When Manchán Magan last emailed me, only a few months ago, he was part of what I called “a benign conspiracy of ecologists” trying to establish if the beaver was ever native to Ireland and, in the process, helping make the case for its reintroduction.
Well, poor Manchán has since left us, alas. But another of his co-conspirators, UCD biologist Andrew Tighe, has been back on. It relates to a more academic but no less intriguing question: whether the black stork was once indigenous here.
This beautiful but shy bird is a very rare visitor now, and a rare species in general, although spread over a vast expanse of Europe and Asia, from which it migrates south in winter. It takes the long way round the Mediterranean so it can glide on thermal air currents rising from land.
But as Andrew writes in a paper for the latest Irish Birds, annual journal of BirdWatch Ireland, there is some historical evidence that the black stork is another of our long-lost expatriates.
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‘The cadet was now descending rapidly towards Cavan without any training in the use of a parachute’
And it comes from a surprising source: Giraldus Cambrensis, aka Gerald of Wales (1146 – 1223), official historian/apologist for the Norman invasion, whose Topographia Hiberniae (1188) was for centuries, unfortunately, the world’s best-known book about Ireland.
As I wrote here some years ago (when suggesting the Irish rugby manager should pin extracts from it to the dressing room wall before all games with Wales), Gerald’s work portrayed the natives as savages in sore need of colonisation by their more civilised neighbours.
Gratuitous hirsuteness was one of many charges he levelled against them. He claimed, for example, that to amuse visitors, the king of Limerick kept a bearded woman who also had a thick mane growing out of her back. “This people then, is truly barbarous, being not only barbarous in their dress but suffering their hair and beards to grow enormously,” he wrote, before making allowances for the fact that they knew no better:
“Habits are formed by mutual intercourse; and as these people inhabit a country so remote from the rest of the world . . . and are thus excluded from civilised nations, they learn nothing and practise nothing, but the barbarism in which they are born and bred and which sticks to them like a second nature.”
When not propagandising, however, Gerald was a fairly reliable reporter of detail about life and landscape. Andrew Tighe was therefore intrigued to find him writing about storks, noting that these birds were “very seldom seen anywhere in Ireland” but “when they are, they are black”.
Gerald also suggested correctly that they disappeared in winter, although his assumption was that they were hiding locally. And a later edition of the book, from 1220, includes a drawing of an Irish stork, which is a very accurate depiction of a black one, albeit the colour is more like brown in the picture, maybe because of fading down the centuries.
But Tighe’s paper goes on to argue that the black stork may also have left its imprint in the place names of Ireland. This is where I have my doubts. Yes, the Irish word corr means a crane, and by extension any crane-like bird, as in corr riasc for heron: another species we were talking about here recently.
So the many townlands called Corduff (from Corr Dubh) scattered across Ireland – especially in the counties of Leitrim, Cavan and Monaghan – could be vestiges of the black stork, living then (as the bird still likes to), in dense woodland of the kind that used to cover those parts of Ireland.
For good or bad, though, I am something of an expert on Corduffs. There is one down the road from where I grew up, famous for the tribal ferocity of its football teams, and a nearby Corduffkelly to boot. I suspect the name has more to do with topography, given that the Irish corr can also mean a kind of hill.
In the drumlin belt that stretches across south Ulster, of necessity, there are nearly as many different words for hill as Eskimos (supposedly) have for snow. These include Mullach and Tullach, and of course Droim, all of which are common prefixes for townlands.
But in the heavily coded glossary of local place names, the suffix duff/dubh has topographical significance too. My former neighbour Art Agnew tells me it once acted as an early warning system for women seeking husbands: “If a farmer came from anywhere with ‘duff’ in the name, that meant the land was north-facing and nothing would ever grow on it.”
So much as I’d love to believe that black herons lurk in in the many Corduffs along the border, I suspect the truth is more prosaic and expressed in the opening lines of Patrick Kavanagh’s Shancoduff. The middle syllable there is from a word meaning “dell”, but the message remains the same: “My black hills have never seen the sun rising. Eternally they look north towards Armagh.”
