Another Life Michael VineyThere can be times on the wild west coast when a feeling of oneness with nature does not come easily: just at this minute, for example, when the barometer in the porch is dropping by the minute towards "Stormy" and the forecast is for violent Force 11. One's psyche nags, instead, about the weak spots in the greenhouse and woodshed roofs and the angle at which the peak gusts will engage with the polytunnel, just as I'd planted the lettuce.
To take my mind off things, and to get this column away before we start life by candlelight, I shall displace my fears to Donegal - or, rather, Belfast, where threats of winds even stronger than our own must be haunting every holiday-home owner with picture-windows facing the Atlantic. How many of them have built two-storey houses to give the bedrooms a view, or brazenly commandeered the high spots, shunning the shelter of the land? How many are still at the half-built, gable stage, just waiting for a gust to knock them flat? Hundreds, certainly, if recent letters about Donegal's reckless building have been anything to go by. A view from the air of "rampant and uncontrolled development" is confirmed from the ground by a cry of anguish from Portnablagh: "Daily the cordon of building tightens about us. There is the incessant noise of rock-breakers, compressors, cement mixers and hammers. Gargantuan machines, diggers, earth-movers, cranes and others pound along our wholly inadequate roads." And what are built are "no longer cottages but mansions". These replace rugged, vernacular houses, built of local materials and fitted so snugly to the contours of the hills that storms could roar over them: limpets on a rock.
The fate of the old "longhouses", in just this corner of north Donegal, is the focus of a new book by a research fellow at Trinity College, Dr Clive Symmons. In The Disappearing Irish Cottage (Wordwell, €17.50) he joins with a local historian Seamus Harkin in a study of what has been ruined and what little remains to be saved around the town of Dunfanaghy. In more than 100 photographs, they document the technology and rich character of houses built with two-foot-thick walls of local stone, roofed with rough-hewn local slate and raftered with timbers of pine retrieved by turf cutters on the bogs.
It is, as the authors say, a study that should have been done at least 20 years ago, before local authorities warmed to the notion that granting planning permission for knocking an old cottage and building on its ruins was a good way of limiting new development in scenic areas. In this, it must be said, they have met little or no resistance from local sentiment, in which the longhouses are mouldering relics of an overcrowded, famine-stricken past. In one of the older cottages, for example, a two-roomed thatched dwelling, a bedroom measuring about three by four metres was shared by 12 children, two parents and a grandparent. Men used the byre as a loo, and women the stable (but, as one of the children assured Dr Symmons, he never once caught the flu).
Other than as theme-park ornaments, the future of these houses seems to depend on blow-ins like Dr Symmons, who bought his in the early 1970s and has since damp-proofed and modernised it as a holiday home: a trend he would encourage through Donegal's county development plan. While the county council has a list of "protected structures" and accepts that vernacular cottages belong in its heritage, none of those pictured on his pages seems to have been included.
Some of them, indeed, are object lessons in how not to go about modernisation (a large rooflight, for example, inserted into the old Roshine slates). But at least the form and the feel should survive, of homes connected to their settings, their weather and history. Dr Symmons bemoans the particular loss of "a marvellous traditional cottage" on the heights of Horn Head - a house singled out only 10 years ago in a major book on the topic as one of the best examples in Ireland. He charts its slow decay, as the slates gave way to corrugated iron and the old windows were ripped out; finally, a new, two-storey house was built in its place.
A big patch of blue sky has opened to the west and a watery sunlight flashes off the shivers of the polytunnel: how it lifts the spirits, even as the gusts increase (a first flicker in my desklight). As I write this, the height of the storm has still to reach us. I feel hopeful, but am not deceived.