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IRELAND
The Irish landscape has often been compared to a bowl. A broad central limestone plain dotted by
lakes and peat bogs and drained by sluggish rivers is surrounded by coastal ranges of hills and
mountains. This upland barrier is only breached to any significant extent around the capital, Dublin.
The total land area is 32,000 square miles (26,600 in the Republic and 5,400 in Ulster). The
highest peaks, Lugnaquillia (926 metres) in the Wicklow Mountains south of the capital and
Carrantuohill (1,041 metres) in Kerry, are on a par with the tallest mountains in Wales and England
but well below many of the highest peaks in Scotland. In the west, the mountains thrust out long
fingers into the Atlantic Ocean, creating a series of deep bays between, many of them now flooded
river valleys. In the far south-west these rocky fingers are formed by parallel folds of sedimentary
old red sandstone, like parts of northern Scotland, but further north in Galway, Mayo and Donegal,
as well as in the Wicklow Mountains to the east, the rock is granite, the weathered remnants of
once-molten magma forced to the surface by ancient movements of the earth’s crust. On the eastern
coast, facing Britain, the coastline is more orderly, without the drama or the dangers of the
stormbound west.
As in the rest of the Isles, the landscape has been sculpted by ice. During the last glaciations,
the ice covered only the northern half, extending as far as a line between Limerick in the west and
Dublin in the east, but earlier Ice Ages enveloped the entire land in their frozen grip. The scouring
of the central lowland plateau created the bedrock upon which the great peat bogs later grew and
which, later still, provided the main supply of fuel for generations of rural households. The ice also
ground the limestone base into a powder which formed the most important element of Irish soil.
Without the glacial limestone powder to enrich it, the soil, made up of the weathering from older
rocks like quartzite, granite and shale, would be infertile and unproductive like so much of the
Scottish Highlands. But limestone gives it life, and thanks to this essential enrichment, and to the
high rainfall, Ireland has thrived on its green pastures. Without the limestone, Ireland would not be
the Emerald Isle, but the Brown.
On the ‘Irish History’ shelves of any high-street bookshop, the titles on display are dominated
by the political struggles of the last hundred years. Books abound on the Easter Rising of 1916,
alongside biographies of Michael Collins, Eamon de Valera and other heroes in the struggle for
independence from Britain. A struggle which continues to this day, as Republicans strive to unite
Ireland into the single nation it once was. As I write, in 2007, the intensity of the cycle of violence
and recrimination has all but disappeared. Earlier this year, in a political accord no one thought
possible even six months before, the leaders of Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party, the