Natural World

Time, climate and the needs of the Irish have fashioned a magical island. Cast free when the ancient bridge from Britain sank, it still holds within its saucer of ice-scoured rocks the animals and plants that followed the retreat of the glaciers. There are Irish deer, Irish stoats and Irish mountain hares, but no snake ever came to trouble the people who cut the forests, fished and farmed. They invented a land of fairy tales, but there are real mysteries too: a strange meeting of the Arctic and the Mediterranean in a moonscape of white rock called the Burren; the unbroken ebb and flow of wildfowl from this mild winter haven; and the daunting sprawl of the bogs - unbeautiful to some, yet valuable to all, fragile wildernesses in a land wild with change.