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In 2023, environmentalist and rewilder Eoghan Daltun travelled the length and breadth of Ireland photographing areas of temperate rainforest, in a bid to illustrate their beauty and immense ecological value, and to document, in almost all cases, their state of decline.
The resulting collection of stunning images, combined with deeply illuminating nature writing, charts that exploration, beginning with the author’s own thriving wild rainforest, Bofickil, on the Beara Peninsula, West Cork, and taking us through the four provinces of Ireland – places such as Killarney National Park, Kerry; The Gearagh, Cork; The Burren, Clare; Old Head Wood, County Mayo; Glenveagh National Park, Donegal; Correl Glen and Cladagh Glen, County Fermanagh; and Wicklow’s beauty spot of Glendalough.
From close-range to wide-lens, luscious forest imagery and landscapes are captured, unimaginably rich in native flora and fauna, offering us a deep insight into rare and priceless ecosystem fragments that we still have but are losing fast, alongside a compelling treatise for how that could so easily be changed for the better.
Eoghan Daltun is a sculpture conservator, a farmer, and author and, above all, a rewilder.
In 2009, he bought a long-abandoned 73-acre farm overlooking the Atlantic near Eyeries on the Beara Peninsula, West Cork. Much of the land was covered in wild native forest which, although very beautiful, was ecologically wrecked by severe overgrazing and invasion by a host of alien plant species.
Over the years since, Eoghan has brought life in all its explosive vibrancy back to the land, with new temperate rainforest spontaneously forming where previously there was only barren grass. He charted the restoration of this rich ecosystem in his award-winning memoir An Irish Atlantic Rainforest: A Personal Journey in the Magic of Rewilding. Rewilding most of the land, and High Nature Value farming the rest, has given him plenty of time to reflect deeply on the ecological crisis unfolding at terrifying speed all around us, and its solutions.
Eoghan lives on the farm with his two sons, Liam and Seánie, their collie dog, Charlie, and five Dexter cows: Maggie, Gertrude, Amber, Nelly and Minnie. The Magic of an Irish Rainforest: A Visual Journey is his second book.