Another Life: Notions of landscape liable to produce divergent opinions

Where the River Shannon Flows was a best-seller in 1940. Illustration: Michael Viney

The new logo on our road signs had me puzzled for days. Wavy white lines on blue what was that about? Narrow, wiggly, bumpy roads? Fair enough. Good surfing? Not that way, into the mountains. Eventually it dawned were now part of the Wild Atlantic Way.

That must be why theyve mended all the potholes and why the grassy-spined boreen down to the strand, clearly just wide enough for one careful driver, has a big, new speed limit of 50km/h.

So now, summoned for a check-up at our distant centre of excellence, it is wisest to leave before breakfast to beat the camper vans into Doolough Pass and, come August, best to stock up with a months supply of everything and close the gate behind us, grateful for the summer mufflement of trees.

It was the Romantics, said Bertrand Russell (in his History of Western Philosophy) who shaped the wild taste in scenery a revolt of passion and individualism against a world of stultifying peace and quiet. Up to Rousseau, he argued, the admired rural landscape was a scene of fertility, with rich pastures and lowing kine. But then dramatic and untamed scenery took over the poets and novelists and almost everybody nowadays this from Russell in 1945 prefers Niagara and the Grand Canyon to lush meadows and waving corn.

Since Russell, a warming world has seen great changes. Spectacular chasms and rushing torrents are no longer the passionate metaphors of literature, but physical threats of things to come. Meanwhile, the Wild Atlantic Way offers soothing views of an infinite horizon, while driving very slowly and never checking the mirror.

But what of the islands interior, still mostly under human command? Just published, and largely ignored by the media is the Governments Draft National Landscape Strategy. It comes a decade after signing the European Landscape Convention and 20 years of native agitation and advice, most cogently from from the Heritage Council and, on the sidelines, from Terry ORegan, the crusading landscape architect from Cork.

A speaker at one of his landscape conferences in the 1990s offered a tempting but cynical thesis: Basically, landscape planning means that those of good taste, or hopefully of good taste, tell those of bad taste or none what they may or may not do. But the European convention was heavy on subsidiarity taking decisions at the most local level possible. Along with pulling together all the government and sectoral interests in the landscape, much of the Irish effort has gone into cultivating trust among stakeholders defending their local views, trees and hedges.

The passing years have brought good successes in local management of landscape, land use and heritage, as in the Wicklow uplands, the Burren, Bere Island, the Great Western Greenway and many locally-negotiated walking trails. But rows over wind farms and pylons continue to warrant a fully developed landscape policy.

We seem little nearer to deciding how landscape should be described at least in terms that bureaucracy feels it can use. It is 14 years since local authorities were charged with preparing landscape character assessments factual appraisals, to eschew any notions of beauty or other aesthetic ranking. Many counties, indeed, did their best (Co Meaths is one worth reading online) but developing a national landscape character assessment is still a heartfelt wish listed in the strategy document.

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Another Life: Notions of landscape liable to produce divergent opinions