were descendants of the old European wild boar which he claimed had been present in prehistoric Ireland.
Eagle. Book of Durrow (late eighth or early ninth century). (The Board of Trinity College, Dublin).
The corncrake and wild swans, distinguished by their striking and unmistakable calls, impressed the monks as summer and winter visitors respectively to earn several citations in the early poetry. Eagles in those days bred on the cliffs in remote areas: the white-tailed eagle survived in coastal regions in decreasing numbers until the early twentieth century, when it completely died out, and the golden eagle hung on until 1926 then remained extinct apart from a pair from the Mull of Kintyre in Scotland that bred on the Antrim coast from 1953–60. Remains of the great spotted woodpecker found in two separate caves in Co. Clare indicate that they were present in the primeval woods. They may have persisted to the ninth century, as suggested by several references to them in the nature poems, but by the twelfth century they would appear to have become extinct. They too fell foul of the shrinking woodlands. In contrast to these unfortunate species, the descendants of the badger and otter, also featuring in the monks’ observations, have maintained thriving populations and remained symbols of the countryside.
Augustin, the first naturalist
One Irish monk living in the seventh century, known as Augustin, composed an interesting text in 655 which, unlike many others, survived because of a superficial confusion between him and his virtual namesake, St Augustine, Bishop of Hippo (354–430), the founding father of the Christian Church. The Hibernian Augustin was fortunate – and so are we – to have his text Liber de Mirabilibus Sanctae Scripturae embedded in the third volume of most editions of the great St Augustine’s works, notwithstanding the 200 years separating the two men. Without such an occurrence of editorial laxity it is doubtful whether the writings of the lesser Augustin would have survived for posterity.10
Principal monastic and other sites of AD 650–800. From F. Henry (1965) Irish Art in the Early Christian Period (to 800 AD). Methuen & Co. Ltd., London.
The central thesis of Augustin’s work was that God rested on the seventh day after all his work was done but that once creatio was completed the gubernatio of the Deity never ceased. The monk believed that mirabilia or miracles were not new creations but only certain unusual developments of the secrets of nature. He wrote of the miracles of the Bible, and questioned why terrestrial animals, unlike their aquatic relatives, were made to bear the brunt of the Deluge (they drowned whereas fish did not) and how the life of amphibious creatures such as otters and seals could be maintained during the same period when they needed dry land to sleep and rest on. In the chapter De recussu aquarum diluvii he wondered where the Deluge waters came from and went to. He observed the fluctuations of the sea, the inundationes et recessus Oceani, noting the daily tides, the fortnightly neap tides and spring tides that suggested to him the waxing and waning of the Deluge waters. He observed that the changes in sea level were so great that what were islands may have been part of the mainland at some stage and that these changes were of considerable significance regarding the animals found on islands.
Augustin reasoned that if the mainland and islands shared a common fauna they must have had former connections. Thus, some 1,200 years before eminent naturalists such as Alfred Wallace and Charles Darwin tackled the same issues, the monk had the first intuition of a land bridge between countries. St Augustine of Hippo had himself earlier pondered in De Cicitate Dei whether the remotest islands had been granted their animals from the stocks preserved throughout the Deluge in the Ark or whether those animals had sprung to life on the spot:
‘It might indeed be said that they crossed to the island by swimming, but this could only be true of those islands which lie very near the mainland, while there are others so distant that we fancy no animal could ever swim to them… At the same time it cannot be denied that by the intervention of angels they might be transported thither, by order and permission of God. If however they are produced out of the earth as at their first Creation, when God said “Let the earth bring forth the living creatures”, this makes it more evident that all kinds of animals were preserved in the ark not so much for the sake of renewing the stock as prefiguring the various nations which were to be saved by the Church; this, I say, is more evident if the earth brought forth many animals to islands to which they could not cross over.’11
The Irish Augustin focused the argument closer to home. Being familiar with the fauna of Ireland and knowing that much of it was common to Britain he asked the following question: ‘Quis enim, verbi gratia, lupos, cervos, et sylvaticos porcos, et vulpes, taxones, et lepusculos et sesquivolos in Hiberniam deveheret?’12 ‘Who indeed could have brought wolves, deer, wild (wood) swine, foxes, badgers, little hares and squirrels to Ireland?’ His statement is the first known written record of some of the quadrupeds present in the country during the mid-seventh century.
Giraldus Cambrensis: Topographia Hiberniae 1185
The next important text on Irish natural history came some 530 years later. The author was Giraldus de Barri, alias Giraldus Cambrensis, the grandson of Henry I. His family on his mother’s side were FitzGeralds, active in the Norman invasions of Ireland. Maurice FitzGerald, his uncle, was one of the principal leaders. Cambrensis’s first excursion to Hibernia was in 1183, a visit lasting less than a year. According to his treatise Expungnatio Hiberniae, the reason for his travel was ‘to help my uncle and brother by my council, and diligently to explore the site and nature of the island and primitive origin of its race’.
Topographia Hiberniae, which received its inaugural reading at Oxford in or around 1188,3 provides a remarkably interesting account of twelfth century Ireland, although the accuracy of its natural history has been questioned and dismissed by one naturalist as ‘an amalgam of fact, fibs and fantasy and much of it patently absurd. It is undoubtedly of much use but, from the scientific point of view, so apocryphal a document is not to be relied upon without supporting evidence.’13 Other naturalists have concentrated on the miracles and strange beliefs recounted, using them to discredit the whole text. For instance, Cambrensis talks about barnacle geese hatching from goose barnacles found clinging to floating logs in the sea. ‘They take their food and nourishment from the juice of wood and water during their mysterious and remarkable generation. I myself have seen many times with my own eyes more than a thousand of the small bird-like creatures hanging from a single log upon the sea-shore.’ Such miracles were in vogue, a convenient way of explaining mysterious phenomena and the substance of bestiaries. What about, for instance, the bended leg of the crane? Cambrensis explained that when on watch duty, the crane stood on one leg while clutching a stone in the other which would drop when the bird went to sleep, so that it would be awakened on the spot and could resume its watch. Not all of Cambrensis is as blatantly fantastical as this. Praeger sums it up when he says that Cambrensis ‘was a careful recorder, but credulous; and from his statements it often requires care and ingenuity to extract the truth’.2 Thus the reader has to disentangle strands of truth from strands of fiction, and make intelligent guesses – whereupon certain important points emerge.
In defence of Cambrensis’s flights of fancy, many writers on natural history, even well into the second millennium, also traded some equally extraordinary beliefs and myths. Another typical story is that of the vanishing birds, or ‘birds that do not appear in the winter-time’. To Cambrensis they ‘… seem … to be seized up into a long ecstasy and some middle state between life and death. They receive no support from food … and are wakened up from sleep, return with the “zephyr” and the first swallow.’ This is close to the misconceptions, persisting many centuries later, concerning the hibernation of swallows, which, it was postulated, spent the winter in estuarine muds. The large pre-migratory
