Mapping Irish wetlands

Donal Hickey takes a look at the new online software making Ireland’s wetlands and their wildlife easier to find.

Mon, 20 Mar, 2017 - 00:00

Spring is well and truly here, with lengthening days and fine weather luring more people to the outdoors, including our countless wetland sites.

Despite huge land reclamation, road building and urban growth, the country still has thousands of such sites which are valuable havens for animal and plant life. A new, online map, Wetlands to visit around Ireland, is making such sites easier to find.

Created by Peter Foss and Patrick Crushell, the map, showing the locations of 12,500 sites and giving an informative tour of 40, is available free of charge. It highlights places like Bull Island, Clara Bog, Pollardstown Fen, Wexford Wildfowl Reserve, Fennor Bog, and Boora Parklands — part of the Midland’s bog network — to mention just a few.

Also there is The Gearagh, a nature reserve of several hundred acres outside Macroom, Co Cork. This strange-looking landscape has emerged from the destruction and flooding of woods and farmland to enable the building of hydroelectric dams in the Lee Valley, in the mid-1950s.

The Gearagh is a patchwork of small islands with oak, hazel and ash trees, a variety of birdlife and blackened stumps of ancient oaks which sometimes give a weird and ghostly look to the waterscape.

Farmers from the area were relocated more than a half-century ago. People can still walk some of the old roads and trails which lead in some cases to the ruins of the abandoned farmsteads. The Gearagh is one of the rarest sites of its kind in western Europe.

Also on the map, we spotted Reenagross Park/Roughty Estuary, a gem in Kenmare, Co Kerry. This is a wooded peninsula boasting 14 habitats and 300 species of plants and animals such as ferns, mosses, bats and birds like oystercatchers.

Always a delightful place to visit, Kenmare is enhanced by this location at the start of a 40km sea inlet which separates Co Kerry from the Beara Peninsula.

The story map offers a useful introduction to the selected 40 wetlands, with location information, a brief summary of what you can discover at the sites, a summary of facilities at each one, and links to further information from the groups that manage the reserves, opening times and much more.

The selection features coastal wetlands, fens and swamps, ponds and bogs, all with a variety of visitor facilities.

The team behind the map believes planning authorities and other state agencies should be doing more to identify locations.

“To-date, only counties Kildare and Louth have undertaken the necessary surveys to characterise and evaluate the complete wetland resource they have, something urgently needed across many other counties in Ireland,” says Dr Crushell.