Environmental Resources Analysis Ltd. Natural Resources Development Centre.
Trinity College Dublin.
1. THE NOTION OF HERITAGE
Heritage is a word whose meaning has become greatly enlarged and enriched in popular understanding in recent years. Twenty five years ago it would have meant cultural heritage. But at its root, the word ‘heritage’ means all that we have inherited from our past: everything of value, including that complex and involved web of things and values that constitutes our culture.
In the sense of this meaning of the word, the most fundamental component of our heritage is the landscape itself, which was created through the cumulative impact of successive human communities on the natural landscape, drawing upon the diverse and rich resources of that God-given inheritance to support them, over a period of several thousands of years at least.
The landscape is often, and very aptly, compared to a palimpsest — a parchment or paper which has been re-used, but on which traces of earlier inscriptions can be seen underneath the obvious recent writing at the surface. The landscape is a palimpsest of human history, because each generation has left its mark upon its receptive surface, for better of worse. The most obvious inscription is that which results from the uses and structures of modern production, settlement and communications. But underneath are elements from many phases and aspects of the human past, side by side with elements of the older underlying physical and biological heritage.
The common landscape is an enormous reserve not only of material resources, but of educational, recreational, scientific and spiritual resources, some aspects of which are reasonably well-known and documented, others less so. But the heritage of the landscape not only nourishes and supports our physical well-being: much of our sense of identity, our sense of place and belonging, is rooted in our relationship with a particular local landscape. Our Own Place is a part of what we are:
“Every feature of the landscape, everything that we see, hear, smell and feel, enters not into the body only but into the soul, and helps to shape and colour it.”
W. H. Hudson
2. THE SCOPE OF ENVIRONMENTAL HERITAGE
The first chapter in the environmental history of an area is the story in the rocks, which tells of the beginnings of the landscape, a story often as fascinating, as exciting as the most thrilling episodes in our human history — but seldom as well told as the human story for those of us who are not familiar with the special language of geology.
Geology is no longer the preserve of the specialist alone: the stone documents in which the story can be read — by anybody who learns to decipher the language in which they are written — are often among the most dramatic facets of the heritage of the landscape — and nowhere in Europe is it more dramatic than here in Antrim. Here in this corner of Ireland we can read one of the most fascinating chapters in the geological history of Europe in a way it can be read nowhere else in these islands. The geology of Antrim is one of its greatest environmental attractions, and one which we have so far only begun to develop and exploit.
The second chapter is the story of the Ice Age and its aftermath. It is, again, a story of great power and fascination, and a story that, with proper interpretation, can be read by anybody from the abundant evidence it has left behind in the landscape itself. As with geology, the details of the story are peculiar to each region, and in some areas the evidence and the story it unfolds are clearer and more dramatic than in other areas. Two aspects of the Antrim story are particularly important from the perspective of environmental heritage: first, the raised beaches which were formed as the land rose following the removal of its burden of glacial ice, and which were to be so important archaeological reasons; and second the great end moraine of the Scottish glacial re-advance at the very end of the Ice Age. This extends from the south-west slopes of Knocklayd past Armoy towards Ballymoney, which diverted the course of the Bush and Breckagh Rivers into their present courses. Each of these first two chapters in the environmental history of Antrim merits a book to itself.
Geology and the Ice Age may not seem to be areas which are the normal concern of an historical society; we might perhaps consider them to be more in the nature of “honorary subjects”. In actual fact there are very close connections between geology and the more traditional concerns of an historical society. Not only does geology provide the fundamental resources whose development and exploitation are what history is all about — soils, building stone, mineral resources — but there are often unexpected and important connections. To mention just one example, glacial erratics stranded by the melting ice in a different part of the country to their place of origin were often singled out as important focal points in prehistory and folklore, and in many parts of the country granite erratics were the stone preferred for the manufacture of bullauns in Early Christian times. All three of our surviving La Tene sculptured pillars are carved from erratics of granite.
3. THE LEGACY OF THE FIRST PEOPLES
After the Ice Age plant and animal life returned to the land as the climate worked its way, with some hiccups, to the climatic optimum of 5000 B.C., the first Mesolithic communities had established themselves along the coast and around the shores of Lough Neagh long before this of course — and incidentally this first chapter of the human story is more clearly told in the Antrim landscape than anywhere else in the country, although it has to be said that Antrim has now lost its claim to be just about the only part of Ireland where there was significant settlement in the Mesolithic. In this regard I cannot refrain from quoting a delightful verse from the pen of the late Tom Delaney which Peter Woodman quoted in his inaugural lecture in the Chair of Archaeology at University College Cork a few years ago:
Keep your hands off our Bann Flakes and Scrapers,
It’s the flint that we Northerners own.
It shall never belong to Free Staters,
Who must use an inferior stone.
Mesolithic man had little impact on the landscape. He was a hunter, fisher, gatherer, without permanent settlements. But 5,000 years or so ago the first farming people arrived, and slowly the landscape changed. The central theme in the 5000 years of history since the dawn of agriculture in the Neolithic has been the winning of as much land as possible from the wild, and its conversion to agriculturally productive land; what history is all about is winning control over this productive land and the wealth that comes with it. History is the story of different peoples one after the other seeking control of productive land and the wealth it brings.
Because of this, little of the natural landscape in which people lived for the first half of Irish history survive. Only tiny fragments of semi-natural landscape still remain to us, the only places where we can appreciate something of what Ireland was like in the beginning. These are a uniquely important part of environmental heritage.
Little survived in the way of obvious material remains from the earlier chapters of the human story, and the further back you go the less there is — but something always remains. We have already used the analogy of the landscape as palimpsest. Today for the first time in history there is a real awareness right across the community that the fragments from the human past, the jetsam of history, are an important part of the heritage of the whole community, and that there is urgent need to protect and preserve it.
4. A NEW PERCEPTION OF ENVIRONMENT
Just as landscape changes, so do the people who live in it. Today, in spite of all our difficulties, we are materially better off and more secure, we are better educated. We have a different outlook. We are able to see values which our grandmothers and grandfathers, who had more immediate priorities usually, could not always see and could not always afford to look out for.
For a long time heritage was regarded as a special interest which only a privileged elite had the time or opportunity to study, appreciate and enjoy. Until quite recently it was simply regarded as the innocent hobby or pastime of people who were interested enough in history or archaeology or buildings or natural history to spend their Sundays and holidays on these things while ordinary people went to football matches or the pub or watched television. Environmental heritage was the prerogative of people — older people as a rule — who enjoyed looking into the past, and the material and cultural legacy of the past — whether that meant folklore, or music, or archaeological or architectural remains: people who join societies like the National Trust or An Taisce, or the Glens of Antrim Historical Society.
For most of us of course, those who are not among the privileged few who are specialists and paid to do such things, these are spare time or retirement activities, which are separate from and have no real bearing on the activities of everyday, real, normal life, the things we do for a living. And indeed it has to be said that much of what goes by the name of heritage, and particularly environmental heritage, has been steadily eroded by those everyday activities by which we live and earn our daily bread, usually through lack of awareness of their meaning, of their real value.
But today the environment has come to be seen as the concern of all of us, and its preservation and conservation is something that matters to everybody — to an extent at least. Most people would now accept that our physical and material well-being depend on keeping our water, air and soil free from pollution, and that legislation to protect that common environmental heritage is necessary and in the interest of all. Few people would have the same feeling of urgency when it comes to the preservation and protection of the natural and cultural heritage of the common landscape because our material well-being is not obviously affected in the same way if a ring-fort or a patch of species-rich fen is destroyed.
But in the immediate future, the material well-being of rural Ireland may come to depend in a new way on our maintaining not only the cleanliness but the diversity of the traditional Irish landscape.
5. A NEW DIRECTION IN FARMING
Change is the very nature of landscape; the story in the rocks tells of other worlds which have long disappeared, and all around us is the chilling evidence of an Ice Age so recent on the scale of geological time it feels like yesterday. Since the first farming communities settled here five thousand years ago, the landscape has changed beyond all recognition. The landscape will never stop changing — but many of us are perhaps too close to the land to see the long-term trends in what is happening: When Frank Convery, Professor of Environmental Science at University College Dublin, went across the Baarn a few years ago to be presented, as a representative of the people of Ireland, with 35 acres of Irish bog bought for conservation by the people of the Netherlands, he made a statement which must have seemed to any farmer who might have read it at the time a long way removed from reality:
The future of Ireland depends to a dramatic extent on maintaining a high quality environment, with bogland conservation becoming the cornerstone of a whole new economic philosophy.
The reality is the fact that much of Irish agriculture, especially on marginal land, is inefficient in the context of over-production within the Community as a whole. The pressure to move areas of land out of production will increase — and although we will undoubtedly fight long and hard to slow down the changes which will follow the shifting emphasis of the Common Agricultural Policy, change is inevitable, and further change is on the way. There is already considerable emphasis on the cleanliness of the Irish environment, and on the traditional nature of the Irish farm landscape, in the marketing of Irish agricultural produce in Europe. This is the major advantage which Irish farm produce has in European markets, and this can only increase in importance as the years go by.
The need for alternative farm enterprises is being felt by an increasing number of people on the land, and there is a growing awareness on the farm that environmental heritage of the rural landscape among the farming community, and of the central role farming history has played in its development. There is a desire to understand this farming heritage better, and a concern to preserve it within a framework of profitable farming. And there is a new and increasingly widespread interest in learning how to explore the possibilities of farm-based tourism within that framework.
6. ENVIRONMENTAL HERITAGE AS A RESOURCE
Tourism has rightly been described as the outstanding economic and social phenomenon of the modern world. It is also one of the few areas in rural Ireland where there are real opportunities for wealth and job creation which can be generated from the intrinsic resources of the local area itself.
Over these last years there has been a change in the attitudes and expectations of visitors which has not always been perceived and seldom catered for, and is a major reason for our not having the share of the market we should have.
There is a great increase in the number of people whose main reason for coming to Ireland has something to do with the unique character of the Irish landscape: this diverse, traditional patchwork landscape which is so different from most of Europe.
Most visitors now want more from their holiday surroundings than good accommodation or simple scenery. They would like to be in a position to appreciate and understand something of the detail of the natural and the material human heritage of the landscape in which they have chosen to spend these few precious weeks of their year. But here in Ireland we have up to now failed to understand, interpret and exploit adequately the environmental heritage resources which constitute the main attraction of Ireland for so many visitors. We cannot guarantee the weather, we do not have the artistic or architectural treasures of other countries, and our culinary achievements on their own will attract few visitors from overseas. Our greatest treasure is the heritage of the landscape itself, in its many aspects and in all its multi-faceted detail.
One of the most important points to stress is that this applies not only to the traditional tourist centres and focal points like Killarney and the Giant’s Causeway. Every part of the rural landscape has a wealth of environmental heritage resources which could be developed for tourism, and indeed many people prefer to spend a few weeks in a quiet part of the country whose environmental heritage resources have not up to now been exploited for tourism. Every part of the country has a unique combination of special interest resources. They need to be properly and systematically documented for each area, and their visitor attraction potential assessed. Much of the interest resides in the local detail, which has never been adequately surveyed and documented. Special interest no longer carries the implication that these interests are minority interests; because there has been such a change in the general educational background of society, these many aspects of environmental heritage are now of real interest to a majority of visitors.
There is an increasing number of people who want to find their own way, to be away from the crowd with just their family or friends for more of the time, to feel they are explorers and discoverers, to experience the sort of Ireland which is, significantly, being used to market Irish farm produce on European television. This section of the changing market can best be exploited by a more dispersed type of tourism, where people feel they are visitors and guests rather than just tourists, and it is in this new context that the growing interest in farm-based tourism or agri-tourism can really come into its own.
Farm-based tourism is a branch of the tourist market which has scarcely been explored or exploited in Ireland. But to exploit its full potential, there is first of all the need to develop an organised grouping of farm-based and farm fringe rural holiday centres, whose particular local environmental heritage resources are professionally and adequately documented, presented and marketed. Many areas, of course, already have the framework for such an organised grouping.
7. A NEW MODEL: ENVIRONMENTAL HERITAGE AS A TOOL IN RURAL DEVELOPMENT
To capitalise on the opportunity which presents itself, an entirely new model for farm tourism is needed. This would have four main components:
First of all, the environmental heritage resources of the locality need to be documented systematically and in detail. This survey needs to encompass the entire spectrum of environmental heritage, including geology, natural history, archaeology and history, architecture, folklore, genealogy and folk-life. Although excellent survey work has been carried out in many of these aspects on a regional basis, much more local information is required for the present model, and data from all the different disciplines need to be integrated.
The detailed, integrated environmental heritage database which this survey produces needs to be assessed, distilled and interpreted for the particular purposes of rural tourism, though it has other obvious uses as well, especially in the context of environmental planning and conservation. This interpretation phase will combine the latest in computer-based technology with the best traditional techniques.
The organisation of a network of farm-based and other rural accommodation centres to allow maximum participation by farmers. In many areas there is already a framework which can take on this function. The nerve centre of such a network would be the regional environmental heritage centre which would operate a centralised booking service for the network, and which would have the latest techniques in data interpretation and display.
Training of people on participating farms in the interpretation, documentation and use of environmental heritage resources as an alternative enterprise on the farm. This training in environmental heritage interpretation and use should be looked on in just the same way as courses in other aspects of farming. What we are advocating is not just an extension of the traditional B & B type of activity in a rural setting, seen as something separate from farming, but the use of rural-based tourism as a genuine part of normal Irish farming.
The model outlined above is about to be implemented as a three-year programme in the south-east region of the Republic (Counties Wexford, Waterford, South Tipperary, Carlow and Kilkenny) to be carried out by the Natural Resources Development Centre at Trinity College Dublin. The first year will be largely taken up with the development of the software for the heritage database with funding from the European Space Agency. It is intended that this will be followed in 1990 by a training course for course leaders who will then be involved in a series of local programmes which will centre on the four elements outlined above. These local courses will probably take place mainly in the south-east itself, but it is likely that other areas, such as Donegal, will also be participating.
The number of counties in Ireland which can lay claim to an environmental heritage as rich as County Antrim is very few indeed, and there are few counties where there is such a clear and growing appreciation of the potential of heritage tourism. Few areas would benefit more from the implementation of a programme of the kind outlined here, and it is to be hoped that it will not be long before the initiatives to carry out such a programme are taken.