ANOTHER LIFE/Michael Viney: Can it be 20 years since they tarmacadamed the boreen that loops towards the sea? It was a stony road, but a dry one, with a ridge of grass down the middle and hawthorn hedges that just about let two tractors pass.
Several new bungalows later, there is still a ridge of grass down the middle, and the roadside banks are still notched by hares on their regular crossings between the fields. But most of the hedges have that bevelled look of County Council discipline, and on one long stretch someone has begun to mow the narrow verges. This sets off the beauty of ferns uncurling in the hedge-bank above, and at least it leaves intact the hawthorn and fuchsia and the myriad wild plants, birds and insects that crowd into their shade.
Among the greenery just now is the fine white lace of pignut flowers, Conopodium, and I found myself trying not to rehearse the lilt of "Here we go gathering nuts in May" for fear it would play on forever. The plant's little tubers do, indeed, have the crunchy appeal of young hazelnuts, which made them a delicacy of spring in the days before crisps and Snickers.
The boreen is a couple of centuries old, worn into the hillside by farm-carts piled with seaweed, but the hawthorn and fuchsia of the windswept hedges are, by comparison, only yesterday's arrivals. While they serve as refuge for ferns and wildflowers banished or grazed away from the ryegrass fields, there is nothing like the striking mix of species one might look for in the big, old hedgerows of more generous countryside.
In the leafy farmland of east Donegal, for example, just outside Raphoe, Stuart Dunlop walks his dog each day along a mile or so of tall, wide and dense hedgerow, one stretch of it beside a stream. He is a computer specialist with a love of nature and last year he totted up some 60 flower and fern species growing in what was clearly a venerable setting. In January he set up a website, "A Donegal Hedgerow" (http://homepage.eircom.net/~hedgerow), for a year-long diary of plant and wildlife species, photographed with his new digital camera.
It is already a fascinating document, engagingly informal and including, in April alone, flowering plants as different as butterbur (on the stream bank), bugle, bluebell and bilberry. It suggests a diversity to match the great unmanaged hedges of Fermanagh, stocked up with species drifting in from the wild.
The oldest, most substantial hedges mark townland boundaries along the roads, which is why their destruction in bungalow development becomes so serious. For all the good work promised by Networks for Nature, the collaborative initiative launched last spring, little has been done to check the planning and building practices that threaten to leave the network in shreds. Better farm management of hedges is already the concern of wildlife legislation and the Rural Environment Protection Scheme. Networks for Nature is working with Teagasc and PAC Ireland, the agricultural contractors' group, to develop a training and certification system for operators of tractor-mounted hedge cutting machinery, and a Teagasc specialist, Catherine Keena, with Neil Foulkes from Networks for Nature, spoke at the first national conference for professional hedgecutters (yes!) held in Tullamore in March.
But the same hedges can be destroyed for an open frontage for a bungalow or half a dozen of them. In all likelihood, no one has even considered the benefits of keeping the hedge for privacy, soundproofing and shelter, let alone for nature. To builders, hedges are tiresome obstructions, and engineers are all for an indefinite widening of roads and parking spaces. Networks for Nature, initially proposed by the Irish Wildlife Trust, embraces Crann and the Heritage Council, and the new Heritage Officers employed by many local authorities should offer one route of influence on county development plans. Why not "Quality Hedgerow Zones" or some such label, in which no roadside hedgerow can be bulldozed without at least considering alternatives?
Among the wildlife in Stuart Dunlop's digital diary ("I had no idea that frogs came in so many colours"), the orange-tip and speckled wood butterflies are welcome familiars of hedgerow vegetation. Donegal, as it happens, has been the focus of a special long-term butterfly survey coordinated by Bob Aldwell of the Dublin Naturalists' Field Club. In a corner of Ireland especially prone to wild swings of weather, and with recorders thin on the ground, it has so far taken five years to map the habitats and distribution of the county's 23 resident butterfly species. A dozen of them are found only locally, often in small and vulnerable colonies tied to particular habitats or caterpillar food plants. The current issue of Wild Ireland magazine has a special article on Irish butterflies and their lifestyles, with some dazzling photographs by Robert Thompson.