Another Life: Hillside, shore, sea. What’s changed in all these years?

When you’re my age, hedges grow as fast as time is passing: insidiously and far too quickly, with Sunday twice a week. There also comes a point when wielding the hedge cutter at all, never mind at shoulder height, joins the growing list of things best left to others.

Thus, as summer passed, the fuchsia outside my workroom window added a metre to its height, its new facade of crimson bells, attended by foraging bumblebees, helping to make up for the loss of the world outside. By the time a good neighbour, his ladder and a dry day came together I had grown used to a life doubly screened, by the fleeting images of broadband and by the real wall of leaves beyond.

And then, with a whirr (lots of whirrs), the vista was restored: hillside, shore, sea, islands, more sea, a final, soft-edged horizon some 50km away. I thought of our Finnish writer friends whose visits were celebrations of not looking out into dark pine forest. Now, like Riittta and Olli, I repossess a distance that seems to fill the soul.

At left a slow uncurling of surf at a corner of the strand, then a long ridge of grassy dunes and a sort of lost valley of sand inside, before the fields begin. A long march of poles through the sheep to the rise of the hill and another row of them, higher up, along the road – 17 poles on the left, a dozen on the right where the hawthorn in the hedge interrupts. That's ESB to seaward and Eircom mainly on the ditch, the gales testing their matchstick verticals in a landscape bowing to the cloud theatre of the sky.

The hawthorn bush is reaching for the eaves and bracken cloaks more and more of the rough pasture beyond. What else has changed in all these years? At the top of the hill two new holiday houses replace the thatched hump of Maggie’s cottage, with its bog-deal props and purlins, its outshot bed, the close web of old stone walls. The new houses are decently “vernacular” and painted a neighbourly white. Just out of sight starts the brave new world of glass walls and telescopes on tripods.

Out at sea, left to right: Inishbofin, Inishturk, Caher Island, with a few low, dark islets in between, each skirted with foam. When, last summer, young friends sailed astonishingly back from New Zealand, the solitary white fleck of our first glimpse of their yacht made the empty ocean seem 10 times its size. How different will it look, I wonder, if big new salmon farms draw circles on the deeps behind the islands? Busier, that’s for sure.

Move fish farms offshore, the farther the better. More vigorous waves in deeper water bubbling with oxygen make salmon use their muscles, swimming more strongly round and round to build firmer, tastier flesh. Stronger currents flush through the cages and sweep the seabed of waste food and life-smothering excrement. Parasitic sea lice are held far from the migrant paths of our last few native salmon and sea trout. Those, anyway, are the hopes of An Bord Iascaigh Mhara.

Farther out, on the other hand, means much rougher sea, even more so in the brand of storms promised by climate change. In last February’s tempests, in Bantry Bay, one cage was smashed into another and upended, spilling 230,000 fish into unaccustomed freedom. Nor is 40m of water – the ideal depth – any shield against poisonous algal blooms and toxic jellyfish shredding through the mesh.

In the lee of Clare Island, round the corner in Clew Bay, a pioneer farm in deeper mooring has suffered its share of amoebic gill disease, a new plague of farmed salmon stemming from assaults by malevolent algae and the wrong sort of zooplankton. The industry’s engineers are working on technology to sink cages to the seabed for safety, ahead of hurricanes, swarms of jellyfish and toxic blooms, all to be signalled by satellite spies in the sky.

BIM has been plumbing sheltered depths off the west for a decade. Of two new Mayo prospects, the most immediately probable is a farm rearing 3,500 tonnes of salmon (not the rumoured 5,000 tonnes concerning some islanders) and anchored two and a half kilometres southeast of Inishturk, a good binocular spot in the middle of my window. A second site, with no plans in prospect yet (according to BIM) is east of Inishbofin, near the islet of Lecky Rocks. A few fierce westerlies will deliver a whole new beachcombers’ harvest of buckets, ropes and bits of net on our strand, but I doubt I shall be first on the tideline.

Ireland’s east coast has other

problems and a very different sort of shoreline, seabed and bird and marine life. The naturalist Richard Nairn gives a free public lecture, The Nature of the Irish Sea

, at the National Maritime Museum, in Dún Laoghaire, next Friday night. You’ll find more details at irishseasymposium.com