the boat was overly warm and the bar a little too noisy. ‘I take my gladness in the … sound of the curlew instead of the laughter of men,’ the ancient sailor had written, feeling lonely and uncertain on his gale-ridden sea. I did share that in common with him. I have ears only for the call of curlews, a curlew earworm, overriding the muzak and the chatter in the restaurant. Mind you, had the ferry been more akin to an Anglo-Saxon ship I might have been more prepared for the wintry blasts that strip the skin from your body in County Antrim.
Stretching north from Belfast is an area of high plateau cut through by valleys, or glens as they are more commonly called. Even today, many of the higher reaches of Antrim are remote. Glenwherry, in the heart of upland Antrim, is my first stop before heading out to Enniskillen. Sitting at around 400 metres, this is a landscape of bog and rough pasture dominated by an extinct volcano – Slemish Mountain – a giant Celtic beast crouched on bogland.
Glenwherry gets its fair share of rain – lots and lots of rain – and on the day of my visit this is mixed with sleet. It is easy to imagine how glaciers up to a mile high bore down on this land 30,000 years ago, their icy fingers prising open every crack in the rocks and tearing out boulders like flesh off a bone. When the climate began to warm and the glaciers retreated about 12,000 years ago, the land that reappeared from beneath the ice had been stripped of life and was scarred, bare and exhausted. But, slowly, vegetation and wildlife returned.
Over the millennia that followed, Ireland was colonised by hunter-gatherers and then farmers, expanding westwards from mainland Britain and Europe. The great forests were cut down as agriculture spread. The climate continued to change, and after long periods of warmth and low rainfall it became increasingly colder and wetter. Upland soils were leached of their nutrients and became acidic. From 4,500 years ago, bogs began to form across Ireland. In many places farming was abandoned until iron tools allowed these sodden, poor soils to be worked again. The hopes and beliefs of these early Irish people are writ large across the landscape in the form of tombs, dolmens and standing stones. As Christianity spread, these made way for churches as the modern spiritual expression of local communities.
In 1832 Lieutenant Robert Botler noted that the last wolf in Ireland was seen in Glenwherry in the seventeenth century. No doubt it cut a lonely figure, stressed and hungry in a hostile land. Standing here today, I could be on a film set for Sherlock Holmes’ The Hound of the Baskervilles. Through the grey, low cloud I can easily visualise a slinking form circling a stone sheep enclosure, providing scant protection from a beast ravaged by hunger. The wolf record is given added credence by an adjacent area of peat land called Wolf Bog, now home to five wind turbines.
In 1836 James Boyle wrote in his memoirs that the people who lived here were kind, shrewd, hard-working descendants of Scottish Presbyterians and Calvinists. They were livestock farmers, and their occupation is carried on to this day. In a land where rain and gales sweep in from the west for much of the year, it is the only practical option; growing crops is well nigh impossible. While Boyle admired the upright grittiness of the people, he was somewhat less inspired by the landscape:
The valley of Glenwherry is wild and mountainous, presenting no variety of scenery, either in its natural or artificial state, destitute of planting or hedgerows, its steep but smooth sides mountainous but presenting nothing bold or striking in their forms, being in fact, except along the banks of the river, one unvaried and uncultivated waste. At the western end of the parish the scenery is not so wild and there is more cultivation, but proceeding towards the eastern end of the glen the scenery becomes wild, dreary and uninteresting.3
Glenwherry was, and still is, a tough place to live.
Place names can tell us much about the past character and wildlife of an area. In England, former animal denizens are recorded as Buckfast and Wolford, for example. Others are more obscure, such as Birkenhead, meaning the headland where birch trees grow. In Northern Ireland, Doire, or Derry, means oak grove, and Cúil Raithin, the town of Coleraine, is a place of many ferns. Laios na n Gealbhán, or Lisnaglevin, means ‘fort of the sparrows’. Cranfield, in County Antrim, is the anglicised version of Creamhchoill, or wild-garlic wood. All of life, whether sought after for food or fuel, grand or humble, is to be found in place names. In County Tyrone the townland of Pollnameeltogue means ‘hollow of the midges’, and Knockiniller is the ‘hill of the eagle’. A journey through the towns of Ireland is a glimpse into an abundant past natural history, where people named their homes in terms of the life around them.
Glenwherry has the quaintly named Whappstown Road. Whapp or whaup is an onomatopoeic Celtic name, reproducing the sound of one of the curlew’s barking calls. It also gives its name to Whaup Hill in County Antrim and Whaup Island in County Down. When an old musician from the Sperrin Mountains was asked to sing a song, he said, ‘I whaups a bit on the flute as well, ye know,’ and ‘What’s thou waap-whaupin aboot?’ was a rebuke to a crying child in the northeast of England.
Whappstown Road is a hint that curlews were once common here in Antrim. Maybe their calls over the hills as they returned to breed in early spring lifted the hearts of those past generations of tough farmers. Neal Warnock, the RSPB Conservation Advisor for Glenwherry, told me how much he looked forward to their arrival in March. ‘For me, being up in the hills all year round, there’s quite a few months when you’re faced with silence, and the more I work up here the more the anticipation grows of hearing the first curlew of the spring return. It’s fantastic to hear them call across the valley and the farmers look forward to them coming back, too. They hold an important place in the hearts and minds of the people that live in this area.’
It seems they always have. In the late nineteenth century, James McKowen, a worker in a bleach factory near Belfast, led a double life as a poet and songwriter. He used the pen name ‘Curlew’, or sometimes ‘Kitty Connor’, and wrote lyrics for ballads. Though his hands helped turn the wheels of industry, his heart was alone on the bogs with curlews in spring. His collection of poems appeared in The Harp of Erin, in 1869, and his song ‘The Curlew’ relives his boyhood joy of wandering through the glens of Antrim, listening to that soulful cry of the wilderness, alongside those of the golden eagle and the turtle dove.
The Curlew
By the marge of the sea has thy foot ever strayed,
When eve shed its deep mellow tinge?
Hast thou lingered to hear the sweet music that’s made
By the ocean-waves’ whispering fringe?
Tis then you may hear the wild barnacle’s call
The scream of the sea-coving mew,
And that deep thrilling note that is wilder than all
The voice of the wailing curlew.
The song of the linnet is sweet from the spray
The blackbird’s comes rich from the thorn;
And clear is the lark’s when he’s soaring away
To herald the birth of the morn.
The note of the eagle is piercing and loud,
The turtle’s, as soft as it’s true;
But give me, oh! give me, that song from the cloud
The voice of the wailing curlew.
Sky minstrel! How often I’ve paused as a child,
As I’ve roamed in my own native vale,
To
