Monday, July 21, 2008
IRELAND has more than 6,000 lakes and, according to author John Dunne, we don’t appreciate them. They are, he thinks, a neglected part of our heritage.
In Lakeshore Loops, Exploring Ireland’s Lakes, Dunne describes the 28 water bodies which have surface areas exceeding 7.5 km² and gives an account of their history and folklore. His focus is an unusual one: that of the cycling tourist. It’s a timely offering. As the recession deepens, more of us will holiday at home and bicycles may stage a comeback. This should help to reduce those carbon emissions — every cloud has a silver lining.
From a cycling perspective, Lough Neagh, which is west of Belfast, is the most accessible of our lakes. Its 206km circuit is well sign-posted and the tourist infrastructure is good. Nor can many lakes compare with Neagh for folklore and myths. Its waters are the urine of a magical horse on which a legendary figure, Eochaidh, abducted his father’s wife. But that can’t be true; every schoolchild knows that Fionn Mac Cumhaill created the lake when he seized a great lump of earth to hurl at a Scottish giant. The Isle of Man is all that remains of the missile.
Six thousand years ago, Ireland’s earliest settlers lived along Neagh’s shores. They probably came for the fishing. It’s still an important industry — Neagh has Europe’s largest eel fishery and the pollan, a whitefish, is also caught. This relict of the last Ice Age is found in four Irish lakes and nowhere else in Europe.
Neagh’s modern owners, bearers of the Shaftesbury title, are said to be cursed. One ancestor died in a fight at Eton, another committed suicide, while a third was murdered in the Alps in 2005. The former prime minister of Northern Ireland, Terence O’Neill, was no friend to the lake; he thought that the largest expanse of fresh water in Ireland and Britain should be filled in to form a new county to be known as Neagh.
Loughs Allen, Ree and Derg are justly famous but the Shannon also flows through 12 other lakes. According to Dunne, the great river once had two mouths. It emptied into the sea between Clare and Kerry, but there was another exit at Ballyshannon. Ptolemy included the Shannon on his map 2,000 years ago.
Lough Melvin, located in Leitrim and Fermanagh, and of great interest to naturalists and anglers, is seldom visited by ‘normal’ tourists. Perhaps it should be: Dunne rates it in his top three cycling circuits. It holds three varieties of trout, which are so distinct from each other that they don’t interbreed. Reproductive isolation is a criterion of ‘separate species’ status, so classifying the gillaroo, sonaghan and ferox is a zoological conundrum.
Dunne acknowledges that he is neither a naturalist not an angler. This well-researched book is essentially a travel guide but a very interesting one, especially for its wealth of history and folklore.
Dubliners will benefit from another new publication. Travel writer Muriel Bolger’s Dublin’s Magical Museums, the Old and Not So Old, complements her two previous pocket guides, Darting About and Statues & Stories.
Museums, she tells us, are not necessarily enduring entities; Dublin’s Civic Museum and the Heraldic Museum disappeared recently, while a collapsed stairway will keep the Natural History Museum closed for several years.
There are, however, 31 museums open to the public in Dublin at present. These vary from the great Chester Beatty and National Museums to the Freemasons’ Hall and the Lambert Puppet Museum. Among the more unusual institutions is Ye Olde Hurdy Museum of Vintage Radios, which is located in a Martello tower at Howth. Marconi, one of the fathers of wireless, carried out experiments from the tower in the early 1900s.
The James Joyce Museum is also in a Martello, the one at Sandycove, which was the setting for the opening of Ulysses. The Records Tower of Dublin Castle, which dates from 1205, houses the Garda Museum.
* Lakeshore Loops, Exploring Ireland’s Lakes by John Dunne is published by Liberties Press, €14.99.
* Dublin’s Magical Museums, the Old and Not So Old by Muriel Bolger is published by Ashfield Press, €10.99.
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