reveals remarkable achievements which prepare the reader for the chapters to follow. Living Irish naturalists, whose work is unfinished, will not be discussed, but many of their accomplishments are quoted in subsequent chapters. Our purpose here is to salute those early pioneers who unravelled much of the rich pageant of Ireland’s natural world.
The trail begins with early Christian monks, living close to nature and its moods, who set down their observations of the changing seasons. Their perceptions of the flora and fauna were recorded in poetry that was at first oral before being written down several centuries later as alliterative verse – much of which was botched by antiquarians and modified not inconsiderably by scribes.1 Emerging from this first wave of nature watchers was a perspicacious monk, Augustin, reckoned by Praeger to have been the first Irish naturalist.2 Augustin flourished around AD 655, when he wrote Liber de Mirabilibus Sanctae Scripturae, and his ideas pre-empted by 1,200 years many fundamental concepts about animal distribution expounded by Charles Darwin and others.
During the thirteenth century, Giraldus Cambrensis (c.1146–c.1223), a Welsh ecclesiastic and travel writer, produced Topographia Hiberniae,3 vivid and robust sketch of Ireland’s natural history. Yet another visitor, Gerard Boate (1604–49), a medical doctor from Holland, followed many years later with Irelands Naturall History (1652),4 a popular handbook for ‘adventurers’ and land investors at the time of Oliver Cromwell. Both the Cambrensis and Boate texts provide the earliest framework for natural history in Ireland. Thereafter Ireland remained a scientific backwater until towards the close of the seventeenth century when a small group of Dublin-based natural philosophers, belonging to the age of new learning and enlightenment, brought a rational approach to the study of natural history. Subsequently many amateurs, divines, members of the landed gentry, businessmen and ordinary folk, together with academics, bore the torch of knowledge. Natural history societies bloomed in Ireland, especially in Belfast, during the heady industrial atmosphere of the Victorian era. These developments triggered off a surge of natural history investigations that gathered momentum throughout the present century.
Remains of a sixth or early seventh century monastic settlement perched on the summit of the Bailey Mór, Inishkea North, Co. Mayo.
Early Christian monks and their nature poetry AD 600–800
From their austere and silent cells and monasteries the early Christian monks spoke eloquently of a love for the natural world. These men, scattered throughout the countryside, had plenty of time at their disposal to become the first observers of natural patterns, rhythms and cycles, and of a wide variety of living creatures, all of which had God for a cause. As well as being uplifting, their poetry yields to us today information regarding the natural surroundings with which they were familiar.
One of the better known poems from this period is Tánic sam on the coming of summer, taken from a Bodleian Library manuscript dating from the twelfth century but considered by James Carney to have originally been composed in the mid-ninth century or possibly earlier, and published by the Irish scholar Kuno Meyer.5,6 The version here was translated by Greene & O’Connor.1
‘Summer’s come, healthy free, that bows down the dark wood;
The slim, spry deer jumps and the seal’s path is smooth.
The cuckoo sings sweet music, and there is smooth, soft sleep.
Birds skim the quiet hill and the swift grey stags.
The deer’s lair is too hot, and active packs cry pleasantly;
The white stretch of strand smiles and the swift sea grows rough.
There is a noise of wanton winds in the palace of the oakwood of Drumdell;
The fine clipped horses who shelter in Cuan Wood are rushing about.
Green bursts out from every plant; leafy is the shoot of the green oakwood.
Summer has come, winter gone, twisted hollies hurt the stag.
The hardy blackbird who owns the thorny wood sings a bass;
The wild, weary sea reposes and the speckled salmon leaps.
Over every land the sun smiles for me a parting greeting to bad weather.
Hounds bark, stags gather, ravens flourish, summer’s come.’
Carvings (c. seventh to eighth centuries) on slabs, Inishkeel, Co. Donegal.
Hunting scene (c. 790 AD), Bealin Cross, Co. Westmeath. From F. Henry (1965) Irish Art in the Early Christian Period (to 800 AD). Methuen & Co. Ltd., London.
A limited analysis of some ten of these early nature poems published by Jackson7 and Greene & O’Connor1 revealed that of 33 references to mammals, 19 were of (red) deer, stags, hinds and fawns, with many references to the stag’s roaring and bellowing.8 Next in occurrence were swine and boars (five mentions each) followed by three for badgers, two each for wolves and foxes and one each for the otter and seal (grey or common). Of the feathered creatures, the blackbird is cited most frequently (nine mentions) followed by four for the cuckoo and three each for the crane, heron and ducks. There are two references to a ‘woodpecker’, a species no longer resident in Ireland. Trees feature prominently with most citations being of the oak (six mentions), followed by yew (four) and three each for hazel, rowan and apple. Birch and ash carry two references. Hazel nuts were obviously of great significance, judging by the frequent references to them. Acorns and sloes were the next most noted. Of the plants and wildflowers mentioned, water-cress was the most prominent, followed by ivy, bracken, cottongrass, yellow iris, honeysuckle, marsh pennywort and saxifrage. The monk’s culinary interests were reflected by references to wild garlic, fresh leeks and wild onions.
What do these early nature poems tell us about the natural world of Ireland as seen by the monks about 1,150 years ago? Firstly, the location of the observers determined their commentary and, contrary to the general impression that they lived in the fastness of remote islands off the west coast, most monks resided in monasteries located in the Midlands. Their poetry conjures up an auspicious mix of woodlands, pastures, lakes and rivers. Those religious men dwelled in a much richer and more biologically diverse environment than today’s, populated by several large mammals and bird species which subsequently became extinct. Red deer were clearly widespread and frequent due to more extensive deciduous woodland cover (of which the Irish red deer makes a greater use than its European counterparts). Also present in these woods were wolves and wild boars, not yet exterminated by man.
The descendants of the wolves from the early Christian period had mostly disappeared by 1700 but struggled on until 1786, when the last specimen was exterminated in Co. Carlow. Wild boar were formerly the most abundant of wild animals of Ireland. Their bones were found associated with the first known human settlers in Ireland some 9,000 years ago. According to Thompson9 they continued to be plentiful down to the seventeenth century, but their date of extinction is not known nor is it recorded when they were last seen. Robert Francis Scharff (1858–1934), Keeper of the Natural History Museum, Dublin, from 1890 until 1921, believed that the degenerate wild pigs seen by Giraldus Cambrensis during the late twelfth century were descended from domesticated stock introduced by the first Neolithic
