The completion and publication of the Clare Island Survey in 1911 marked a significant change of direction in Praeger’s life and indeed for natural history in Ireland. Some of the leading Irish naturalists of the time – Richard Barrington, Richard Ussher and Robert Warren – died during this period, and the Field Club movement of the previous century had declined significantly. Not long afterwards Europe was plunged into a cataclysmic world war, while Ireland was engulfed by widespread political upheaval. With a German wife and a Teutonic-sounding name, Praeger may have felt the need to keep a lower profile. About this time, he turned to the less prominent pursuits of gardening and taxonomic botany, which led to the publication of two major accounts of plant groups. The reduced activity of the Dublin Naturalists’ Field Club during the period of the 1914–18 war and the struggle for Irish independence was not mirrored in Ulster, and Praeger’s attention again turned to his birthplace in the north, when he was elected Vice-President and subsequently President of the Belfast Naturalists’ Field Club. He returned to lead field outings to Derry and Sligo, and frequently attended indoor meetings in Belfast despite continuing to live in Dublin.
From the 1920s, Praeger, now in his sixties and retired from his position in the National Library, resumed his passion for plant distribution. The treaty of 1921, resulting in the partition of Ireland, had dramatically changed the political landscape and led to the Civil War of 1922–23. This curtailed fieldwork and Praeger devoted more time to writing up the results of his extensive surveys. He rarely referred to the political situation in his writings and continued to regard the island of Ireland as a single unit for the study of natural history. By now, however, the natural sciences were evolving towards modern concepts of ecology, and the old amateur pursuits of merely collecting and listing of species were considered to be quite limited in value. So Praeger moved more in the direction of plant taxonomy, the study of the relationships between species.
In 1934, Praeger published another magnus opus, The Botanist in Ireland.1 Press opinions were universally positive. The Times Literary Supplement, for instance, reported, ‘Dr Praeger, the chief living authority on the Irish Flora approaches his subject place by place rather than plant by plant.’ The Irish Times review said, ‘Dr Praeger’s new book is in every sense a masterpiece of botanical work. With the full knowledge of one who has tramped nearly every hillside and stream-side of the four provinces, he passes over no district without giving us a good bird’s-eye view of its features as well as a trustworthy list of its most striking plants.’2 The text followed a winding path through the island and in this respect it formed a scientific background to his most popular book, The Way that I Went, published just three years later. In the former he acknowledged the new scientific trends of the time, in that ‘the claims of ecology as contrasted with purely floristic work have been recognised and an endeavour has been made all through to correlate vegetation with geography and geology’. In this context he commented that ‘within the fretted coast-line of Ireland almost every sedimentary rock which has gone to building up the crust of the Earth is represented … as well as many of igneous origin’.
Nor did he neglect the public interest in landscape, archaeology, history and folklore. In 1941, aged 76, he published a further book of reminiscences called A Populous Solitude. While this was still based on his comprehensive knowledge of the country, he also included stories gathered from people he met during his travels, some of them imaginary, such as a chapter on fairies at Hilltown, County Down. ‘It was at this Hilltown ring-fort that one of Paddy Fitzpatrick’s cows was shot by the fairies. I never got the details of this unlucky occurrence, which was not infrequent in the old days, when the magic cure – a flint arrowhead or elf-stone – would often be produced in corroboration of the story told.’(PS)
His chapter on the coast of Antrim reads more like a tourist gazetteer, with his impressions of the landscape of this popular route. Of the north Antrim coast he writes, ‘you should not on any account miss the walk along these headlands, for you will not find anything better in the British Isles’.(PS) The western edge of this long north coast begins in north Donegal at Bloody Foreland, from where it is possible to see the island of Tory facing directly into the wild Atlantic Ocean.
Tory Island
I strapped on my safety harness as the helicopter warmed up its engines in a car park on the edge of the coastal town of Falcarragh. I had been invited by the Tory Island Cooperative to visit the site for a new recycling facility, to assess if this would have any environmental impacts. While I had been several times before to the island, fourteen kilometres from the coast of north Donegal, the previous visits were always on a fast-moving ferry across a rough sea. This was an unmissable opportunity to see a spectacular part of the coast from the air.
With the dramatic outline of Tory in the distance, we flew over three other smaller islands – Inishbofin, Inishbeg and Inishdooey – on the way. Exposed to everything that the Atlantic Ocean can throw at it, Tory has some spectacular rock structures on the north and west sides of the island. The hard quartzite rocks have been eroded to produce offshore stacks, arches, caves and cliffs, some of them reaching to almost 100 metres in height. The most impressive is the knife-edged promontory of Tormore, which reaches out to the north-east of the island. Praeger wrote, ‘it is strange to find so desolate and tempestuous a place has been long inhabited and even fortified’.(WW) From the clifftops the land slopes away to the south-west like a listing raft in a vast ocean. On its surface I could see two clusters of houses known simply as West Town and East Town. An early Christian resident of the island was St Colmcille, who founded a monastery here in the 6th century. The most obvious remnants of this are the round tower and the distinctive T-shaped cross which face visitors as they step off the boat at the pier in West Town.
Until the 19th century, the people of the islands lived mainly by farming but, when the Congested Districts Board took over control of the island, they built harbour facilities and provided grants for the purchase of boats and nets. This led to a greater commitment to fishing in the island’s economy and less intensive farming practices in response. Tory farmers used to have a version of the ancient open-field ‘rundale’ system of allocating plots for cultivation annually on a community basis. But widespread cultivation of the land for potatoes and oats was largely changed to extensive grazing. By the time of my visit, farming had been all but abandoned to rushy grassland, and I only saw a single small flock of sheep.
Low-intensity farming has led to the islands off the north and west Donegal coast now being among the few places in the country where corncrakes return to breed each year. Here the numbers are still impressive, with some forty-three calling birds recorded on Gola, Tory and Inishbofin islands in 2017. A scheme run by the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) aims to protect all suitable corncrake habitat within a 250-metre radius of any male that calls over five consecutive days. This is generally accepted as the area within which the female may be nesting. Research shows that home ranges of each pair are very variable, from less than one to over fifteen hectares. The scheme promotes the development or retention of early and late cover, as the vegetation in the meadows is generally not tall enough to provide cover for corncrakes when they arrive in early summer. Similarly, after meadows are cut, these provide cover late in the breeding season.
Marie Duffy, who managed the project for the NPWS, says, ‘we work to enhance and create areas of tall cover and encourage farmers to delay mowing. The work on the islands is all encompassing, creating suitable corncrake habitat from abandoned land. We are trialling new tall plant species here such as reed canary grass, iris, nettles and artichokes, to see what grows well in such an exposed habitat and what is suitable for corncrake.’ The management work goes on right though the year – clearing vegetation, fencing and creating nettle patches (winter); ploughing, sowing and planting other early cover species (spring). Crops grown include a black oat mix, barley/oats with kale and triticale, potatoes and a grass mix favouring tall coarse grasses. Some areas within the fenced perimeter are left fallow after vegetation clearance, as they are being managed for breeding waders.
On my visit to Tory Island I met up with Marie to see what attracts the corncrakes to this remote spot off the north coast of Donegal. In her words, ‘the islands have become the focus for conservation of the corncrake in Ireland as the farmers here have largely stopped cutting grass because there are few overwintering livestock that require fodder. The problems are now lack of early and late cover and the overgrazing of some meadows in summer. We are working to try and restore some of the habitat that the birds need.’ As one of the few globally threatened species in Ireland, this is a high priority for conservation.
By 2018 it appeared that the scheme was having some positive results, with the number of calling males in the country increasing by 8 per cent to 151. In 2019 this number increased to 162, but fell again to 146 in 2020. However, this represented an overall 20 per cent decline on the 1993 total, when conservation measures were first introduced in Ireland. Since 2012, the State has spent several million euro on this scheme, with hundreds of farmers in the west and midlands availing of grants to adjust the management of grasslands for the birds. The most recent increase in numbers was attributed to the exceptionally warm weather that summer, and was the first rise in numbers since 2014. The Corncrake Project Annual Report for 2018 confirmed that Donegal remains the national stronghold for the bird, where a total of ninety calling males were recorded that year – fifty-nine of these on the county’s offshore islands. The recently launched Corncrake LIFE project aims to deliver actions for this threatened species across a total of 1,000ha in eight areas down the west coast. This is to be achieved through a combination of habitat management agreements, land leasing and strategic land purchase. This scheme is like the emergency ward of a hospital where the patient is on life-support. The type of farming that used to support the corncrake has largely disappeared from Ireland, and only specially targeted measures will prevent the species becoming extinct in the few areas where it still holds on.
Bloody Foreland to Fanad
Bloody Foreland forms the very north-west corner of Donegal, where the wild Atlantic waves have built up a massive storm beach of large boulders. Its name is thought to relate to the red sunsets so often seen out over the Atlantic rather than any bloody battle or murder. Following the coast a little further to the east, I reached the huge mobile dune system that lies off the townland of Gortahork. I remember walking the coast here in the 1970s when a local farmer was cutting marram grass from the dunes and using it to thatch his farm buildings. The tough dune grass was once widely used for thatching on the west coast but this tradition has now died out.
The next major headland on the north coast of Donegal is Horn Head, which stands up to 250 metres above sea level. Praeger wrote:
It is the massive architecture of Horn Head that both produces so imposing an effect, and at the same time makes it difficult to realize the scale on which it is built – a similar impression is sometimes produced by a well-proportioned building of great size. The quartzite forms solid bastions rising from base to summit, separated by deep vertical rifts, the whole being tilted over at an angle. The ledges are a breeding-place for tens of thousands of sea-fowl and as one passes in a boat the air is thick with razorbills, guillemots, puffins, gulls of several kinds and other species in smaller numbers.(WW)
I walked along the clifftop here in autumn and watched as exhausted redwings, each slightly smaller than our native song thrush, flew in from the ocean and landed in the heather. They had migrated non-stop from Iceland ahead of a looming arctic winter. Linking Horn Head to the mainland at Dunfanaghy is an extensive area of sand dunes, which was once so mobile that it swamped houses and farms, both here and on the opposite side of Sheep Haven. Praeger knew the damage that had occurred and he recorded:
About Dunfanaghy blowing sand has long proved a serious menace, as it has done also at Rosapenna. At the latter place, in 1784, it finally overwhelmed Lord Boyne’s house, demesne and garden, as well as sixteen farms, burying some of them to a depth of twenty feet. This catastrophe is stated to have been due to the killing of the foxes, which preyed on the rabbits inhabiting the dunes. The rabbits increased greatly in numbers, and burrowed and destroyed the turf to such an extent that, during a dry stormy winter, the dunes were themselves destroyed, the material blown inland and deposited to the amount of thousands of tons on the demesne and farmland.(WW)
To the east the coastline is deeply indented with three large inlets: Sheep Haven, Mulroy Bay and Lough Swilly. Just behind the little pier at Portnablagh is a classic example of a blowhole where the roof of a cave has collapsed and I could stand by the hole listening to the waves roaring among the rocks below.
I felt a great sense of excitement when entering Mulroy Bay by boat for the first time. Praeger referred to it as ‘that extensive land-locked, most complicated piece of water’.(WW) The bay has a very narrow entrance and a long contorted shape with many small islands and much unspoilt landscape on its shores. The channel varies in width and depth, with some narrow points only 100–150 metres across, where the current is very strong. It stretches south for approximately twelve kilometres ending at the village of Milford. This was the location of a large flour mill and bakery up to the 1970s, but I can also remember the discharge of enriched water that it produced in the bay. In 2010 a new high-level road bridge was opened across the northern part of the bay, replacing the old ferry that plied across the water up to the 1960s, connecting the communities of Carrigart and Fanad. At 340 metres in length, this is one of the longest road bridges in Ireland. This reduced the driving time around the bay from up to two hours to less than ten minutes.
Due to the unusual tidal currents here, Mulroy Bay contains a range of different sediment types, which includes coarse sand, beds of calcareous algae called maërl and a variety of exposed and sheltered underwater reefs with strong to weak currents. The varied habitats support many marine communities, with high species diversity. Rare marine species found in Mulroy Bay include a little fish – the Couch’s goby – a file shell, an anthozoan, a hydroid and a red seaweed. In the more sheltered areas with less current, dense kelp forests occur, and these have a greater variety of sponges and solitary sea squirts. Otters are sometimes seen here, and I remember finding a group of harbour seals hauled out on various islands in sheltered parts of the bay. There were once breeding terns on the islands but predation by introduced mink and disturbance from aquaculture caused them to desert. Feral greylag geese are now breeding in some numbers, and it is not unusual to see a flock of over 100 birds at the end of the breeding season. A large population of native scallops is also present here, and this is now commercially exploited. Despite being protected under the EU Habitats Directive the NPWS has acknowledged that aquaculture, scallop dredging and seaweed harvesting here pose a threat to the ecological value of the area.
Lough Swilly
It was in Lough Swilly, at the small pier of Rathmullan, that I joined an international group of biologists who set out to find and count harbour seals in the more sheltered waters of north Donegal. We launched two powerful inflatable boats from the slip and scoured the coastline looking for the haul-outs of these marine mammals. Just offshore a tiny storm petrel danced about on the waves. From its opening to the sea between Fanad Head and Dunaff Head, Lough Swilly stretches inland some forty kilometres into the heart of Donegal, almost to the town of Letterkenny. The inner areas are shallow, sheltered, muddy estuaries where the rivers Leannan and Swilly discharge their loads of silt into the tide. The extensive mudflats are packed with marine worms and shellfish, attracting tens of thousands of waterbirds in winter, as it is one of the nearest landfalls in Europe for birds migrating south from Iceland and Greenland.
It was also here at Rathmullan that a watershed event in Irish history took place. Up to the end of the 16th century, much of the province of Ulster was ruled by Irish chieftains but, following their defeat by English forces in 1603, Rory O’Donnell, the earl of Tyrconnell and Hugh O’Neill, earl of Tyrone, with some of the leading Gaelic families in Ulster, boarded a French ship and travelled down Lough Swilly into exile in mainland Europe, where they hoped to raise Spanish support for their cause. The so-called ‘Flight of the Earls’ marked the end of the old Gaelic order and the beginning of British colonisation of Ulster, which was to have major implications for the whole island, not least in the partition of Ireland in 1921 and the Troubles of the late 20th century. Walking along the beach at Rathmullan I tried to imagine a tall ship sailing hurriedly down the lough with English soldiers being marched in on all sides to garrison the towns. From then on, through the Napoleonic wars of the early 19th century, Lough Swilly was to become an important military base, with extensive fortifications. During both world wars the lough took on a strategic role as a sheltered base for Royal Navy warships defending the American merchant shipping passing Ireland to the important ports of Liverpool and the Clyde.
In the 19th century low-lying farmland on the western side of the lough was created by draining and infilling some arms of the estuary, but the sea walls north of Ramelton have since broken down and the sea has reclaimed a large area, turning it back into mudflat and saltmarsh. With modern sea level rise this process is likely to be repeated in many places around the Irish coast, as the value of coastal farmland is often less than the cost of repairing the sea defences. About halfway along the eastern shore the large island of Inch was linked to the mainland by two causeways, and the area between was partly pumped out and claimed for agriculture. This area, known as Inch Levels, is now one of the best sites in north-west Ireland for wintering swans and geese. As the autumn days close in great V-shaped skeins of whooper swans and greylag geese jet in from their Icelandic breeding grounds. Here they are attracted to the rich feeding that they find on these large, flat fields of grass and cereals. Walking along the raised embankments I could hear the swans trumpeting out their evocative calls, reminding me of the sounds of lonely areas of tundra in Iceland during the summer.
Inch Island was also the location in the 18th century for a commercial fishery station established by one of the leading merchants of the nearby city of Derry. A large salting station was established here to cure up to 100,000 herring per day, with forty women and children employed to gut the fish and five coopers on hand to make the barrels in which the fish would be preserved. In 1776 some 1,750 barrels of salted herrings were exported to the Caribbean, where they would have been used to feed the burgeoning population, including slaves working in the plantations. At this time there were up to a thousand fishing boats in use in the lough, which gives some idea of the size of the herring shoals which some fishermen said were difficult to row through. By the early 19th century the herring shoals had dramatically declined, in an early example of the impact of overfishing.3
Overfishing is still a problem in Lough Swilly. This is one of a decreasing number of bays in the west of Ireland where the native oyster still occurs. This shellfish was once widespread in the country and, growing in abundance in shallow water, it was easily collected until it became extinct in many areas. Lough Swilly is now a protected area, and in 2013 a five-year plan for conservation of the native oyster was prepared, but so far this has not been implemented. The current unlimited fishery has significantly reduced native oyster numbers, and there is now a real risk of population collapse. In addition to the fishery, the culture of non-native Pacific oysters is increasing in Lough Swilly, and this is impacting on the native oyster population due to escapes from shellfish farms.4 It is now known that feral Pacific oysters are well established in the Shannon Estuary, Galway Bay and Lough Foyle, as well as Lough Swilly.5
The eastern limit of Lough Swilly is formed by Dunaff Head, which holds several rare northern plant species, including roseroot and rock samphire. This made it a happy hunting ground for naturalists like Praeger and Henry Hart, author of Flora of the County Donegal. In 1885, Hart, botanising on Slieve League at the south-west extremity of the county, met an old man and a small boy carrying armfuls of samphire up a steep path, eating as they climbed. This species was widely collected and sold as food or for herbal remedies.6
Inishowen and Inishtrahull
Between the long inlets of Lough Swilly and Lough Foyle is the Inishowen Peninsula, where the people have many of the characteristics of an island community. I felt a sense of satisfaction to stand on the most northerly part of the Irish mainland beside the lighthouse at Malin Head. From here I could see the outline of Tory Island to the west and Islay fading away into the Scottish mist to the north-east. Below me was one of the finest examples in the country of a raised beach, with its fossilised cliff-line well above the present sea level. This illustrates dramatically how the northern coast of Ireland is still ‘rebounding’ more than 15,000 years after the last Ice Age, when it was depressed by the weight of ice, several kilometres thick. I liken this to a mattress springing back to shape after a sleeping person has risen in the morning.
Inishowen has some fine walking country. Praeger criss-crossed the mountains in the centre, including Slieve Snacht, and scoured the area for rare plants. He advised visitors to ‘walk north from Malin village along the west side of Malin Head (where you will sleep) and back along the cliffs to Glengad, and again you will have seen a splendid stretch of precipitous coast’. He commented that ‘the Inishowen flora is, as one might expect, northern rather than southern, and boreal plants such as the Scottish lovage and the sea gromwell or oyster-plant are frequent on its exposed shores’.(WW)
I had to climb higher till I could clearly see the island of Inishtrahull with the most northerly lighthouse in Ireland. These waters around the northern point of Ireland are a place where strong tides rip past the headland from the Atlantic Ocean and upwelling from the sea floor carries a rich harvest of plankton, the microscopic life that forms the foundation of all marine biodiversity. Here too is a wonderful place to see basking sharks, the largest fish in the Atlantic, when they congregate in feeding shoals. To have a closer look myself I went to the pier at Culdaff, where I was told I would find a boat to take me to the island. As it happened that day, the ferry was also being used by a team from the Commissioners of Irish Lights on one of their regular servicing trips to the automatic lighthouse. Landing on a high pier in a sheltered cove on the northeast side of the island, I walked alone around the cliffs and imagined life in this remote spot before the days of modern communications. There was once a small community of islanders living here, and the ruins of some of their houses and abandoned farmland remain to this day in the low-lying centre between two hills. There was a large increase in the island population in the 1880s, with as many as thirteen families resident on the island up to the 1920s.7 At the eastern end there is a small graveyard, and the inscriptions, though now heavily weathered, tell a tale of infant mortality that was common in remote areas in previous centuries. In the 1890s the Congested Districts Board set up a fish-curing station on Inishtrahull to give some employment in this remote location.8
The island is made of a hard rock called gneiss, of the oldest type found in Ireland. The first lighthouse on Inishtrahull was built at the eastern end of the island in 1813 at the behest of the Royal Navy, which was then using the nearby Lough Foyle as a base for its North Atlantic operations. The last of the islanders moved to the mainland in 1928 following a tragedy when a mailboat from Malin was swamped and a young islander drowned. This left the lighthouse keepers as the only occupants of the island. In the 1950s it was decided to reposition the light and a new tower was built on the west end of the island, making it one of the more modern lighthouses in Ireland.9 When the lighthouse was automated in 1987, the island was left to the birds, which now include a sizeable population of eider ducks in summer and flocks of barnacle geese in winter.
After a while I sat looking out through my binoculars over a calm summer sea. In the distance I could see some slow-moving fins, but it was difficult to distinguish the number of basking sharks here, as both the dorsal fin and tail flukes are often visible above the water. I could imagine that below the surface there was a gathering of these enormous fish circling slowly with open mouths the size of shed doors. Although they have several rows of small teeth, basking sharks feed mainly with the use of gill rakers, through which they filter plankton gathered in through the open mouth like a giant vacuum cleaner. The primary food of the basking sharks is zooplankton, specifically copepods, which are tiny crustacea, and current research shows that the presence of one particular copepod species often determines where the fish feed. Emmet Johnston of the NPWS has estimated that up to a quarter of the world’s basking shark population moves through the sea off the north coast of Ireland at certain times of year. The average length of adult basking sharks is five to seven metres, although some specimens have been recorded at eleven metres, the size of an ocean-going yacht. The liver, for which these fish were originally hunted, is estimated to make up approximately a quarter of the body weight. This organ acts as a float to keep the shark at near neutral buoyancy. The basking shark uses its large tail to power through the water with a slow, sinuous movement but the fins on its back and tail are the only visible parts of the huge body.
I called in to visit Greencastle, on the most easterly part of Inishowen, to see where an almost forgotten wooden traditional boat was built. The Drontheim (also known as a ‘Greencastle yawl’ or ‘north coast yawl’) is an open, double-ended and clinker-built boat, generally about eight metres in length, which can trace its origins back to the Viking boats of the 8th century. Its name is derived directly from the town of Trondheim in Norway, from where the original boats were imported. These boats were once a familiar sight on north coasts from Donegal Bay to Ballycastle in County Antrim. They were the traditional fishing sailboats for many generations of fishermen in small communities on the rough waters of this part of the Atlantic. With the arrival of marine engines, these sailboats disappeared virtually overnight, and many were left to rot on piers and in fields all along the coast. From the 1980s a restoration movement began, with new Drontheims being built from the old designs and some surviving original boats restored.10
Lough Foyle
From the harbour at Greencastle, I looked across the narrow strait that marks the border with Northern Ireland. Born near Belfast and living in Dublin, Praeger was clearly very aware of the tensions between north and south. He rarely mentioned politics in his writings, but there is one exception towards the conclusion of The Way that I Went, published in 1937, just sixteen years after partition of the island:
Ireland is a very lovely country. Indeed, there is only one thing wrong with it, and that is that the people that are in it have not the common-sense to live in peace with one another and with their neighbours. Past events and political theory are allowed to bulk much too large in our mental make-up, and the result is dissatisfaction, unrest, and occasionally shocking violence. That ‘frontier’ [the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland], which is a festering sore in Ireland’s present economy, was the noble gift of an English Government – but Ireland brought it on herself.
I crossed into Northern Ireland and went to visit the northernmost part of County Derry at Magilligan Point. I could have saved myself a lot of driving around Lough Foyle if I had taken the seasonal car ferry that runs from Greencastle to Magilligan Point. Londonderry is the official name for the county, as shown on Ordnance Survey maps, but the urban area is often called Derry/Londonderry or ‘Stroke City’. To the south of where I stood a vast area of shallow water opened out into the sheltered waters of Lough Foyle. Praeger viewed the same area from the top of the nearby mountain of Benevenagh.
From the summit of the hill we get a bird’s-eye view of the remarkable flat sandy triangle, with five-mile sides, known as Magilligan, which almost blocks the entrance of Lough Foyle. If we descend the hill and walk over its sandy surface we can study the successive ridges, parallel with the outer shore, which show its growth mile after mile towards the open sea, nor does this process appear yet to have ceased. As to why it was so formed one may well puzzle; as to when, it is of course comparatively new – post-Glacial at least; but where did such a prodigious quantity of sand come from?(WW)
The question raised by Praeger has been partly answered by environmental scientists from the University of Ulster who have carried out extensive studies of dune systems all around the Irish coast over the past half-century. Bill Carter and Peter Wilson showed how beach ridges formed as the land rebounded after the weight of glacial ice was removed and the sea withdrew northwards sometime after 6,500 years ago. This created a huge area of flat beach from which wind-blown sand was later deposited on top of the ridges at least 1,790 years ago, forming the original sand dunes. This was followed by several more periods of active dune formation between 1,200 and 600 years ago, and again during the 17th and 18th centuries.11 There is a Martello tower from Napoleonic times at the end of Magilligan Point. Because of the sedimentary cycles, it can be found beside the beach or up to 100 metres inland.
North of the city of Derry, on the eastern side of Lough Foyle, a railway embankment runs along the shoreline, cutting off large areas of reclaimed farmland from the tides. Beyond the sea wall huge sandbanks and mudflats stretch out towards the centre of the lough, and these are attractive to wintering flocks of brent geese that drop in here after their long migration from breeding grounds in arctic Canada. These small, dark-coloured geese form large family-based flocks and, as I walked along the old railway line, I could hear their ‘conversations’ carrying across the wet sand. I was making a visit to Lough Foyle to map the extensive beds of eelgrass, the main food of the geese. These marine grasses occur between the tides in areas well sheltered from tidal currents. Although modern methods, using satellite imagery and drone photography, are now available, this was in the early 1990s, when the only way to map the outline of the grass was on foot, walking across the soft sand and mud at low tide with a tape measure and compass. With my colleague Micheál Ó Briain, I mapped eelgrass beds in dozens of estuaries all around the Irish coast, as well as reviewing existing information from other studies, both historical and modern.
North Derry
Situated on the north coast near Coleraine, County Derry, and nestled between the beaches of Benone and Downhill, is the sand dune system known as Umbra. I went there first in the 1970s, as it was one of the original nature reserves established by the conservation body Ulster Wildlife. A number of coastal habitats of special conservation value and many distinctive species make this a very important site. Approximately forty-five hectares in size, one of the chief attractions is the summer display of flowering plants in the meadows and sand dunes, and these in turn support an incredible diversity of insect life – butterflies, moths and bees being the easiest to observe. The nature reserve is noted for a number of rare plants: bee orchid, pyramidal orchid, fragrant orchid, frog orchid, marsh helleborine, adder’s tongue, moonwort, hairy rock cress, downy oat-grass, fern grass and early forget-me-not. Interesting butterflies such as Real’s wood white, grayling and dark green fritillary are found here, as well as the rare small eggar moth. It also has several of Northern Ireland’s priority bird species – skylark, mistle thrush, song thrush, bullfinch and linnet.
Current conservation work by Ulster Wildlife at Umbra was outlined to me by Andy Crory, Nature Reserves Manager with this busy conservation organisation. Andy has a team of assistants supplemented by one-year interns from all over Europe. More than half a hectare of sea buckthorn was removed from the dunes in 2018, thanks to funding by the Landfill Communities Fund, with follow-up works planned for future years. This non-native species was a direct threat to the species-rich dune grassland here. The non-native pine plantation at Umbra has been removed too – a landscape-scale change to this site. The project was completed thanks to a partnership with Northern Ireland Environment Agency and Drenagh Sawmills. Several hectares of trees were removed, which will benefit both the grassland species and the wet dune slacks that make this site so important. Andy, who is an enthusiastic recorder of moths, has a vision of an open dune landscape here which will be maintained into the future with sensitive grazing. Ulster Wildlife has produced a management plan for the site which will make it easier for future staff of the organisation to continue the good work. Sand dunes are special ecosystems in the coastal environment, with a unique ability to restore themselves after erosion pressure, given space and freedom to move. Enlightened management is the key to protecting the few remaining dune systems, like this one, that remain undeveloped.
Viewed from the north coast, the towering Benevenagh mountain marks the north-west corner of the basalt plateau which dominates the county of Antrim and stretches into Derry. On this mountain, Praeger searched for a number of rare alpine plants – mountain avens, purple saxifrage, cushion pink, twisted whitlow grass and others. Moving east, the coast road runs along the clifftop at Downhill, giving spectacular views back to Inishowen Head to the west and Benbane Head to the east. Perched on the cliff edge here is a strange circular building in classical style known as Mussenden Temple. Built by the Bishop of Derry, who owned the nearby Downhill Demesne, the design was based on the Temple of Vesta in Italy, and once held the Earl Bishop’s library. Now protected by the National Trust, the inscription on the building reads ‘Tis pleasant, safely to behold, from shore, the rolling ship and hear the tempest roar’.
To see if it was ‘pleasant’, I sat above the cliffs here in the setting sun and watched the gathering of huge flocks of starlings, coming from all directions between east, south and west. In the sky, they circled and massed together until they formed an enormous flock known as a murmuration. For a period, the flock wheeled overhead, constantly changing shape like a giant amoeba and then, in a few seconds, it disappeared beneath the cliffs into a cave where thousands of birds sat chattering along ledges to roost for the night.
I had cousins who lived near Castlerock and we played as children on the beach and sand dunes here. Praeger had similar memories from almost a century earlier:
Castlerock, a couple of furlongs of scattered villas facing the sea, has changed but little in the last half-century. For this I am grateful, for it is bound up with many of my happiest childish recollections. Hither, away back in the seventies and eighties [1870s and 1880s] we used to have a family migration in August. Here we learnt to swim without fear in rough water; here we found hare-bells and gentians, and white and yellow water-lilies difficult to gather without a wetting; and the sand-dunes, now thronged with golfers, were lonely and exciting places, ideal for the hunting of Red Indians and for expeditions through untrodden mountain passes. And they yielded wild strawberries too, in profusion, a gift beyond price for starving explorers.(WW)
Today the beach at Castlerock is largely unchanged since Praeger’s times, but the ‘scattered villas’ have morphed into a large group of modern bungalows, many built as second homes.
Bann Estuary
The River Bann, which rises in the Mourne Mountains at the southern margin of Ulster, finally reaches the sea here, having passed through Lough Neagh in between. The long estuary runs for six kilometres, entering the saltwater between long sea walls. Just upstream, on the edge of Coleraine, is Mount Sandel, the earliest known human settlement on the Irish coast, which was excavated by Peter Woodman in the 1970s, so Praeger was probably unaware of this important site. In the centuries following 8000 BC early people returned repeatedly to this site, occupying several phases of circular huts. Built of substantial posts and roofed with turfs, rushes or perhaps even sealskins, the huts had a central hearth, so the buildings must have been filled with smoke. Inside the house sites the archaeologists found hazelnut shells and burnt animal bones, while outside were several large pits used for rubbish disposal or food storage. Here too were abundant flint implements, including both finished and partly worked tools. These Stone Age people would have inserted the flint blades, axes, scrapers and other tools into handles made of wood or deer antler. The animal bones were dominated by wild pig, with some mountain hare and either dog or wolf. Some birds, including waders and wildfowl, were also hunted on the estuary, while fish remains found include salmon, trout and eels, many of which may have been caught in fish traps. Mount Sandel is generally thought to have been a kind of base-camp from which these early people would have ventured out on hunting and perhaps trading expeditions.12
The Bann Estuary includes Portstewart Dunes, which are managed by the National Trust. The dunes owe their existence to plants such as marram grass, which can grow in the harshest conditions, trapping blowing sand and forming embryo dunes. Further back from the sea the dunes become more stable with age, supporting different communities of plants, resulting in a site so rich in species that the Bann Estuary dunes have been recognised nationally and internationally for their importance. Finding a balance between the dunes becoming so stable that they lose their special character and so unstable that they are damaged and eroded is central to their ecological management. Historical management has included the planting of non-native sea buckthorn, which has spread across the dunes at the expense of the native flora. Human impacts have damaged the vegetation on the seaward face of the dunes, reducing the formation of new dunes and the protection from the waves of storms. The key focus of future management is mitigating past human activity, while allowing nature to thrive and be enjoyed. I finished the day sitting at the top of Portstewart Beach watching the sunset to the west and enjoying a feast of the best fish and chips in Northern Ireland from Harry’s Shack.
As well as being an important navigational channel, the estuarine banks of the Bann have a range of important habitats, not least an extensive area of saltmarsh. Almost ten per cent of Northern Ireland’s coastal saltmarsh is found on this site, and it is home to a wide range of specialist plants and animals perfectly adapted to living in an environment of regular inundation by salt water.
A short distance to the east of the Bann Estuary, at Portrush, there are basalts as well as shales and clays, from the Lias period, that contain numerous fossils. Here Praeger recalled ‘one of the great scientific controversies of the past’. In 1775, a dogmatic geologist named Werner was appointed head of the School of Mines at Freyburg (now Freiburg), Germany. He did not believe that any rocks except recent lavas were of volcanic origin. He and his followers were called ‘the Neptunists’, as they believed that all basalts had been precipitated in water, and they were opposed by ‘the Vulcanists’, who regarded these as igneous rocks that had originated from ancient volcanoes. Praeger wrote:
Questions of religious belief were by no means excluded, for those who would not admit that all rocks were sedimentary were accused of attempting to undermine Holy Writ, in that their tenets were incompatible with belief in the universality of the Flood. … At Portrush an intrusion of molten lava … so baked the Lias (clay) that it became a hard dark flinty rock, which was mistaken for one of the volcanic series: and the inclusion in it of numerous fossils was hailed with delight by the ‘Neptunists’ as proof that the basalt itself was of aqueous origin as contended by Werner and his followers.(WW)
It took until 1835 until there was general agreement about the volcanic origins of this rock, which, as Praeger wrote, ‘still outcrops boldly on the beach at Portrush, a monument to a famous battle’.(WW)
Giant’s Causeway
One of the geological wonders of Europe – now a World Heritage Site – is the Giant’s Causeway, which lies about ten kilometres east of Portrush. The site was generally only known to local people until the late 17th century, when a number of prominent clerics, scholars and natural philosophers ‘discovered’ the unique rock formations. In 1739 Susanna Drury, a previously unknown Dublin artist, travelled to the Causeway to paint the landscapes, and some engravings of her work were circulated throughout Europe, arousing great interest among scientists. By the mid-1800s, with the proliferation of railways throughout the country, tourism became a popular activity for the wealthy, and the Giant’s Causeway featured prominently in many guidebooks.13
The most famous image of the Causeway shows the regular hexagonal columns, in some cases up to twelve metres high, which outcrop in a number of cliffs. The basalt, of which they are formed, was originally molten lava which was forced out onto the earth’s surface. As the hot liquid cooled and hardened in the air, shrinkage caused cracks to appear and the regular geometrical shapes emerged, each column locked into those surrounding it like honeycomb in a beehive. I walked down the track that leads from the car park to follow the shoreline and a whole vista of different shapes and patterns spread out before me. The most popular features, known by romantic names such as the organ pipes and the chimneys, were crowded with tourists, all brandishing cameras, so I kept walking and soon found myself alone on this beautiful coastline. I had to agree with Dr Samuel Johnson who, when asked what he thought about the Giant’s Causeway, proclaimed ‘Worth seeing, yes; but not worth going to see’.
In the 19th century the coast at the Giant’s Causeway would have been marked almost continuously by columns of white smoke from the fires used to burn seaweed collected from the shore. The rocky seabed here is covered with dense beds of large brown seaweeds, collectively known as kelp, which waves back and forward in the tides. Their anchorage or ‘holdfasts’ are sometimes ripped from the rocks by winter storms and great banks of tangled weed cast up on the shore. A century ago this seaweed was a valuable commodity which was collected by hand, carried in wicker creels made from hazel rods and laid out to dry on specially built stone walls. By the summer, the dried fronds were piled onto stone kilns and burned until the remaining residue, looking like a bluish sticky toffee, cooled and hardened. This product, also called kelp, was cut into blocks and sold, as it contained a concentrated source of sodium and potassium, chemicals used in bleaching and for making soap and glass. The value of the kelp was further enhanced by the discovery that it was a source of iodine, then widely used in medicine and early photography.14
The flora of the basalt cliffs of north Antrim is rich and varied as they are largely ungrazed. On the Shepherd’s Path which leads down to the shoreline, the vegetation contains plants more typical of woodland mixed with the familiar maritime species. In early summer, I found primroses, bluebells and early purple orchids growing among sea pink and sea campion flowers. There are caves here, which sheltered some of the early people who lived on these coasts. Among the bones that archaeologists have found on cave floors are those of the great auk, a flightless seabird that is now extinct throughout its range. It’s possible that it was hunted for food here on the north Antrim coast while nesting among the related razorbills and guillemots.15
The Causeway coast path is one of the most varied and interesting coastal walks in Ireland, passing by the spectacular Carrick-a-Rede suspension bridge, once used by salmon fishermen to reach their nets, and the dramatic ruins of Dunluce Castle which hang above the Atlantic waves. My longest day’s walking was rewarded with a visit to the Bushmills Distillery. Founded in 1608, Bushmills is the oldest licensed distillery in the world. Here malted barley is distilled in the original copper stills to make a single malt that is world famous. In 1885, a disastrous fire destroyed most of the distillery, but it was rebuilt and now continues the tradition of earlier centuries.
Finally, I reached the town of Ballycastle, nestled into the northern edge of the Antrim Plateau. Just outside Ballycastle, I came across the North Star Dyke, evidence of violent seismic activity about sixty million years ago. The name arose because it points roughly towards the North Star and, at shorter range, aligns with Church Bay on Rathlin Island. It is a four-metre-thick olivine dolerite intrusion where the sandstone has been washed away from it on both sides, leaving the dyke resembling a stone pier. Dolerite is a volcanic rock, very similar to basalt, containing crystals indicating that it cooled a little more slowly. Ballycastle is the site of the annual Lammas Fair. Frequently given the adjective Ould, this is one of the oldest fairs in Ireland, where animals would have been bought and sold and competitions held each year. Here, at a street stall, I sampled local products called Dulse and Yellowman, an unlikely pairing of honeycomb toffee and dried seaweed.
Rathlin Island
At Ballycastle I took the regular ferry that crosses the narrow strait between the mainland and Rathlin Island. Praeger was particularly fond of Rathlin at the north-east corner of Antrim, where he spent many days of his youth exploring and learning to understand the natural world.
These island crossings were for the greater part among the most exhilarating things in life. Who would not wish to find himself at dawn on a June morning in the rushing tide that eddies between Rathlin and Ballycastle, with Fair Head rising like a black wedge to the eastward, and the sunrise coming up over the Scottish islands?(BS)
In his old age, Praeger wrote about the coast of Antrim and vividly remembered standing on a clifftop where he rejoiced ‘in the boisterous sparkling northern sea, the imposing precipitous headlands one beyond another’. Following a colourful description of the basalt, his eyes lingered ‘longingly over Rathlin, set in the blue sea’. He then recalled a remarkable experience on the island many years earlier:
Here with two other youthful adventurers, I experienced for the first time, in an open boat, a really bad sea which made us, and our hardened boatman, very glad indeed when we reached Church Bay. Here we saw for the first time vast colonies of breeding sea-birds tight-packed on stack and precipice. And here I had my earliest experience of rock work. It was ‘Paddy the Cliff-climber’ who helped at that initiation. I wanted to see the Manx Shearwaters, and he took us to the top of a 300-foot headland. … He fastened a long light rope around a solid boulder and casts it over; then lashed a stouter rope twice around my chest, knotted it with a peculiar knot that climbers know, set himself and my brother and cousin sitting one behind the other with the rope taut between them, and their heels well dug into the turf, and invited me to go ahead.(PS)
He was lowered down the cliff on the end of the rope, and Praeger later commented, ‘I think the tyro’s chief difficulty is to have full trust in the rope, and have the courage to lie well back, so as to walk down or up the cliff’. He emphasised that ‘indeed it was necessary to keep on one’s feet here, for every ledge was so packed with birds and their eggs and droppings, and the smell was so overpowering, that it was well to be as far from the cliff face as one could’. Despite searching in several burrows he failed to find any shearwaters on his sortie down the cliff, and was hauled safely back to the top. Then, ‘Paddy donned the harness and went over instead; when we hauled him up he had a dark bird dangling at his waist’. Following a detailed examination, the shearwater, which Praeger and his companions thought was now surely dead, ‘stirred and turned over; and then suddenly it was up into the air and away, and with astonishment we watched its long curved wings bearing it far out to sea’.(PS)
Towards the end of an epic sail around the entire Irish coast in his yacht in the 1990s my father berthed at Church Bay in Rathlin and tied up alongside other visiting boats. During the night he had some trouble with his eyes and, when he mentioned this to the skipper of the neighbouring boat, he was surprised to learn from this man, who turned out by coincidence to be an ophthalmic surgeon, that he was very likely to be getting a detached retina. Speedy action was needed, so the surgeon telephoned the nearest hospital and shortly afterwards a helicopter arrived with medics on board. My father was whisked off to the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast, where rapid surgery saved his eyesight.16
The cliffs of Rathlin reach their most dramatic at the western end facing the open Atlantic. After leaving the ferry in Church Bay, the only village, I walked about six kilometres to reach the cliffs. Here it is possible to get panoramic views of the stunning seabird colonies, including the ever-popular puffins, that occupy these cliffs. For most of the year, puffins feed far out at sea, returning to land in April. Most start breeding when they are five years old and often live for more than twenty years. Some young, inexperienced birds may change mates after breeding failure, but most will mate with the same partner for many years. During the summer these comical birds share the cliffs near the island’s west lighthouse with thousands of other seabirds, from kittiwakes to fulmars, but the huge population of common guillemots (estimated at over 130,000 individuals in 201117) seems to cover every available square metre of ledge, as well as the flat tops of all the sea stacks. This is the largest concentration of this species in Ireland or Britain. From the West Light Seabird Centre, which is run by the RSPB, I got great views of these birds using my binoculars. As well as the visual spectacle, the sounds and smells of the colony were all part of my experience. Constant commuting of birds in and out of the cliffs leaves the impression of a seabird city with a large and busy population.
A new five-year project has recently been announced to boost the seabird population on Rathlin Island, which has dropped by more than 50 per cent in recent years due to predators such as rats and ferrets. Rats are thought to have come to the island via boats, including from shipwrecks, while ferrets were introduced to manage rabbits but escaped and bred. In charge is Claire Barnett, manager for the RSPB, who said the aim is to remove all the ferrets and rats from the island. ‘It has worked in the Scilly Isles and it’s worked in New Zealand so hopefully it will here too.’ She said she hoped increasing the seabird population will also attract more tourists to the island.
The location of the Ulster coast and the influence of the Gulf Stream make Rathlin a meeting place for both northern and southern marine species, although, with climate change, these boundaries may also vary. For example, the sea anemone Parazoanthus axinellae reaches its northern limit at Rathlin, while another boreal or arctic species, Phellia gausapata, is not found further south than the Antrim coast.18 The deep waters around the base of Rathlin’s cliffs and the fast tidal currents both contribute to the richness and diversity of marine life here. The massive cliffs around Bull Point continue downwards below the waterline, where they are encrusted with colourful animals growing densely over the rock surface. Here there are boulder and cobble habitats that support rare and diverse communities of branching sponges, hydroids (sea firs) and bryozoans (sea mats), all of which provide an important food source for many marine invertebrates, including nudibranchs. Both king scallop and queen scallop are also found living among the boulders, cobbles and adjacent sand on the seabed. A number of species occur here that are rare in Northern Ireland, such as a sea cucumber, a sea sponge and red algae. Recent dive surveys have revealed a stunning thirty species here that are entirely new to science.
However, before Rathlin could be given any environmental protection, the first signs of seabed damage from scallop dredging were found, with photos from divers showing overturned boulders alongside mutilated sponges. Even with the designation of the island under European legislation, divers surveying the seabed after dredging activity in 2009 captured images of trawl scars and displaced invertebrates, including sea pens and a soft coral known as ‘dead man’s fingers’. Eventually regulations were enacted, making it an offence to use bottom-towed fishing gear around the island within the boundary of the Rathlin Marine Conservation Zone.
Since the ban was imposed in 2016, new species and habitat data have been gathered from within the Rathlin Marine Protected Area through both statutory and recreational recording initiatives. This was compared with information from the 1980s, before scallop dredging began. The introduction of the dredging ban has produced signs of recovery of faunal communities on the seabed around Rathlin, with recent records of 371 species, seventeen of which are included on the current Northern Ireland Priority Species list.
Fair Head
Sailing back from northern waters past the eastern end of Rathlin Island, I had previously been impressed by the dramatic scale of the Fair Head cliffs, clearly visible from Scotland, and which mark the most north-easterly point of the mainland of Ireland. I walked along the cliff path staring down at the tide which rushes out through this northern gate of the Irish Sea. This headland, formed by the typical basalt columns, is capped by a large intrusion of dolerite, another hard, volcanic rock. Weathering and ice over millions of years have hacked away at this sharp corner of Ireland and left beneath the cliff a massive scree slope, or talus, which drops steeply to the sea. Praeger knew this area well, and his climbing skills again came to the fore in this description:
From Murlough Bay, Fair Head is in full view, with its flat top, its clean-cut gigantic wall of columns, over three hundred feet high, and its wild talus descending another three hundred feet into the ocean. … The scramble round the base of this great semi-circular rampart, over the talus, which from the summit does not look formidable, is a wonderful experience, but not to be undertaken unless you have plenty of energy and time; for the ruin of the cliff is on a gigantic scale, sloping at a steep angle, and made up of fallen blocks which may be as large as cottages. You climb along, sometimes over, sometimes under, sometimes between these, using both arms and legs to their full capacity, and unless you are a demon of energy, you will be glad when the talus gives out and you see in front the low grey sandstone cliff, and the beginning of the road which leads from the old coal-workings towards Ballycastle.(PS)
His exploits in pursuit of Ireland’s natural history show that Praeger was indeed a ‘demon of energy’ in his physical explorations, his organisational skills and his prolific writings. There were few places in Ireland that he did not explore in his long and active life, and his knowledge of the coastline was exceptional.
Leaving the North Coast
Fair Head marks the end of my rambling account of the Irish coast, but I will never stop exploring and seeking out new and interesting places along the shore and out at sea. The north coast is the shortest stretch of the four coasts, but its interest rivals the other, longer parts. The ancient rocks of north Donegal contrast with the more recent basalt plateau of Antrim and the low-lying sandy coasts of Derry. The only significant offshore islands are Tory, Inishtrahull and Rathlin. The northern shores are often battered by Atlantic storms, with some historic buildings perched on the cliffs above. The Giant’s Causeway is one of the few World Heritage sites in Ireland, and a major draw for tourists.
Much of the coastline of Northern Ireland is fully protected either by statutory designations or by the ownership of the National Trust through its long-running campaign Enterprise Neptune. The essential ecology of the north coast is no different from that of the rest of the island, but it appears to be more highly valued by its people, and this is recognised by the government.