Local History:Richard Roche on Donegal's delights, the hidden streams of Dún Laoghaire and 'the deepo' in the park
The landscape, that most precious yet too often despoiled part of our heritage, its influence on the people who inhabit it and its place in the history of the country are examined in Prof Patrick J Duffy's absorbing Exploring the History and Heritage of Irish Landscapes(Four Courts Press, €19.95). From the parklands of the planter to the mountain patches of "the peasantry", from the Burren to Bargy, Antrim to Aherlow, the landscape has nurtured and shaped its inhabitants as indelibly as the people have helped shape the landscape.
Recognising and knowing our place and our duty therein is, as the work implies, one of life's prerogatives. This is a richly documented exploration of Irish landscape history and heritage, embracing a multitude of aspects - the natural and the built, the cultural and the social, the rural and the urban environments.
Though it is intended "chiefly as a guide for students of landscape history", this is a timely study, especially so for an age when it seems that we have forfeited a sense of appreciation of the landscape for a few fleeting disadvantages.
The landscape, particularly that of Co Donegal, is also the subject of Donegal: the Making of a Northern County, edited by Jim McLaughlin (Four Courts Press, €45), a collection extolling the history and geography of that wonderful county - an area laden with history, enriched by nature and inhabited by the finest people in Ireland. Selected from a wide range of writings by more than 60 commentators and visitors over the last couple of centuries, the work, at 380 pages, is as complete a picture of this northern county and its people as one could wish for. It includes reports on social and economic conditions in Donegal in the 19th and 20th centuries as well as observations from Lloyd Praeger, Yeats, Arthur Young, Henry Inglis, Patrick MacGill, Peadar O'Donnell, Charles McGinley - strangers and natives who found fascination in the wild environment, Jim Mac Laughlin himself contributes a masterly introduction and a series of explanatory forewords to each of the five sections. He concludes with a summation appropriate to the times: "All that appears to matter now are success, imitation, technique and progress, at whatever cost to the natural and cultural heritage of the country."
Streams, even if they are hidden, are part of the landscape too. Yet it is unlikely that most of the residents of the Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown area know how many rivers and streams merge and flow through their neighbourhood into the Irish Sea. There is of course the Dodder, but after that all that is generally known about the other 30 or so becomes apparent only when they overflow, as at Carysfort Park last July or Rathfarnham last June.
Brian Mac Aongusa's attractive Hidden Streams: A new History of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown(Currach Press,€24.99) should go a long way towards filling any gaps in local knowledge about the area's hidden steams. His method of linking the existence of these waterways with the lives of the various inhabitants who have occupied the district in the early Christian, Viking and Norman times lends itself to much local lore and more than justifies the book's subtitle. The book is colourfully illustrated with maps, drawings and photographs of landmarks and historic buildings.
Jim Lacey's excellent A Candle in the Window - A History of the Barony of Castleknock(Mercier Press, €14.99) deals with a different but no less interesting part of the greater Dublin area. This is a revised and updated edition of a work first published in 1999 and sheds further light on the barony's long and lively story from the days of the Celts, through the Viking settlements and Norman colonisation and down to modern times. The candle in the window of the title was said to have stood in an open window of Tyrell's castle and never blew out no matter how fierce the gale.
This new edition also includes the names and addresses of many former residents from lists that go back 150 years or more, These should interest compilers of family trees keen to establish links with the old barony.
When there were gardaí in the local station in my native place in Co Wexford, a few of them referred to Garda headquarters as "the deepo", meaning the depot, the subject of Donal J O'Sullivan's The Depot(Navillus Publishing, €15), a detailed history of the centre of police administration in Ireland from 1842. The buildings in the Phoenix Park have served also as a training centre for the early Dublin Metropolitan Police, the RIC and the Garda Síochána. As such, the place has had a significant role in the history of Ireland and its links with rural Ireland were particularly strong, in that most of the police and Garda recruits were the sons of farmers. As a former member of the Garda Síochána, retiring with the rank of chief superintendent in 1996, the author knows his "deepo" well. Incidentally, the pronunciation of the name as "deepo" was as near to the original French origin of the word as anyone in a rural Garda station could wish.
Richard Roche is a journalist, author and local historian