Sounds of silence

The recent brief blast from the Arctic, such a misery further east, turned out quite differently on this side of the hill. Our western fringe of polar air brought only crispness and clarity, and the sun, up early, took all day to roll around Connemara.

By the time it reached Tully Mountain, just across the bay, I had given up untwining brambles from sapling trees, a winter chore. and was sprawled on a seat beside the pond, eyes closed in a trance of scarlet, like the people who crowd park benches in Stockholm to welcome the sun's return.

This has been quite the gloomiest winter in 20 years, with sombre gale after gale to keep us indoors. On the last shopping trip to Galway, I loitered thoughtfully beside a radiant "light box" on the counter of the health-food shop, tempted by this gismo against Seasonal Affective Disorder.

No doubt it works - you don't even have to spend time staring at it, just have it lit up somewhere in the room - but the real thing is irreplaceable. Even our Connemara pony, when we had one, used to bask head-on to a January sun, his long white lashes closed, one hoof lifted in bliss.

Part of basking is listening - or it is when you're anywhere close to silence. A real daytime silence is rare in today's world. I've known it only in the High Arctic, in fiords deeply muffled with snow: a stillness so intense and far-reaching you could hear your arteries pumping. What, then, at Thallabawn? Not, for once, the rumble of surf at the srutha (the sandy estuary where the mountain river tumbles into the waves): this is carried by a wind from the ocean, not one tucked away behind the hill. A few bird calls - raven, far off up the ridge, magpie nearer, chattering at a cat; a robin in the hedge.

And two tractors: so-and-so taking out a bale of silage; somebody else hauling sand. If they were gone, you could talk of silence: a living sort of silence full of small, natural sounds. But tractors - these, or others, or more besides, or lorries, cars or vans, or all together - are never quite gone.

Recently, revisiting The Way That I Went, I tried to imagine the countryside Praeger walked through in the first years of the century. Such quietude there must have been, after the train from Dublin chuffed away down the line!

Or was that all comparative, too? Perhaps horses and carts kicked up a terrible racket on stony roads. Perhaps the sound of one hand bashing in village smithies was quite nervewracking, and the countryside a cacophony of braying donkeys, crowing roosters, whinneying mares. In place of engine-powered machinery, there must have been a never-ending banging and clattering as things were made, or repaired, out of doors.

But sensibilities were different, then: noise was not an enemy. The sounds hadn't been invented which, partly because of their cultural resonance, are now so destructive of silence.

Every now and then in winter, a little team of racing bikers bring their machines to the strand on a Sunday afternoon to test them or tune them or whatever it is they do. The whine of engines as they speed along the tideline has a mile to travel, over sand and fields, before it reaches my ears. It is no louder and only subtly different in pitch from a neighbour's distant chain-saw or motormower, yet the effort not to be angered by it can almost bring me out in a sweat.

Sometimes it is, of course, sheer decibels that hurt (and I write as someone who likes Mahler at full belt on the stereo). Now and then we find ourselves, with neighbours, at a special occasion in a village pub, where the young routinely want their music as background. We can take about an hour of shouted attempts at conversation before fleeing, stunned and desperate, while everyone else is still nodding and smiling: how can they stand it? By now there must be millions of adults so conditioned by loud, non-stop noise, dawn to dusk, that rural silence, when it happens, would make them deeply uneasy. In the same way, the darkness of a country lane can terrify some city people who have never known a world without light: even their night sky glows unnaturally. The steady distancing from nature is affecting how people react when floods or terrible storms occur. They behave as if "something should be done about it" by some higher human authority, the county council, or whoever. There is, of course, a sense in which they're right, whole governments should be doing something to haul back on global warming - but this is not yet what most people mean.

My recent column on rising sea level, and its implications for our sand-dunes in particular, brought a copy of the discussion document for public input to a "national coastal zone management policy" now being devised by the Government.

It comes free from ENFO in Dublin and is meant to stimulate interested parties to put their reactions on paper and send them (by next Friday, February 6th) to the Coastal Zone Management Group at the Marine Institute, 80 Harcourt Street, Dublin 2. There'll be a public seminar on the whole thing in March.

Three departments are involved - Marine, Environment, and Heritage and Islands - but the basic policy study is the work of Brady Shipman Martin, the consultants. No less than 26 years ago, the same firm did a National Coastline Study for development and conservation, so we're moving on.

On coastal erosion, the new document is nothing if not realistic. "The coastal area is very dynamic and erosion is a natural and widespread process. For most of the coast, the present policy of accepting natural shoreline changes, and accommodating the problems they cause, is likely to be the most appropriate response." I wouldn't argue with that.