MAGAN'S WORLD:I SPENT LAST October in Lower Normandy, four weeks tucked up in the eaves of an 18th century farmhouse overlooking a forest in the Parc Naturel Régional Normandie-Maine. A mantel of ancient oak and sweet chestnut covered the hills in all directions, with maize fields in the valleys and ochre cattle grazing the lower slopes.
Development is strictly curtailed within the park and so almost all of the houses were elegant lime-washed, oak-beamed buildings with authentic 19th century outhouses, and well maintained orchards and vegetable gardens. Heavy snow and storms in winter mean that households must be self-sufficient in terms of fuel, and so each house had neatly-stacked cords of well-seasoned wood which the owners had chopped themselves from pollarded trees, or well-managed hedgerows. The hunting season was coming to an end and each weekend people gathered in the forests collecting mushrooms, with guns slung over their shoulders in the hopes of bagging the last of the season’s boar quota.
I’ve been reluctant to write about the holiday, not because I didn’t enjoy it. I adored it, and would recommend anyone to spend time in Lonlay-l’Abbaye, Domfront, Flers, Sourdeval or any of the other towns within the park that covers a vast area of rolling hills, woodland, and open country. My problem was that most of my observations were along the line of: “Why, oh why, do they get it so right and we in Ireland so wrong?”
Such thinking is never helpful, like a mother comparing her children to her neighbours’. Comparisons are pointless: all families are different, like all nations.
I’m sure there’s a good reason why we in Ireland demolish our vernacular farmhouses, outbuildings and stables and sell off the stone; why we raze our orchards and slash our hedgerows into plucked-eyebrow strips. No doubt there’s wisdom too behind our decision to no longer provide our own fuel – why dead trees are left to rot where they lie, why the cuttings from our hedgerows are mulched rather than being dried and used for kindling? It can’t just be laziness, can it?
Perhaps we can blame the British in some way, sing a drunken verse of Cill Cáis, as we nimbly shirk responsibility.
The most depressing comparison is in terms of walking trails: the fact that every village for miles in Normandy has a map outside the town hall outlining the cross-country walking routes that spiral out along rivers, forest trails and droving paths. Where I live in north Westmeath there are no trails and so people do laps of the GAA pitch, circling like prisoners because they daren’t risk the roads. I’m surrounded by Lough Derravaragh, the Ben of Fore and Lough Lene – all of which have fine car parks nearby, for young folk to practise hand-brake turns late at night, but there’s no way of walking around any of them. A way-marked route exists between Kilbeggan and Mullingar, but much of it on treacherous roads.
Does the fault lie with farmers for failing to steward the land? For ripping out the old herding trails and refusing to allow access on their land? They hide behind a bogus case of a Donegal farmer who was said to have been sued by a hiker in 1997, but that never happened. The case was thrown out of court because the Occupiers Liability Act makes clear that landowners have no liability for claims from recreational users.
The midlands need tourism. I could show you locations in Longford, Laois, Offaly and Westmeath that surpass anything in the west of Ireland or Lower Normandy, but in each place we’d be trespassing on a farmer’s land and liable to be shouted or shot at with suspicious glances, if not actual bullets. Vive les Midlands!