Shaping the landscape

THE clear-felled slopes in Connacht's state conifer forests have made drastic changes in the landscape, stripping back valleys and hill-sides to their original wild contours of rock and bog. In Connemara's Maam Valley, clearance rediscovers dramatic, ferny bluffs; in south Mayo's mountains, the Glenummera River and its waterfall, once darkly planted to the banks, are opened again to the sun.

The shaven hectares present an often rather shocking expanse of stumps and brash (though never as deeply dreadful as some of the sheep-worn peatland around them). One peers into the "empty" forest for clues about its future: there is seldom anyone around to ask.

Look hard enough and the little green dragon's teeth of thousands of new spruce seedlings reveal themselves. But the boundary shapes of the re-plantings seem to follow new lines in the landscape, new jigsaw curves in place of the old, hard-edge blocks. And the trees are not all Sitka after all.

Over the bill from me, the forest at Tawnydoogan was once a sheer black shadow on the mountain-side at the flank of Doolough Pass. Now, the "felling coup", as it's called, has been redesigned, and I am promised that what grows up within it will look "a lot more natural".

Its shapes will follow the forms of the land, leaving rock outcrops their dignity and waterfalls their light. The dark wash of spruce will be broken by drifts of native silver birch, rowan, alder, even wild cherry. In autumn, judicious seams of larch will let a seasonal glow into the wood.

Coillte's foresters seem to have taken to this sort of thing with positive relish, part of a corporate zeal to disown the mistakes of the past". The company has recruited the services of Simon Bell, chief landscape architect of the British Forestry Commission, and more than 100 forest managers have completed courses on design, sensitive even to ideas like genius loci, the "spirit of the place".

Coillte's seven regional environmental officers have, as their main job, the redesign of plantations at the clearfell stage. Their boss, John McLoughlin, uses sober language for the task: "The visual force in landform draws the eye down con vex slopes and up concave ones, the strength of the visual force depending on the scale and irregularity of the landform. Forest shapes should follow the visual forces in the landscape, rising in hollows and falling on ridges. This happens naturally with vegetation, and if an area of clearfell forest conflicts with the visual force of the landform, it looks destructive and out of place."

For such insights into what's going on in Coillte - and, indeed, in many other areas which impinge upon our countryside - I am indebted to The Second Londfoll a fascinating publication based on the audio-record of last year's (second) Irish Landscape Forum.

It shows how remarkably well this event, brainchild of Cork landscape architect Terry O'Regan, has connected with the hearts and minds of people concerned with landscape quality professionals, artists, scientists, community activists, green radicals, even county councillors. These different dynamics give an intellectual excitement to the forum, which will be staged again next month in Maynooth.

The need for a National Landscape Policy, which was O'Regan's starting point, can lead down many different avenues, all of them suitably tree-lined.

DEVISING and perfecting planning tools and techniques can happily go on for ever, trying to marshal the landscape into lists of criteria and bar-charts. Fans of a man-made parkland stroll off with Simon Schama under their arms. Greens get angry about access, wilderness, diversity, native species. Voices pipe up (some in Irish) for community involvement, native culture and thatch (a great material). It's a heady mix, well reflected in the pages of The Second Landia II.

The attractions of a consciously man-made landscape, deliberately designed for both use and beauty, has great appeal at this time. We are spending billions and money changes landscape, as we see in the ribbon development along every country road. Perhaps, over large regions of the countryside, we should accept these suburban densities and aim for a highly-textured, richly-planted, intimate parkland full of romantic, leafy vistas and great stonework.

We might, as Finola O'Kane said at the last forum, have qualms about the 18th-century demesnes - "these landscapes of power and control" - but at least they were shaped to a confident vision and called on the right experts to carry it through. "If Carton isn't a definitively Irish landscape," commented Des Gunning of Crann, "I don't know what is.

The needs of "wild" Ireland, on the other hand, are so urgent and particular that they constitute almost a separate agenda. Roger Garland lets rip in The Second Landia II about the 60,000 hectares of mountain pasture, mostly in the west, that are now officially designated as degraded: much of the damage, as he fears, may well be irreversible, as the bog begins to wash and slip away.

The most powerful contribution, however, comes from Ray Monahan, a lecturer at the regional tech in Tralee and ardent student of the historical ecology of Irish native woodlands. He is specially concerned with the "forgotten" treasure of Ballyseedy Wood, where huge coppice oaks and alders, some eight metres in girth, may be some of the oldest native trees in Ireland.

Part of the wood is threatened by a proposed dual carriageway, and the process of defending it has brought out the astonishing fact that the few remaining fragments of our ancient woodland, a key to so much of our native diversity, have never been surveyed Scientifically. In Ballyseedy there are definitely trees worth bugging.