An atlas with attitude

In certain lights, certain moods, Connemara looks sick. Here, a quarry is spreading like a festering sore; there, another hillside has come out in a rash of deep ploughing for forestry; a favourite boreen has its hedgerows ripped out and replaced by barbed wire and a calf-shed the size of a small factory. A village development committee proposes that a road be widened, a verge sprayed with weedkiller, a green field turned into a carpark; everywhere, nature stamped down in favour of convenience."

Tim Robinson, actually trying his best to be cheerful, has been given virtually the last word in a big new book with ambitions to make a difference to the way we regard and treat the countryside. The Atlas Of The Irish Rural Landscape, edited by a trio of livewire academics and published by the Cork University Press, is a sort of CD-ROM on paper, so richly visual and diverse are its 350 large format pages, with their paintings, computer maps and impeccable, sometimes thrilling, photographs.

Read one way, it is a sumptuous celebration of the "cultural landscape" of Ireland - the countryside complete with towns and farms, shaped over thousands of years. But once the history moves into the present, with maps and pictures of proliferating golfcourses, sheep-degraded mountains and "assertive dwellings of eccentric design", the book becomes quite fierce - an atlas, indeed, with attitude.

"Widespread insensitivity to landscape deterioration and spineless acquiescence in brutal acts of spoliation" - this from Prof Fred Aalen, the primary editor, who lectures in cultural geography, landscape history and planning in Trinity College, Dublin. "Gaping holes ripped in the fabric of the rural landscape by prior vandalising policies" - thus Prof Kevin Whelan, Ireland's most acute and passionate rural historian. Not, perhaps, the cool language we might expect, given the project's provenance. The book began under the aegis of the Royal Irish Academy. It was funded largely with State money and written and devised by a score of devoted contributors, north and south - all working, it seems, just for love of the idea.

The atlas will mean different things to different people. Its simple beauty and interest are compelling: Nuala O Faolain, arrestingly, has called it "my favourite book ever". More to the point may be whether Sile de Valera, as Michael D.'s successor in the "heritage" policy field, will really want to take it to bed with her. After recent real progress in strategies for landscape conservation, why does a change of government make us feel apprehensive, all over again, of what Kevin Whelan calls "the permeability of the planning process to political manipulation"?

The need for a clear national landscape policy is the book's most urgent argument. In the five years or so of its gestation, we have seen the arrival of Terry O'Regan's brave landscape conferences, calling for just the same thing. This goes a lot further than a protective "heritage" label for the best and most dramatic bits of scenery: it shows concern for the whole weave of Irish landscape, from the widest field patterns of farmland to the smallest visual details - hedgerows, gatepillars, stone bridges - that knit into history and give a locality its character.

It's the management of change that sets the problems, especially when so much of it is in the hands of farmers largely exempted from planning control. "Landscapes cannot be monitored," Prof Aalen concedes, "by battalions of public sector conservationists." On the other hand, he says, voluntary schemes such as REPS, which use financial carrots, may produce a series of individually eco-friendly farms, but no coherent landscape.

The answer, as all frustrated idealists end up by saying, has to lie in "greater public awareness". Local communities should study, record and monitor their landscape, urges Dr Aalen, "defining its overall character and the appropriate design for new developments to enhance diversity and distinctiveness". Somewhere in the process - the hope is implicit - people will stop wanting to build so many nasty suburban bungalows in all the wrong places.

But first, I would suggest, we need another set of maps - those to trace the real ways in which rural Ireland arrives at, or avoids, its decisions and consensuses. Some of them would look like family trees; some like political networks; others like histories of events - who did what to whom and when. Even laid one over another and tidied up a bit, a whole stack of maps might not add up to anything very recognisable as a community.

The self-renewal of many country towns is, as the Atlas records, a cheering and positive recent phenomenon, making up for all those in which one side of the street never speaks to the other. But the community of the town, if there is one, does not set standards for the hinterland, in which, by and large, people get on by not annoying each other, or objecting to each other's houses. Rural Ireland has not had a great deal of practice in abstractions such as the wider public good.

Ribbon development, which started with the towns, is not going to stop in farmland where families want to practise kinship side-by-side along the road. Bungalow design will not improve (by urban, AB, art-gallery-going standards) until better models of roomy, bright-looking, affordable design are around to be admired.

"This new house in Doolin in Co Clare," says an approving caption in the atlas, "echoes the traditional, narrow, gable-ended, two-storeyed houses of the region." It's painted grey, looks like a barn and has slitty upstairs windows. And below it is the standard Land Commission cottage of three little rooms, extended at the rear into an L-shape "without altering the original vernacular character of the building" - lovely for a retired couple or weekenders; not so suitable for a busy family with three kids and a dog.

Still, like Tim Robinson, one has to look on the bright side. There are good things happening, exciting initiatives, community-minded people, and the Atlas of the Rural Irish Landscape will help to inspire and inform them and add new perspectives to the landscape. It's a lovely book just to browse on - geology, archaeology, the bogs - it's all there, and the cartography, by Trinity's Dr Matthew Stout, has produced some revelatory maps. Pity there's no subject index, just placenames; amazing the bibliographies of books and documents don't list the publishers, for readers who want to go to sources for themselves.