The tiny bridge over the River Cummeragh is a wonderful place to while away time. I can easily waste a quarter of an hour here, resting my elbows on the thick ivy padding of the bridge’s walls, gazing into the waters below.
I might watch the water flowing towards me from the loughs and mountainsides upstream – sometimes a torrent, sometimes a gush, sometimes a stream, always urgent. Or I might turn to see it from the downstream wall, gurgling over boulders away towards the great lough below, constantly topping up that deep, dark mass. Either way, the effect is the same: the action of the river is mesmeric.
Rivers and lakes play a large part in the folklore of all Celtic lands; the rivers of Ireland maybe most of all. The mysteries of stillwaters and streams draw in our imagination. In Irish mythology, rivers are principal elements in a relationship between the world we humans inhabit and the lands of the Aos Sí (“ee-es shee”), the fabled “people of the hills”.
Rivers represent both the boundary and the gateway between the realm of humans and that of the Aos Sí. They are, in lore, the descendants of the Tuatha dé Dannan, the mythical people who yielded ownership of Ireland to Galician invaders in distant times, before themselves retreating to an Otherworld, never to be seen again.
In these less legendary days, the great rivers of Ireland, from the mighty aorta of the Shannon, the midsize arteries of the Boyle and Boyne, the Bann or Blackwater, right down to little vessels like the Cummeragh, are the blood that measures the health of the land.
How we treat our bodies shows up in our bloodstream; how we treat our land is revealed in its freshwaters: its streams, rivers and estuaries. And standing in those streams are the anglers of Ireland, and they have a keen sense of the health of Ireland’s rivers.
Kevin O’Sullivan, who works for the Irish Agriculture and Food Development Authority, says: “They understand the water better than most. Anglers are often the first to spot problems – problems with the invertebrates, with the water quality, with the river beds. They are often the first to raise the alarm.”
He points out how special our little area is: the Cummeragh water system contains the mountain-ringed lakes of Cloonaghlin, Namona and Derriana, as well as the Cummeragh itself and the monster lough Currane at its base. (The original name for Currane is Lough Luíoch, “The lake of Lugh”, a Celtic god who was a king of the Tuatha dé Dannan and by all accounts a bit of a lad)
Upriver, where streams from three of the loughs converge, the Cummeragh blanket bog is among the best preserved wetlands in Ireland. The bog is home to nesting curlews and the spectacular black slug. It also contains the shallow spawning grounds of a unique and gargantuan strain of sea trout – a genetic relic, O’Sullivan explains, of the last Ice Age, when the glaciers stopped just short of this spot.
We are very lucky. This Kerry waterscape has its problems: the sea trout population has plunged, most probably because of sea-lice infections derived from salmon farming off the coast. But we have relatively healthy rivers. In the south-east of Ireland, the waterways are far more sclerotic and toxic; up in Northern Ireland, Lough Neagh is suffocating under blankets of blue-green algae. Overall, in the Republic, 15% of rivers are said by the Rivers Trust charity to be in poor health. In England, that figure is 50%.
“There has been a lot of change,” says Tom O’Shea, a ghillie on the Cummeragh since his early teens. “A lot of it is the climate. We have much wetter winters, with flash floods, which we never had before.”
The floods damage the streams where young salmon and trout grow in the colder months. And the summers are warmer too, putting strain on the hatchlings in the bog.
O’Shea says: “When I first started recording the water temperatures, it was never higher than 20 degrees. Last year I recorded 27 degrees. This year, there was no flood between April and August. It was so dry – and that hasn’t really happened before.”
Ben Fenton is author of To Be Fair: The Ultimate Guide to Fairness in the 21st Century
