The importance of charting the landscape

ANOTHER LIFE:SNOW CARVES NEW shapes against the sky, plucking peaks and ridges, whole successions of hills, out of a dark horizon. How could I have forgotten the great long whaleback of Corraun, or the way Nephin sits in the far northern distance, past Croagh Patrick, from right across Clew Bay? Not really forgotten, of course but freshly etched in white.

Mountains are the bones of Mayo's landscape, their slopes folding down into foothills and drumlins that helped to shape the map of human settlement, the bounds of local feeling. Tourists appreciate their unthreatening grandeur, the cosy embrace of uplands left wild and bare at the edges. For something like that, the "landscape appraisal" of the current Mayo development plan urged the county council to "encourage development that will not interrupt or penetrate distinct linear sections of primary ridge lines when viewed from areas of the public realm". Such deadening language was born of the demand to be precise, even scientific, about the qualities of landscape. Faced with the limited usefulness of aesthetics - those subjective products of class, education and culture - the world of official planning turned to more practical pigeonholes.

In 2000, the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government issued guidelines to local authorities on the preparation of Landscape Character Assessments (LCAs). These involved a method that "moves away from concepts such as sublime, beautiful, outstanding, etc as criteria or as a means of categorisation. These are the very categories which give rise to a view of the landscape which was unnecessarily restrictive, protectionist and conservationist."

What was wanted, the memo went on, was something more factual, "which will essentially describe the distinctnessof one landscape type from another and which will avoid an evaluation which tends to rank one landscape as betterthan another". The new approach would assess the landscape's geology and landcover - vegetation, settlements, water and so on - and then overlay its local "values": historical, cultural, religious and "other understandings of the landscape", whatever they proved to be.

After five years, a score of counties had completed LCAs of some sort, most using landscape consultants at a cost of up to €70,000. Few of these thought much of the Department's guidelines and no one in Ireland could offer them any special LCA training. A review for the Heritage Council in 2006 was highly critical of progress, quality and use of the LCAs - this at the height of the development boom.

With the fastest rate of urbanisation and landscape fragmentation in Europe, Ireland remained the only country without a national landscape strategy, despite signing the European Landscape Convention in 2002. Finally last year, egged on by the Heritage Council and Fáilte Ireland, Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government John Gormley announced the first steps towards the long-sought national vision - even, it is hoped, towards a national map - of landscape management. All this will feed in to the big Irish landscape conference the Heritage Council will stage in Tullamore, Co Offaly, next autumn.

Does it matter so much now, when the money has dried up and most of the builders gone home? There are still roads to be built, forests planted (perhaps), pylons erected, wind-turbines set in a row. County councillors will still want development - Mayo's, in particular, will continue to fight the Minister on one-off rural housing.

Meanwhile, we have a breathing space for considering the countryside, what's left of it, and how it should respond to change. And while "landscape" does suggest the eagle's sweeping vista, what matters quite as much to belonging, ownership, identity, sense of place, and so forth, can often be the local detail of field-walls, hedgerows, chimney-stacks, gable-ends, a turn in the road, the tree behind the school.

A new means for such appreciation has come from Terry O'Regan, the Cork activist who was first to call for a national landscape policy in 1994. He founded Landscape Alliance Ireland, a small but dogged NGO pursuing landscape quality. To help inspire awareness and action in local community groups, he has produced A Guide to Undertaking a Landscape Circle Study in Seven Easy Steps. It is intended to help "all those who would wish to recapture their 'runaway landscapes'" by selecting a circle of local territory, studying its history and evolution, its good and bad points, and deciding how to influence its future management. A one-kilometre radius in town, perhaps five-kilometre in the country, could provide enough work for a year. Why a circle? It's the scale at which communities work best, says O'Regan, that of the village.

The guide, a well-produced and illustrated little book, costs €12 (including post and packaging) from Landscape Alliance, Old Abbey Gardens, Waterfall, near Cork City. Website: www.landscape-forum-ireland.com.

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