LITMIR.BIZ

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them for the rest of their lives.

      …

      Excitement over, the monotony of birdwatching returns. We know the goosanders are nesting nearby, and will not stay away for long. So we decide to stake out this spot, waiting for their nervousness to abate before they make the brief flight back upstream. And so we settle into the streamside, peppered with deer dung, to await their return.

      In my yearning for a second look, my mind begins to get the better of me. Fleets of bubbles float by, sometimes forming large clumps of white froth, and I’m all too keen to mistake this for the white chest of the male goosander.

      Frustrated, I lie back to take in the sights of the valley around me. Among the conifers, houses stud the slope rising above the stream. Down river, the valley floor gives way to pasture. Here, sheep roam freely. Lambs, with long, curving tails, frolic. In the field on the far bank, a brace of hinds bolt for cover, white rumps taking up the rear. The deer know the best way through this valley, and it is so often their paths that we follow through the long grass, dusted with ice like the leaves of the trees shadowing the stream. By now, the rising sun has come to collect its toll. As the branches begin to weep, large drops splatter on my shoulders.

      Beside us, the river is the colour of lager. It’s barely a metre deep, and on its bed smooth stones are sprinkled with the minerals that drew generations of miners to Glendalough. Panning would bring us little fortune here though, for anything that could be strained from this stream would be too little and too poor to be worth the effort.

      I can see no signs of life in the water as it leisurely makes its way to the lake. I wonder how piscivores like the goosander draw enough sustenance from Glendalough, especially given that the waters of the upper lake (the largest in the valley) are notoriously acidic. But being predators, goosanders are often seen as a benchmark of the health of the rivers and lakes they call home. Their presence in Glendalough is a measure of the fecundity of its waters. In any case, acidity can bestow a clarity to the water. This can help the goosanders zero in on what fish there are here.

      In an age when many birds seem to be beating a retreat in the wake of the devastation left by man, it’s exciting that (for now) the goosander is on the march. Not thirty years ago, breeding pairs were almost unheard of in Ireland. At the time, this was no surprise. The ducks Irish people are most familiar with are birds of temperate wetlands. Their docile dabbling nature has eased their transition into an increasingly human world.

      But the goosander is not most ducks. By nature, it’s a creature of the wild boreal forests, that vast coniferous belt that hangs like a curtain just below the icy grip of the Arctic. It’s a harsh realm, shared with wolves and bears. Wintering goosanders rarely made it as far south as Ireland, So while wigeon, teal and other ducks could (and still can) be found in flocks of hundreds all around our coasts each winter, for many years the only glimpse you’d get of a goosander in Ireland (if you were lucky) was of a green- or copper-headed speck patrolling an estuary.

      That all changed in 1994 when goosanders were recorded breeding in County Wicklow for the very first time. The species had previously tried to establish an outpost in Donegal, but while this attempt to colonise Ireland eventually petered out, the Wicklow population has endured.

      In so doing, goosanders have added Ireland to the expanding list of countries in which they have made a permanent home, having colonised vast swathes of Britain in the previous decades and even claimed a toehold in the Alps. Although they’ve bred in Ireland every year since 1994, the population here remains small and centred around its stronghold in the Wicklow Mountains.

      Here, where the valleys vacated by long-gone glaciers have been occupied by fresh mountain lakes, the species has found its Shangri-la. And they’re not the first to find peace and prosperity in this valley. The most famous to do so was St. Kevin, who found in Glendalough the perfect place to establish his monastery back in the sixth century. St. Kevin was renowned as a great lover of nature, as one of the most famous legends of his life in Glendalough – documented in The Church and Kindness to Animals – attests:

      And while he was lifting up his hand to heaven through the window, as he used to do, a blackbird by chance alighted on it, and treating it as a nest, laid an egg there. And the Saint showed such compassion towards it, out of his patient and loving heart, that he neither closed his hand nor withdrew it, but indefatigably held it out and adapted it for the purpose until the young one was fully hatched.

      But Kevin’s avian associations stretch even further into legend. Perhaps the most striking recalls how he first laid claim to Glendalough. At that time, the O’Tooles were among the most powerful of the Gaelic families in the region. Their king, grief-stricken over the ill health of his aging pet goose, reached out to Kevin to help save the bird. Kevin agreed – but only if he could have all the land that the goose flew over. Sure enough, with a touch from Kevin the goose regained a youthful vigour. It took off in a circuit around the valley that we now know as Glendalough.

      It was here that Kevin sought the solitude in which he could immerse himself in God’s living work, eschewing the company of people for that of the birds and beasts that thrived in the valley. Back then, the goosander was almost certainly not among them, though it’s ironic that the vacuum left by one departing hermit has centuries later been filled by an avian recluse that has found sanctuary in Glendalough.

      In a crueller irony, it was the teachings of the solitude-loving St. Kevin that would see the solitude of Glendalough shattered. Kevin was one of Ireland’s most accomplished and well-travelled Christian scholars (even journeying to Rome and back). As recorded in Bethada Náem nÉrenn:

      Great is the pilgrimage of Coemgen (as Kevin was then known),

      If men should perform it aright;

      To go seven times to his fair is the same

      As to go once to Rome.

      To claim that seven visits to this valley in the Wicklow Mountains was the spiritual equal to a pilgrimage to the centre of Western Christendom was a bold idea for the time. But it soon took root. And so St. Kevin’s teachings spawned a monastic tradition that turned Glendalough into one of the centres of Christian teaching in Ireland in the centuries after his death. A monastery flourished here, complete with its own cathedral and round tower to safeguard monks and their treasures from the Vikings that raided their way up and down the east coast.

      It wasn’t just the divine that enticed settlers to Glendalough, but also the prosaic. The tectonic churning that raised the Wicklow Mountains forged at their heart seams of lead, silver and other ores that drew a mining community to the valley. By the middle of the 1800s they’d become well established, tunnelling deep into the mountain slopes in pursuit of wealth. At the height of the mining boom over two thousand people lived here. The scale of their operations soon outmatched the mules and other draught animals used to haul chunks of ore to processing, and so a railway had to be introduced to take up the load.

      Hunger for wealth drove further development along the valley. New seams were cut open and worked to their roots. The miners’ labour beneath the mountains took them so far from the comforts of the Wicklow coast that one mine was even named Van Diemen’s Land in tribute to the island (present day Tasmania) on the other side of the globe, where many Irish convicts of the day were shipped, and from where very few returned. Buildings sprung up in the miners’ village on the valley floor, including a water-powered crusher to pulverise the ore peeled from the mountains. This was mainly operated by the women of the village as their husbands and sons toiled by torchlight underground.

      Outside, centuries of development had wrought a heavy price on the once pristine wilds of Glendalough. Very little of the ancient forest that once carpeted the valley remains today, with much of the greenery to be found now dating from just the nineteenth century or later.

      By the late 1800s the mining community had begun to suffer. More and more of its members took their expertise overseas, where they used it to develop the extraction industries that would fuel manufacturing booms in Britain and the United States. Increased demand for lead during the First World War would see a temporary flowering of mining fortunes, but once the Treaty of Versailles had been signed the mines of Glendalough sunk into decline

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