The big wind

For a whole morning after the first big storm the hillside was a Christmas-card period-piece: Victorian, ochre-tinted sheep knee-deep in blue-white pastures; each twig in the hedge with its own, fluffy halo of snow; Muilrea, the Twelve Bens, the islands, all finely engraved in white on a purple sky.

The visitors over at the mountain, hardy types, were thrilled at the whole adventure. First a memorably great wind had snatched the breath from their lungs and tried to whirl them away across the strand like tumbleweed. Then came supper by gaslight and candles, the whole cottage shuddering and rumbling. And then, at morning, the children waking to a fairyland of snow. It depended, of course, on how many slates you'd lost, how long the power was out, how well the old barn stood up to it. For those of us bonded to the ocean's edge, not just for this winter but all those to come, the acceleration of winds can only seem ominous. I keep thinking of Annie Proulx's haunting Newfoundland novel, The Shipping News: gaunt houses on wind-shorn peninsulas, long winters of oilskins and anomie.

In a pause between the storms I splashed out across the duach, hoping for snow buntings, a gyrfalcon, a snowy owl - some sort of acknowledgment of what was happening. But nature insisted on business as usual: a dozen swans up-ending like pointy icebergs in the lake; choughs rummaging for insects among the drifts of sheepdroppings. On the strand, little flocks of waders kept their heads down, one eye on a pair of merlins hunting in tandem along the dunes.

Mere storms do little directly to change the ways of wildlife. They may, however, modify some habitats and introduce new ones. The winds combed the marram grass on the dunes all the one way and took 1,000 chisels to the seaward face of sand. As the sea level rises and the tides are forced in by storm surges, as rain-floods lie longer to mingle with them, the low shoreline below me has all the makings of a salt-marsh: the ducks and the swans won't mind.

What would be missed from the west, in terms of diversity, are trees and hedgerows: imagine leafy Westport as bleak as Belmullet. Left to nature, this might take a century or so, as a new regime of storms and the winter blast of salt winnow out the region's vegetation.

But for trees of any stately size to disappear from our roadsides, or near houses, could happen in mere decades, if enough people panic and cut them down, or local authorities do it for them. As it is, a rash of "lopping and topping" will follow this winter's storms, leaving a host of mutilated beeches, ashes and sycamores.

To be concerned about the shape of trees when people are being killed in accidents may seem insensitive or perverse. But keeping trees beautiful as well as safe is not difficult: it just needs some knowledge of how they grow and how to prune them when they need it. Local authorities should have tree surgeons on rolling contracts, tending older trees where it matters and spotting the young hedgerow saplings worth protecting from the slashing machine.

I have to recant somewhat on the matter of ivy, much maligned, and agree that letting great tods of its leaves and berries take over the crowns of mature trees can put these at serious risk. The one casualty of the storms on our acre was an evergreen olearia, a shrub with ivy-sized leaves that had grown, untrimmed, into a four-metre tree. While all our young and bare-twigged broadleaves were able to shrug off the wind and even the conifers just bowed and sifted it out through their needles, the great green dome of the olearia was slowly levered out of the soil.

The aerodynamics of western roofs may also need some rethinking, now that so many new bungalows have started the year with first-aid patches held down with planks and ropes.

We have two roofs, abutting each other. One is a hip roof: a smooth pyramid of slates which gives the wind no purchase; the other, the pitched roof on the old house, has traditional "barges" of cement at each gable, sealing in the edge of the slates. Today's smart and suburban designs dispense with barges, relying instead on clips and extra nails to give a streamlined, but ultimately vulnerable, rim to the roof.

Better still might be the Ecohouse sketched in a Christmas letter from friends who have been living in a small and isolated farmhouse tucked into a hillside in Donegal. They are designing a new home for an old age in one of the several Eco-villages planned for Ireland by organically-minded groups.

They are building a scale model of it on the kitchen table: a domed and semi-sunken "snail house" coiled around a central fire-stack. The walls will be made of cob, a mix of earth, gravel and straw that was widely used in Ireland before industrially produced building materials took over. Away from the rocky regions of the island, and especially in the south-east on land of sticky glacial till, walls were made with a mixture of wet clay and rushes, built up without any mould or support and trimmed with a spade. Thousands of these mud-walled houses and barns survive, their original substance often hidden by rendering and paint. I imagine a snailhouse made of cob as warm, very quiet and peaceful, even - perhaps especially - in a storm.

For those who prefer a traditional house of stone, with barges, I must recommend a splendid new book by Patrick McAfee, whose manual on stone-walling I was praising here a few months ago. The new book, Stone Buildings (O'Brien, £19), is a good browse for its own sake, but for anyone involved with conserving or restoring an old vernacular farmhouse or a small-town terrace house, it is absolutely essential. Along with help on the masonry, there are the arguments for not stripping stone buildings down to the bone and pointing all their crevices, but, instead, using hot lime mortars, dashes and renderings - even limewash, in colours that look right for Ireland.