WANDERING WEEDS
Eco-investigator and New Jersey native, Alissa MacMillan, seeks to find answers to your everyday questions about tough decisions we all face, when acting in the best interests for the environment. A freelance writer and philosophy lecturer, Alissa is a former features reporter for the New York Daily News and has been living in County Limerick for eight years. Your queries on all matters environmental, are welcome. This week, she focuses on:
Q: I remember walking the fields with my grandmother years ago and how she would never cut a hawthorn tree. This made me think about how some of our old traditions and superstitions, like not damaging fairy forts, would be beneficial for the environment today. Is there a way to integrate them back into our lives?
A: Ireland has “quite the storied landscape,” says Dr Nessa Cronin, Cork-native and Assistant Professor of Irish Studies at the School of Geography, Archaeology, and Irish Studies at the University of Galway, who I contacted for her thoughts on your inspiring and hopeful question.
Historically, “there is a very long tradition in Ireland of connection between people and place,” Cronin says, “but also the importance of places of high importance, inaugural kinships sites, or sacred landscapes.” This connection between communities and landscape, even to unseen forces, is found in archaeological and manuscript records from very early settlements and is alive in poetry and language, Cronin notes, illustrated well with Ogham, the early medieval Irish alphabet, which is often thought of as being a “tree alphabet,” with some of the letters originally linked to native Irish tree species.
Even now, “We can look to music, literature and poetry, and how writers today are continuing a tradition of acknowledging that connection we have with place and culture.”
Cronin points to three main periods: the pre-Christian, Christian and more contemporary moment, after Ireland joined the EU.
The most ancient of folklore and tales are “part of our tacit knowledge,” says Cronin, every child learning about Finn McCool and the Children of Lir, “stories that are thousands of years old, it’s like they just happened yesterday.” These are also stories that are “interconnected with the landscape… that’s what Ireland was, it was trees, woods, bogs, lakes.” It’s also important, Cronin notes, that “there is still a resonance.”
FAIRY FORTS
Many early practices were taken up and repackaged by Christianity, resulting in “a blend of the pre-Christian and Christian.” For example, “many holy wells in Ireland would have been pre-Christian wells where people got water and health benefits or they were associated with pagan gods or goddesses from the Celtic world.” With the arrival of Christianity, wells were appropriated because they were seen as a threat. We still see remnants of pre-Christian practices, like tying knots on trees, Cronin says.
Other practices, like cutting rushes on the first of February, were also part of a pre-Christian spring ritual, different types of St. Brigid’s crosses found across the country, and the shamrock was linked to the holy trinity.
While fairy forts are always seen as positive, “sometimes they’re not,” Cronin says, “fairies can do dark things.” As can people. Many “talk about fairy forts and rings forts as archaeological heritages, that they have been maintained often due to superstition or associations with the fairy or ‘ otherworld,’ and are not to be disturbed,” says Cronin, and they have evidence of this from archaeological records.
But, “on the other side, we are very good at destroying them,” especially since the 1960s and during the Celtic Tiger, Cronin notes, because of modern development, “some of it intentional, some unintentional, sometimes just clearing scrub land.” The road through the TaraSkyrne valley and complex in Meath, for example, “was like putting a motorway through Stonehenge,” she says.
The “shorter history,” one of the last 900 years, is the colonial context, Cronin explains, where “the Irish landscape was radically changed particularly from the Elizabethan era with deforestation, intensive agriculture, plantations and, over time, from the late 15th to early 16th centuries on, it’s the landscape we have inherited and what has largely formed our current geopolitics.”
‘MORE EARTH-AWARE MINDSET’
As for the third period, the era of Ireland in the European community, “ironically it’s shifting back to a bit more of what we see of the traditional model in tandem with the hyper-industrial model,” explains Cronin.
“A lot of tradition is coming back, some driven by policy by the EU, like not cutting hedgerows and having metre wide space on either side, allowing for biodiversity, not maximizing productivity of land, protecting bogs.” Farmers are becoming ambassadors for biodiversity, “letting fields lie more fallow like we used to, not extracting everything out of it.”
Other aspects of history can get in the way of a more earth-aware mindset. The bog is an iconic element of the Irish landscape, a traditional source of heat that people are reluctant to relinquish, as are cattle, with a long pre-Christian history. “We have largely been a cattle culture, the cow was your prized possession,” now turning into maximizing profit.
While there is a long way to go, there’s exciting movement back to a consciousness of the land. The Burrenbeo Trust (burrenbeo.ie), for example, works with local farmers and the community and has resuscitated a once-dying Burren. “Hare’s Corner,” a new scheme for Galway, Mayo and Roscommon, calls for a section of the field to be left to lie fallow, as a biodiversity pocket. “That is incorporating a very traditional Irish farming way into contemporary farming practices,” Cronin says.
She suggests checking out work from Irish nature writer Manchán Magan, to learn more about these interconnections, as they can be valuable resources for environmental awareness.
“A lot of the Irish students already have the relationship with natural world and are not conscious of it,” says Cronin, a knowledge that might foster a more reflective and kind relationship with the land.