A fine, glossy, sleek magazine type publication comes through the post, the contents simmering with argument. About many things: trees too many of them? Not enough of them? About our modern style of housing - Bungalow Bliss or Blight? About our style of farming - prairiesized fields since our advent into the EU as against our old fashioned, small mixed farming. Archaeology? A torrent of pleas. In short it's the report of the second National Landscape Forum held in May of last year, and, before the ink is dry, so to speak, there's another due in Maynooth, June 18th/19th.
Freda Rountree, Chairperson of The Heritage Council leads off with a good run over the ground. She points out that we have now a greater capacity than ever to destroy our landscape: farming methods, the growth of building, the growth of leisure pursuits.
But she feels that with our more educated population we can do something. We have to make the land better so that more rural people can live off it -- and even make it easier for urban dwellers to come back to the rural life. She wants pattern books of regional building styles - to promote a modern vernacular style. Get architects and artists interested. Heritage has to be instilled as almost a gospel.
Elsewhere in the publication are two telling quotes, "How will we know it's us without our past?" That's John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath. And from Estyn Evans: "Nothing less than the whole of the past is needed to explain the present, and in this difficult task we cannot afford to neglect the unrecorded past." With the recent digging up of part of Telltown in Meath, we have a lesson in lack of vigilance. Of course, compensation has to be given, argues Ms Rountree, where restrictions have been put on farmers, and she instances the banning of silage on the Burren.
There are about 30 other worthwhile contributions. Terry O'Regan of Landscape Alliance Ireland, Waterfall, Cork is the man behind it all. And if you've read through all the lively contributions, don't get an inferiority complex. In what used to be rather quiet parts of the French Mediterranean coast, there are fine examples of bungalow blight. But at least France doesn't seem to have the dreadful litter problem that is one of our more moronic characteristics, and about which not enough fuss is made.
(Except by tourists.)