The old farming phrase “eyes to the acre” carries a gentle truth: the land benefits when it gets close attention. To regularly walk a field with observant eyes and attuned ears is to notice a silky, funnel-shaped spider’s web stretched between two stems, the inward fold of grass leaves that hints at drought, or the flash of electric-blue wing feathers of a jay in the trees.
“Eyes to the acre” came to my mind earlier this summer when I visited Batt Sheahan’s dairy farm in Ballynoe in the Bride Valley, Cork. For the past few years he has been part of a publicly funded project to look after and restore life to lowland intensive farms like his own. Batt has thickened his hedgerows, dug out new ponds and created south-facing banks with nesting places for solitary bees. While all these efforts have brought visible gains – one of his upper fields is still home to a breeding skylark, possibly one of the last of these birds in the valley – it seems the most profound change has occurred within him.
It is as if, for the first time, his eyes have opened. For 30 years, he told me, he walked to and from his dairy parlour with his head down, noticing nothing. Today that short walk takes much longer because he sees the life around him. “Now I stop and look up, look down, look sideways,” he said. “I take time to see what is around me. I think about what I’m doing. Before, I never did.”
Because much of my work takes me to rural, isolated parts of the country, I spend a lot of time in the car, which leaves little opportunity to notice and feel the natural world along the way. Yet in these rural areas, the countryside is threaded with a network of quiet, lightly travelled old country roads, often bordered in spring and summer by thick, flowering hedgerows. Anyone who walks these small roads, with their adjoining boreens, knows they can be an abundant source of life.
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If these roads were safer, their potential as alternative routes for rural residents – especially children – to walk or cycle to school or the local sports club would be obvious. About 35 per cent of the Irish population lives in rural Ireland, but the option to safely cycle – something increasingly available to those in urban areas – simply isn’t available. It’s a profound change from the past, when cycling was the main means of transport in rural Ireland. Between 1986 and 2011, as the number of cars on Irish roads doubled, the number of secondary-school children cycling to school daily dropped by 87 per cent to just under 7,000 students.
In April 2022, inspired by how people had reclaimed the streets during Covid as spaces not just for cars, but also for walking, playing and cycling, Caitríona Corr from Kilkenny and Jo Sachs-Eldridge from Leitrim, both members of the Rural Cycling Collective within the Irish Cycling Campaign, came up with an idea to reclassify some of these minor rural roads. These roads, which they describe as “Ireland’s best-kept secrets” that “go virtually everywhere” could be designated as Rothar Roads, where walkers and cyclists are “expected and respected”.
The idea is simple. Local rural roads are identified and marked with a Rothar Roads sign, indicating a default lower speed limit. Traffic-calming measures, such as surface treatments at junctions, additional signage and chicanes, can be added to slow vehicles down. In doing this, the dense network of narrow country roads would become safe and accessible for people who prefer alternatives to a car. It also offers a tangible reminder of the law, which gives walkers, cyclists, horse-riders and even herded livestock equal standing with cars, trucks and tractors as users of these local roads.
Mayo County Council has recently proposed a similar initiative on the Mullet peninsula. The Blacksod Bay Loop Scheme intends to be a safe walking and cycling corridor using existing back roads to connect towns and villages along the area, including Belmullet, Doolough, Doohoma and Tullaghanduff. The idea isn’t to reduce the number of cars; rather, the roads will be repurposed with traffic-calming measures to slow vehicles and prioritise walkers, cyclists and other non-motorised users instead.
In north Roscommon, farmer and writer Keith Brennan is developing a series of Rothar Road routes along the local roads of Crossna and Cootehall. They will be way-marked with QR codes linked to audio recordings of written records from the Schools’ Folklore Collection, containing memories of the place recorded by school kids in the 1930s. “The idea is to show that roads aren’t just for cars – they’re places for people, nature and farming,” says Keith. “These roads are essentially natural greenways with hedgerows overflowing with wildflowers which we can see and experience in a different way.”
[ Hedgerows are a shining example of nature benefiting from human interventionOpens in new window ]
Travelling daily outside along our bogs roads, boreens and local roads – whether on food, by bicycle or on mobility aids – helps us bring more “eyes to the acre” and gives us a chance to notice and enjoy what’s there. If we can make some of these routes safer, especially for children, then we have a chance to connect with and learn from the life around us – to read the landscape, and respond with a better sense of stewardship and care.
