The glory of this promontory is Slieve League on the southern shore. A tall mountain of nearly 2000 feet, precipitous on its northern side, has been devoured by the sea till the southern face forms a precipous likewise, descending in this side right into the Atlantic from the long knife-edge which forms the summit. The traverse of this ridge, the ‘One Man’s Path’ is one of the most remarkable walks to be found in Ireland – not actually dangerous, but needing a good head and careful progress on a stormy day.(WW)
It was a beautiful calm day in summer when I took to the sea in a small boat from the pier at Teelin at the eastern end of the cliffs. As the boat rounded the point at Carrigan Head a stunning view of the cliffs opened up above me, echoing Praeger’s words. ‘The quartzite and gneiss of which it is composed is singularly variegated, and on a bright day the kaleidoscope of colour – yellow, red, white, gold – which it displays is wonderful against the blue of sea and sky.’ He was fascinated by the collection of alpine plants which he found on steep slopes of rock here, including alpine meadow-rue, mountain avens and purple saxifrage.
Glencolmcille
Travelling west from Slieve League across wide-open spaces of bog and mountain grassland, I reached the small village of Glencolmcille, set in its own valley facing the Atlantic. Many people, both Irish and international, come here to learn or improve their Irish conversation at classes run by Oideas Gael. When I joined a group of geographers and archaeologists in the village, we climbed down into a stone-lined souterrain in the grounds of a church. These underground passages were built in the Early Christian period in Ireland as hiding places from invaders, and may also have been used as safe places to store religious valuables. Praeger advised:
If you want to visit one of the finest stretches of coast in Ireland, stay at Glencolmcille, and explore not only the Slieve League side, but also the northern shore towards and past Slieveatooey. Glencolmcille itself is a lonely and lovely spot, with interesting associations, for hither, in the sixth century, St. Columba journeyed over miles of moorland with a band of disciples, to find in this sequestered valley, shut in between the mountains and the ocean, a spot meet for meditation and prayer. The place is still full of relics of subsequent religious occupation.(WW)
About fifteen kilometres north of Glencolmcille, at Port or An Port, there are the remains of a ‘ghost village’ (also called The Deserted Village), where a number of houses were abandoned during the famines of 1845–52. Of course, millions of people died or emigrated from Ireland during this period, but the houses at Port were never reoccupied, probably because of the remoteness of the place. The houses were all built of local rock, and I noticed the distinctive long stones protruding from under the eaves which were used to tie on the thatch and prevent it lifting in westerly gales. Standing here among the ruins in this remote spot, it was hard to believe that a community of people lived and farmed here some two centuries ago, where huge rocks and boulders seem to be more common than soil.
In 1576 the daughter of Tarlach Neill, head of the O’Boyle Clan, drowned here. In the Annals of the Four Masters it is recorded that she had drowned while learning to swim in the river that runs into the sea at Port. However, today this is merely a stream, and an alternative explanation seems more likely. It is suggested that, as she was being forced into an arranged marriage, she ran away to Port followed by the man she was to marry, and here he drowned her. Today there is a slipway beside the rocky beach and a little bridge over the river. It is very peaceful and a place to reflect on the sad events that took place there over the centuries.
Sheskinmore
North of the high Glencolmcille Peninsula the coastline drops dramatically to sandy beaches at Loughros More Bay, where saltmarsh and sand dunes are the dominant features. The beaches and dunes here seem to change almost beyond recognition from one decade to the next as sand moves around, eroding the dunes on one side of the bay and building new ones on the other. Perhaps due to its remoteness and reputation for wind and rain, this is always a quiet place to visit. Even at the height of summer it is possible to be alone on some of the best beaches in the country. Since the 1980s I have spent numerous family holidays in this area and explored its many hidden wildlife jewels.71 In the middle of the dunes, a shallow lake near Ardara was the breeding place of waders such as lapwing and dunlin nesting in undisturbed marshy vegetation between the sand dunes and the reeds. In winter, Greenland white-fronted geese grazed on the lakeside pastures. The name of this area, An Seascann Mór, means literally ‘the big marsh’ in Irish. In the early 1980s news emerged that the lake was being drained by a local farmer who wanted to improve his lands upstream. Apart from the environmental damage, the neighbouring landowners were not happy, as they found that their cattle could walk around the ends of long fences and into other properties.
The Donegal naturalist, Ralph Sheppard, who knew the site well, alerted the Irish Wildbird Conservancy (now BirdWatch Ireland). Emergency action was called for if the site was to be saved. With the agreement of neighbouring landowners, the IWC installed a simple sluice on the outlet stream, thus controlling the levels of the lake. In the following years Ralph and I undertook breeding wader surveys here and found a diversity unlike other west coast areas.72 By the end of the 1980s, the National Parks and Wildlife Service had purchased a sizeable area of the surrounding land, thus securing its future as a natural area, and John Hennigan, the local Wildlife Ranger at that time, became its guardian. The original sluice was later replaced by the NPWS with a more substantial and durable structure, allowing the water levels to be controlled for roosting geese and protected plants.
Today the marshy land near the lake and the surrounding drier fixed dunes are grazed by cattle and horses in winter, with greatly reduced grazing in summer in order to improve the diversity of plants and to control more aggressive grasses. The tiny marsh snail, Vertigo geyerii, which is rare in Europe, occurs in abundance in the marshy area. The dunes provide valuable invertebrate food for foraging choughs, which are common on Donegal coasts. In summer, I walked along the sandy plain behind the dunes, where the short sward is ideal for swathes of colourful flowers like seaside pansies and bird’s-foot trefoil. The current conservation management challenges at Sheskinmore and how they are being addressed were outlined to me by the Conservation Ranger, Emer Magee. She comes from a large family and she traces her interest in wild nature back to her childhood. ‘My parents managed to take us on holidays to the most remote parts of the west of Ireland every year and, combined with frequent stays with farming relatives, this introduced me to wild places and farming before I had left primary school.’ Emer explains that ‘extensive cattle grazing is the optimal management for the flora and fauna around Sheskinmore. The animals are not housed and receive very little supplementary feed. They are taken off the marsh and dunes in the summer and put in the wet grassland areas, under an annual grazing agreement with seven local farmers.’
There are management problems at Sheskinmore that need to be addressed in an effort to find a balance. The fluctuations in the rabbit population over the last decade have had a detrimental effect on the dune habitats. The burrows are causing erosion and the disturbed sandy soil is being colonised by ragwort and burnet rose. The rabbits are grazing all year round, affecting the flowering plants and the grassland that is leased for winter grazing. The burrows are a threat to wintering cattle and horses that could be hurt by falling into them. The rabbit population is elevating the fox population, which also impacts ground-nesting birds. Various attempts by the Killybegs Gun Club and the NPWS trapper to shoot the rabbits have taken thousands of these mammals out of the site, but it has not had a significant impact on the population as far as I could see when I visited the reserve. The site is too big and the rabbit population too widespread to be able to control in a sustainable manner. Population changes are driven more by pathogens such as rabbit haemorrhagic disease and myxomatosis.
Greenland white-fronted geese were once regular winter visitors to the lake, but their numbers have fluctuated internationally since the 1980s, and now they are rare here. These days they are returning from the arctic with fewer juveniles each year, which has resulted in recent declines in overall numbers. When they do return, they prefer the re-seeded grass fields around Lough Swilly instead of Sheskinmore Lough and their traditional bog feeding sites. Here NPWS has worked with the local farmer Seamus Meehan to after-graze his cattle on the fields adjacent to the lough in September, which makes it more attractive for geese. Then in October a temporary electric fence is erected to keep the cattle out and to save that area for the returning geese.
Breeding wader numbers have also dropped significantly since the 1980s. This decline is a reflection of what has happened nationwide, as numbers of breeding lapwing here had declined to three pairs in 2009. In 2013, BirdWatch Ireland secured EU funding to erect a predator-proof fence around the main lapwing breeding area in the marsh west of Sheskinmore Lough. The organisation owns fifteen hectares of land here, and worked with NPWS and the other landowners to establish the project. Predation has been identified as a main cause for decline in breeding waders, and the electric fence is designed to exclude mammalian predators such as foxes and American mink. The lapwing numbers have increased to twelve pairs since the fence was erected, but predation continues to be an ongoing threat to the small numbers of waders breeding here.
Emer works closely with University College London (UCL) on research projects. Undergraduate and postgraduate students have carried out research based at the Field Studies centre at Sheskinmore. A doctorate has been carried out on the dune slacks, another on the hydrology of the lough. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has funded research on the impact of grazing on the saltmarsh. In 2020, eight landowners around Sheskinmore Lough were approved for NPWS farm plans. From 2021, over 400 hectares have been farmed exclusively for nature as part of a five-year plan. Funds have also been made available to develop a management plan for the area. NPWS-led research has begun on the hydrogeology of the area, and this will complement the ongoing research by scientists from UCL.
Emer has been a Conservation Ranger in southwest Donegal since 2001, managing Sheskinmore among her many duties. On a personal level she finds it very challenging, but also rewarding, to manage the area for nature conservation. She says, ‘I spend a lot of time alone here but I also enjoy the interaction with all the local people. I know the farmers and their families, the surrounding community, seasonal visitors, visiting researchers and the local historians. I am motivated by the desire to do some good and make a positive difference. I still want to learn so much and there is always so much to do. The more effort you put into trying to do something the more you want it to succeed.’
Gweebarra Bay
In a westerly gale I sat on the top of Dawros Head and watched the Atlantic breakers rolling in to crash against the rocks below. Suddenly an otter appeared out of the water and scrambled up the rocky face to take refuge from the storm in a reed-filled lake on the top of the headland. Walking further around the north side of the headland I came across a brood of kestrels with four well-grown chicks sitting in a row on a heathery ledge. My destination was the village of Portnoo which lies on a north-facing slope leading down to Gweebarra Bay. Praeger described this area ‘as exemplifying what the visitor will find in this region’:
Below the scattered line of houses of Portnoo, green fields, white with pignut instead of daisies, slope steeply to a rocky shore, but to the right this gives way to a great beach of yellow sand, which at low tide connects with Inishkeel, where you will find the relics of a bygone ecclesiastical settlement with two churches and some incised crosses of primitive type …. Above the grassy slope of Portnoo, the scene changes abruptly, for everywhere there is rock and heather and lakelet, stretching southward to Loughros More Bay. Eastward stretches away to Glenties; westward it ends close by in a wild line of great cliffs which decrease as one goes towards Dawros Head. The heathland is dotted with granite boulders instead of bushes, and juniper replaces the familiar gorse. (WW)
Walking out across Narin Strand to reach Inishkeel, I had to check the tide tables carefully as the sea advances rapidly here across the level sands, and more than once I have been caught wading back to the mainland. At low tide, the northern side of the island has some wonderful rock pools filled with marine life, including the distinctive purple sea urchin. Offshore there are dense beds of kelp, the wide fronds waving underwater in the currents.
From here I walked to the east along wide sandy beaches and over impressive sand dunes near Clooney. This is the only place in Ireland where I have been challenged by a landowner claiming that he owned the beach because the sea had eroded his property and his land registry map now included the foreshore. In law, however, the area between high and low water mark in the Republic of Ireland belongs to the state and is therefore open to anyone to traverse.
Further east the sandy peninsula of Roshin Point is barely joined to the mainland by a narrow ridge of sand with the tide rising on either side. I sat on a high sand dune at the end of the point for a full tidal cycle to watch the movement of a group of harbour seals which regularly feed here and haul out on the offshore rocks at low tide. The fast-flowing waters at the mouth of the Gweebarra River are probably a good place for the seals to catch salmon and other fish which are concentrated in narrow channels. North of the river is Lettermacaward, where, on the flat fields behind Dooey Beach, I listened one summer in the 1980s to numerous corncrakes broadcasting their curious repetitive calls into the evening air. These birds have since vanished from many of their former haunts and are now largely confined to the north Donegal coast.
Arranmore
Arranmore, the largest of Donegal’s offshore islands, is neatly framed in the view from Burtonport, where I caught the ferry on a summer’s day. In the bay to the south several smaller uninhabited islands lie, including the flat sandy plain of Inishfree. This reminded me of hippy days in the 1970s when a commune set up home in a house in Burtonport. Up to thirty people lived in the commune in ‘Atlantis House’, which was brightly decorated, with eyes around the windows, astrological signs and yin-yang symbols on the walls. The group was known locally as ‘the Screamers’. Primal therapy, including screaming, crying and unrestrained laughter were part of their lifestyle, as a way of expressing emotional needs, including anger and frustration. They were the first to highlight the problems associated with uranium prospecting in Donegal, but when other local people got the message and took up the challenge, the Screamers wisely stood back, as they knew their involvement would put many people off. The group’s way of life raised objections locally, so in 1980 the commune relocated to several deserted cottages on the island of Inishfree. This aroused much curiosity in the national media, and the unwanted attention forced the commune to emigrate in 1989.
I was heading to Arranmore to meet a team of ornithologists from BirdWatch Ireland, who were studying the local chough population. These red-legged crows are plentiful on Donegal coasts because of the abundance of well-grazed maritime grassland. I walked with the birdwatchers to the lighthouse on the storm-lashed western side of the island. We found the aerobatic birds moving around the clifftops in family parties of four to six, the juveniles following their parents to the best foraging areas.
Walking the roads across the island, we passed groups of houses, some deserted and others only occupied in summer. In 1911, the population of the island had reached over 1,500 inhabitants who were mostly dependent on seasonal fishing and small-scale farming. The density of people in those days was quite evident from the extensive ‘lazy beds’ in small fields which were cultivated for potatoes and oats in the past but were now grassed over everywhere. By 1925, it was recorded that the fishing industry, based on a previously abundant herring migration, had now largely failed, and emigration to America or Scotland was the only prospect. Over the years, seasonal movements of farm workers to Scotland to work on the harvest had been a way of life for the people here and, even today, there are many families with Scottish relatives. In 1935, a disaster hit the island population when a boat carrying islanders returning to the harvest in Scotland set out from Burtonport in darkness. Hitting a rock, the boat sank, leaving nineteen passengers and crew dead and only one survivor.73
On the return trip by ferry I could see haul-outs of seals on various rocks, and I remembered a boat-based survey in the 1970s, when we found a good number of these animals here. Praeger recalled an incident where a hunter arrived on Arranmore to kill some grey seals that were raiding salmon nets and he confessed that ‘a shrinking from the taking of life in any of its myriad manifestations has grown on me with the passage of time’:
I was glad to have no part in this, for no one who, like myself, has watched these beautiful animals on the coasts of half the counties of Ireland, could wish them ill; but then I am not dependent on the capture of salmon for my daily bread. I remember a deep clear calm gully, cliff-encircled; and in it a seven-foot seal at play – now resting on the surface, now diving to the bottom and groping fish-like among the long sea-weeds, clearly visible since the opposite cliff cut off the sky’s reflection – a very beautiful sight: and I thought of this when I saw a full-grown seal and a very young one laid out on the boat slip on Arranmore.(WW)
Praeger was clearly shocked by the sight of the dead seals, but he knew that his view would not be shared by the west coast fishermen. The novelist Monk Gibbon also described a seal-hunting expedition on Arranmore in the early 20th century. The local men clambered into a cave where seal pups were lying and discharged their shotguns in the darkness. He wrote, ‘It seemed inconceivable then that an ounce of lead, the dullest and heaviest, the most debased of all metals, should be capable of destroying the most delicate and beautiful mechanism in nature.’74 Up to the 1970s seals in Ireland had no legal protection and bounties were even offered by the government for their heads. Today they are protected by Irish and European law, but licences are still issued occasionally for controlling individual seals at fishing nets, and there are frequent calls from the fishing community for larger culls.
North of Arranmore the coast breaks into a series of small islands off the Gaeltacht area of Gaoth Dobhair. Most of these held a small human population up to the early 20th century. The island of Gola attracted me because it had been deserted more recently. As I walked across the island from east to west, I passed many farmhouses that were still roofed and farm implements abandoned in field corners. I peeped through the window of a ruined schoolhouse, situated west of Port an Churraigh, that still held the wooden desks where up to seventy children sat in the 1940s. Stormy weather in recent years means the sea now comes right up to the schoolhouse door at high tide. It is weather-beaten, the roof has collapsed and it may be completely washed away in the coming years. The population of Gola rose steeply to 169 in the late 19th century, in response to a boom in the fishing industry, but collapsed again after that, and the absence of electricity was one of the factors that caused its final desertion in the 1960s. Today, there is a small but mainly seasonal population again.
Leaving the West Coast
Facing directly into the power of the Atlantic Ocean, the west coast is the most rugged and indented part of the Irish shoreline. It is also the longest section of shoreline and contains the greatest proportion of rocky cliffs, some of them among the highest and most spectacular in Europe. The west coast has about 80 per cent of all the larger offshore islands in Ireland too. Sand dune systems on the west coast are naturally more dynamic and mobile than those in the rest of Ireland due to frequent strong gales and storms. But the west has its quiet moods as well. I frequently find that I am the only person walking on a fine sandy beach in the middle of summer, as many of them are remote from roads. I love to walk around a rocky headland in west Donegal, where there are many secret coves, some known only to local fishermen and sheep farmers. This is a great place to find coconuts and other large seeds that have drifted across the ocean from the Americas. These strange drift seeds were often given mystical powers by local people, who had no previous experience of them.75 The west coast is also frequently the first landfall in Europe for vagrant birds blown off course by Atlantic storms. In a warm summer of the mid-1980s I spent three weeks walking the sandy shores and grasslands of over fifty west coast bays from Malin Head in Donegal to the Aran Islands in Galway Bay. With some friends, I was looking for the small wading birds that make their nests in these attractive locations and whose young help to swell the flocks of autumn migrants moving south. Since those times, breeding wader populations on the unique sand dune machair of the west coasts have virtually collapsed. This is partly as a result of reduction in their range due to climate change but also due to a rise in predation and to more grazing pressure in the last decade, with sheep densities known to have increased markedly here. Total breeding wader populations on the west coast have declined by 62 per cent since 2009. Dunlin show the largest decline in numbers at 91 per cent. Oystercatcher, ringed plover, redshank and common sandpiper declined by over two-thirds, while snipe and lapwing both declined by between a quarter and one-third since 2009.76 Other coastal sand dunes have been highly modified over the last few decades for conversion into golf courses, caravan parks and other developments, leaving less and less space for the native wild plants and animals.
‘To hell or Connaught’ was the cry of the Cromwellian invaders as they forced the native Irish from the good lands further east and confined them to the poor, mountainy land of the west coast and islands. The human population of the west coast was among the worst hit by the famines of the mid-19th century and there are many reminders in the deserted villages, small clachans and isolated farmsteads. The cultivation ridges known as ‘lazy beds’ are still evident in the grass and heather on many coastal fields, a reminder of the large farming population that once eked out a living in the remoter parts.
Today, the Wild Atlantic Way is known around the world as one of the most attractive long-distance tourist routes. As a marketing brand it remains highly successful but, in truth, the west coast has always been ‘wild’, and this should be valued for its own sake rather than just for its tourism potential.