Worrying turn of events for local residents.

Some new insights into the extinction-threatened hen harrier have come to light in a study by a rural development group in Co Cork.

A plant, vilified by many for being invasive and allegedly causing damage to woodlands and the environment, is to be celebrated in a Co Tipperary community.

Tommy Barker visits a home which was designed for both comfort and views by its owners and their architect.

Coillte spends €450k a year cleaning up litter. We meet the contractor who’s out to bust the dumpers. Are bin charges to blame? asks Donal O’Keeffe

Gerard Sheehy found solace and a new sense of purpose in the mountains following the the death of his young daughter, says Dan MacCarthy.          .

The Irish Wildlife Trust has logged almost a dozen large wildfires since Tuesday, raging from the Blackstairs Mountains to the Beara Peninsula and from the Knockmealdowns to Killarney National Park, and says most occurred in special areas of conservation.

Jim Stack came across veteran architect Peter Legge, at the RIAI/Simon Open Door event in 2012, at a time when Legge & Associates’ reconstruction of two conjoined stacked stone cottages in Connemara, was causing enormous interest.

DONERAILE PARK WALK

BERE ISLAND WALK

Location: Clonmel

GLENBARROW LOOP ON THE SLIEVE BLOOM WAY, CO LAOIS

KILSHEELAN TO CARRICK-ON-SUIR

LISMORE, CO WATERFORD

Rose Martin profiles a 200-year-old home near Mitchelstown, Co Cork

VIEWS over the Bride Valley and a location with a panoramic sweep of the Galtees, Knockmealdowns, and Comeragh Mountains are some of the attractions of this Rathcormac house.

WHAT would one of the most fabled leaders of the 1920s Republican forces think of this country being baled out by the British?

THE red grouse, a relative of the pheasant and the farmyard hen, lives in bogs, where it feeds on the shoots of young heather.

YOU can see the wood and the trees, and a whole lot more at this high Austrian house, in a pure Irish setting.

YOU can go large, or go mór, at this Moorefield home near Tallow in west Waterford — it packs a lot of property in its punch.

IF you’re going to go for an estate purchase, then Tipperary is probably a good choice.

FORMER Irish Farmers’ Association (IFA) president Joe Rea died yesterday after a short illness.

TULLAGHMEELAN HOUSE was built 200 years ago as the rectory for the Knocklofty Estate, part of the demesne of the Donoughmore estate.

IT could be said, in historical terms, the fall of the Irish ascendancy marked the rise of another ruling class the Catholic church.

HOW appropriate that Bryan and Kerry 'Queen of the Jungle' McFadden are rumoured to being buying Cooleville in Co Tipperary.

By Rose Martin

HIGH up in the Drum Hills between Ardmore and Dungarvan, the Sheriff of Waterford, Richard Osborne, decided to build himself a farmhouse.