Landscape shaped by the potato

PEOPLE who grow potatoes are proudly taking note these days as strong stalks signal a healthy crop of "earlies’’.

But our love affair with the modest spud is losing some of its passion.

In what some might regard as a sort of national betrayal of what was once a staple food of generations, the consumption of potatoes in Ireland has dropped by 25% in the last decade, according to the latest surveys.

Few foods have had such an effect on the Irish diet and countryside, where we can still see traces of the potato ridges, or unjustly named ‘’lazy beds’’, that have formed an imprint in fields, perhaps since Famine times.

Originating in Peru, the potato was originally cultivated in the gardens of the gentry before the plain people copped on to its value. By 1750, it formed a big part of the subsistence fare of labourers and small farmers throughout Ireland.

An acre of land could yield six tonnes, enough for a family which ate four tonnes and used the remainder to feed their animals. As the population grew rapidly, land had to be found to grow food and a lot of marginal land was used for potatoes.

In that lovely book, Secrets of Irish Landscape, Eanna Ní Lamhna, writes about the impact of the potato on that landscape and argues that it was the potato, and not Cromwell, which caused the population shift to Connacht between 1770 and 1840. It was only during this period the west of Ireland was first settled and the high marginal land cultivated, she adds.

“The soaring population changed the appearance of the landscape,’’ she goes on. “There was huge road expansion — in Mayo alone, 320km of new road was constructed between 1835 and 1845, and where roads went, settlement followed.” More and more land was cultivated, boglands were cut to provide fuel and huge amounts of trees were cut down, except those in the large estates. Thatched mud cabins needed 24-hour fires to prevent disintegration through dampness.

The Famine, or course, changed everything and the way the land was worked. But the potato, albeit different varieties, continued to be a mainstay of the Irish diet — until rice and pasta began to make inroads.

According to Ms Ní Lamhna, we are only 25th in the world ranking of potato eating, well behind Belarus in the top place, and consuming only a fraction of what our ancestors accounted for at the dinner table. Our very landscape, however, has been shaped by the spud.