Sheep-scorched hills where no birds sing

THE lake islands of Connacht are borrowed from another landscape, another time: mysterious, miniature Edens heaped with trees. Once, as crannogs. they were refuges for people. Now, amid bare bogs, they give sanctuary to native oaks, yews, rowans, birches, hollies, all crowding densely together in dark castles of leaves.

Nowhere is the contrast more striking than at Lough Tawnyard, tucked away in the Glenummera valley between Bengorm and the Sheeffry Mountains. If the lake is more visible lately, it is because Coillte has been clear-felling the plantation immediately beside it and clearing away the hundreds of wind-thrown, dying spruce that litter this lovely valley.

Thus, Tawnyard and its twin islands are surrounded by two levels of devastation: the slopes of clear-felled debris from a misplaced conifer forest and, towering bare and bright above them, the uplands of overgrazed mountain.

Zig-zagging past the roots of toppled spruce comes Stage 3 of the Western Way, leading its walkers bravely ahead from Leenane to Drummin (five hours).

At the top of Tawnyard bill there are ravishing views, back across the silver lake to the Devil's Mother and Maumtrasna, and onwards toward Croagh Patrick. Ireland's distant views and cloudscapes, having little to do with man, are still inspinng: it is the detail that sometimes deadens the heart.

At Sheeffry Bridge, in the next valley, one can take an alternative route to Drummin (an extra couple of hours) by turning left and climbing out of the cirque to visit Lugacolliwee, a high lake in the corrie at the far side of the ridge. I went this way, on one of the recent brilliant days, in company with an amiable bunch of teenagers and their teachers.

The youngsters were a mixed party, not only co-ed but Irish and German (rural Louisburgh and suburban Kiel), and the idea was to wake them up a bit to the natural world. They'd already had a hopeful spiel from me about bogs and their fragile ecosystems. Do notice, I beseeched them, as we paused for a breather half-way up the hill, what is happening to the land and the vegetation under your feet.

This was before they all flocked ahead, out of reach, absorbed in their own agendas for the day. The fact that, during the whole journey over the hill, we saw not a single bird and heard not a single note of song this in a landscape that should have been trilling with larks and pipits was undoubtedly lost on them, anything softer than a 10-amp disco not really engaging their interest.

What they couldn't miss, however, was the desert of overgrazed bog that awaited us beyond the lake peat land bare as a parade ground, pierced by single, green blades of moorgrass a hand's breadth or more apart. The blades were new growth, tempted up by the weeks of sun: one sheep would mow a whole acre inside an hour.

There are some four kilometres of this, stretched around the north-eastern slopes of the Sheeffrys, and if the sheep are let up again from their brief lowland idyll for lambing I do not see how they. or the open hillside, will survive. A swat be of new forestry above it, which one might once have regretted, now seems a positive sanctuary for wildlife the last cover, for the moment, in which pipits might nest or a hare find heather for its form.

The Western Way, too, diverts across a stile into new Coillte planting, where whips of birch and larch promise a cosmetic fringe beside the path. One tries to appreciate the intention, and not to notice how the fertiliser, draining away into the nearest stream, has streaked the blonde, dead moorgrass with a lurid and astonishing shade of green.

For a somewhat less cranky account of the Western Way all of it, from Maum Bridge in Connemara, through Mayo to the Sligo border you should go to Michael Fewer's excellent Way-Marked Trails of Ireland. He, at least, sitting alone at the stony lakeside of Lugacolliwee, was entertained by the sweet song of sleek wheat-ears perched on nearby rocks, and the antics of a pair of lemon-coloured wagtails at the water's edge".

In the current season's crop of guidebooks from Gill and Macmillan, the same author offers Irish Waterside talks (£8). Given the general lack of foot paths in the Irish countryside, let alone of any. effort to maintain them, a desire to walk beside water - whether along a river or around a lake - is often quite hard to fulfil. In sorting out almost 60 walks, Mr. Fewer, a Dublin architect has coped with much frustration sometimes driving halfway across Ireland to set out on a walk that came to a halt within minutes due to the roughness of terrain - or one might thank him especially, for this - "doubts regarding access".

He also did his readers the kindness of exploring his routes in summer, when the growth of nettles, brambles, giant hogweed and the rest can be most troublesome. Preferring, sensibly, the magical times of early morning and late evening, he was rewarded by encounters with kingfishers, dippers and herons and many more meetings with otters than with mink, much to his pleasure.

There's a huge variety of waterside walks in Ireland, from the ferny Victorian waterfalls of the Glenariff Forest Park, say, in Antrim, to the swollen, peaty flow of the Gweebarra in Donegal or the grandly wooded curves of the Blackwater below Fermoy in Co Cork. The book includes lakes and canals, and western spectaculars like the green road along the Galway shore of Killary Harbour.

BEST Irish Walks (£9) is a second edition of the hillwalking guide edited by Joss Lynam, with maps amended to take account of the new 1: 50,000 Ordnance Survey. There are 76 different routes, most of them conveniently circular. Cycle Touring Ireland (£7) is another reissue, up-dating Brendan Walsh's guide with new maps and information on hostels and other accommodation.