It’s amazing. Forced and foiled by glaciers, millennia old. Nurtured, worked and revered, our soils are our nation’s greatest asset. I didn’t appreciate that fully until I was researching our food systems and how they evolved into the first human settlement, the first villages, the first cities. Food underpins our existence, our culture. The soil dictated our settlement. Movement of harvests developed into roadways and infrastructure.
Perhaps we’ve lost our connection to the soil, to our landscape. In Ireland, the landscape is so beautiful, so ‘everywhere’ that we take it for granted. One-off housing and expanding non-sustainable development is eating it up. I guess we like the photo-view of a valley or a mountain range on our Christmas calendars, but if we look closer, the micro-view of our landscape is pretty amazing. Everything is interconnected; everything has a purpose, a symbiosis. From the fungi, fishing, to the farm buildings, everything is useful working to a collective seasonal assembly line of food production to our cities.
On our landscape are the vestiges of an urban migration, disused buildings and abandoned fields. The strong farms disassembled after the Land Acts, a seismic shift in the constructional hierarchy of our land. Redistributed ruins and abandoned orchards. The draw of New York and London leaving clusters of homesteads to be reclaimed by an unforgiving landscape. We turn our backs on these, seeking a new definition of our national identity. But what were wars fought for if not to protect a culture over which we now cast a cold eye? Our landscapes, our vernacular, our soils are some of our greatest cultural and economic assets. Traces of lifetimes vested into defining our identity over an unforgiving landscape; the story of who we are. Tread softly.
