Post-glacial gravels and fen-peats lie exposed for the first time in 10,000 years and 75,000 hectares of raw Irish landscape await a new future at human hands, writes Michael Viney
Extraction of peat for power- station fuel, for home-stove briquettes, for gardeners' composts and for poultry-litter has steadily erased the greater part of more than 300,000 hectares of the midlands' great raised bogs.
Over that half-century, more and more bogs have reached a stony bottom, leaving a vast, man-made landscape of hollows and hillocks in which post-glacial gravels and fen-peats lie exposed for the first time in 10,000 years. Some 75,000 hectares of raw, prehistoric Irish landscape now await a new future at human hands.
Bord na Móna began to research the possible uses of cutaway bogs as long ago as the 1950s. However, despite many trials, the potential for growing biomass fuel, vegetables and other tillage crops has proved disappointing .
Good grassland was found to be possible on the higher, free-draining areas, and commercial forestry seemed an obvious option. However, there proved to be serious frustrations from the midlands' late spring frosts.
Thousands of hectares of cutaway are now under squares of grass and conifers, but by the 1990s it was obvious that most of the total area was suitable only for "non-productive" uses.
The virtues of a parkland mosaic, in which recreation and tourism was integrated with farming and wildlife areas, found strong appeal+ both with Bord na Móna and with local communities concerned for their future livelihoods.
A pilot management project - the Lough Boora Parklands - was launched in Co Offaly in co-operation with Bord na Móna, and here the oldest area of cutaway is already well advanced in a natural recolonisation by plants and birds.
Turraun, now a nature reserve, took 20 years to create its own mixture of habitats.
There on limestone boulder till, with a skin of woody fen peat, grew self-seeded woodlands of birch, willow and Scots pine, open moorgrass grasslands and areas of heather and moss.
On lower ground, where reed peat carpeted a deep layer of shell marl, enclosure helped to create a shallow lake, reedbeds and winter wetlands. Pioneer plants on the bare peat helped to feed the winter flocks of whooper swans arriving from Iceland and groups of Greenland white-fronted geese. Thousands of lapwing and golden plover have come too, foraging on the new grassland and roosting on islands in the newly-created lakes.
By 1998 some 130 species of birds had been recorded on the cutaway, among them the last colony of Ireland's wild grey partridge. Songbirds breed there in high densities, especially in heathery areas at the fringe, and this provides the merlin with good hunting.
The young forestry plantations are now one of the few places in Ireland where the nightjar can be heard churring on summer nights.
Creation of artificial lakes and parklands is costly, and UCD ecologist John Feehan (author of The Bogs of Ireland) has argued that the great bulk of the cutaway should be left to develop spontaneously as a new midland wilderness, a mosaic of fen and reed-marsh and water, pine and birchwood and heath.
The cutaway's diversity is already often richer than the bog it replaces, and, left to their own dynamic processes, Feehan insists, the "ravaged" bogs will regenerate wild landscape with an ecological vitality and diversity as great as any in the past 10,000 years.
In the old bogholes and drains of the cutaway a resurgence of sphagnum mosses shows that regeneration of bog is possible - but not very probable on the brown plains of milled peat, or in the dry summers promised by climate change. Restoring raised bog needs a foundation of at least 1.5 metres, a mean annual temperature lower than 11 degrees Celsius, and it needs an intact bog nearby to provide a seed-bank. Just by ceasing to pump out the drains, a number of bogs near the Shannon will eventually provide new lakes for angling. Others could grow reed-beds, both for wildlife and as a natural, "green" system for treating farm effluent and sewage.
On drier tracts of cutaway the failure of Sitka spruce has by no means put an end to forestry prospects: Coillte will watch with interest as research by Coford seeks hardier forestry species.
A mosaic of commercial, touristic and nature-conservation uses seems the most logical outcome. The return of the cutaway boglands to the Irish people may warrant the creation of an expert Midland Trust, perhaps through the Heritage Council, to plan and oversee the future of this lost, strange and potentially beautiful tract of land.