Landscape and Society in Contemporary Ireland

Chapter 4 - Change

Dramatic change in a landscape or the prospect of such a change brings a landscape into focus. Without that catalyst we may never really take note of where we are. Sometimes, unfortunately, to quote the lyric of the Joni Mitchell song, ‘you don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone’. As individuals we persist in regarding the physical landscape as a reassuring constant, subject to seasonal rhythms, but otherwise relatively unchanging. It can therefore be upsetting, traumatic even, when that assumption is shaken by the possibility of change. CHANGE Chapter 4 50 Landscape and Society in Contemporary Ireland CHANGE 51 When such events affect whole communities they can lead to conflicts which expose deep differences in the way that the surrounding world is viewed. Examining how we perceive and manage change and what happens when conflict breaks out provides the deepest insight of contemporary society’s relationship with its landscape. An auctioneer’s ‘For sale’ sign went up recently at the field gate opposite our house and immediately caught our attention. In the winter part of the half-acre field is a pond rimmed by sedges. In the early summer it produces one of the best displays of yellow flags on our road. A while ago somebody worked their way through the field with a pair of hand shears, lopping the tops of the sedges and the flags so that, for the next few weeks, weather permitting, the field will pass muster as a meadow. It is more than half a mile from a public sewer or a mains water supply, there is an electricity pole in the middle of it from which three power lines radiate. On the face of it, its development potential is negligible but a phone call to the auctioneer revealed an asking price of €60,000 ‘subject to planning’. I assume that this price has been arrived at because the field’s dimensions are such that a house could fit on it, there is road frontage and it is an easy drive from Ennis. The price compares with current local agricultural land values in the area of around €10,000 an acre. I doubt if there will ever be a house in this field but one cannot be certain on the evidence of the recent past. Roadside signs of ‘site for sale’ have been familiar harbingers of change in rural areas and, like so many townlands across Ireland, this one has seen more development in the past thirty years than in the whole of the previous century. What distinguishes the recent past from earlier decades is that there seems to have been a possibility of dramatic change nearly everywhere, not just in towns and cities and near those places but virtually everywhere. In our townland nine new houses have been built in the past decade while others have been modernised and extended. For a few years the pounding of rock breakers preparing sites, the early-morning traffic of builders’ vans and jeeps threading their way to work and a mid-morning queue for bacon and sausage rolls at the hot food counter in the village supermarket were part of the daily rhythm of our neighbourhood. Now things have quietened down and the builders have long departed although there is still a restoration project ongoing at the ‘big house’. House construction is a small component of change in a rural landscape. We are hardly aware of much of what is going on. Sensitivity is blunted by a detachment from the land which is part and parcel of contemporary living. There are no full-time farmers living in our immediate locality, even though we inhabit a landscape fashioned for and by agriculture. One neighbour, whose husband had been a farmer, still keeps a few cattle and another rents out fields for grazing and silage. That is about the extent of the direct economic connection that exists between this settled landscape and its settlers. The absence of a connection through livelihood is partly compensated for by experiencing the countryside through leisure. In my case bird-watching encourages me to look more carefully than I might otherwise do. When I first came here, in 1999, I occasionally saw a hen harrier, one of Europe’s rarer birds of prey, on the ridge above our house, but I haven’t seen one now for several years. Its presence then and absence now probably reflects a stage in the commercial forestry cycle of planting and harvesting rather than any...