PRIME SPOT??The monk’s fishing house at Cong Abbey, on the Cong River, which could boast high salmon stocks this year.?Pic: Flickr.com/rEn84
A living heritage swims
Country sights and sounds
John Shelley
James and I leaned, side by side, on centuries-old stonework, watching the telltale ripple playing at the shallow end of the bridge pool; back and across it went; upstream and down, covering ten or twelve square metres of stream bed. Now and then it came to a stop, always at the same place, adjacent to the off-white outline of a broken, sunken branch.
The constant flow of water had long since soaked the bark free from its core of wood and left it pale and luminescent, and in that strange glow I saw them: salmon.
They lay side by side, dressed in dark tartan with lighter hints to jaw and fin. The more we looked the more we saw, until the pool seemed full of fish. The shallow at their tails was deeply scored, showing where at least some of them had spawned. These, heavy in head and slim behind, held station with those yet to fully ripen. These latter patiently wait for their brief moment on the redd, ready to spill their very lives in a torrent of eggs and milt.
Neither James nor I were surprised to see these noble fishes. After all, we find them in the same place year after year, waiting above the same patch of gravel that has been the birthplace of so many generations. We had not, however, expected to find quite as many in such a confined area. Perhaps the rest of the river was equally well stocked.
Other waters are not faring as well. In fact there are some, including a number of traditionally prolific fisheries, where fish stocks are barely sufficient to sustain what has become a modest population. There are too many rivers that no longer support salmon at all.
There are arguments in favour of artificially boosting the reproductive success of these most valuable of fishes, and there are equally compelling arguments against interfering in the natural process at all, although it is a little late for that.
Of course, in an ideal world we could look after the river catchment and leave the fish to look after themselves. A century and more ago our rivers and streams were pretty much intact, largely as nature made them, the water clear and bright, the nursery areas extensive. Pollution was virtually non-existent. Salmon came to spawn year after year, in such numbers that farm labourers complained about having to eat them.
So what happened? We came to drain bog and marsh, to straighten and deepen the streams, seeking to improve the productivity of the land. We brought in tonne after tonne of nitrogen and phosphate to help our endeavours, neither seeing nor caring that a third or a half of it ran straight off the fields, not noticing how that heavy growth of weed chokes life from the streams, brushing aside the consequences of enrichment, biological and chemical pollution, the spread of non-native species, modern forestry practices, water abstraction…
Managing the catchment simply has not happened. Angling clubs up and down the country have done their utmost to improve habitat and water quality, working with local and national authorities to achieve the best results. While some progress has been made, we are still a long way off.
Enter the European Union with the River Basin Management Plan for the Western River Basin District in Ireland (2009-2015). We are more than half-way through the implementation of this plan (which can be downloaded free from www.westernrbd.ie and which makes very interesting reading) but have yet to see the positive results that were initially anticipated. The goal is that by the year 2015 ‘74 percent of rivers, 95 percent of lakes, 35 percent of estuaries, 63 percent of coastal waters and 68 percent of groundwaters will have achieved Good Status’.
We have a year to go and much to be done. We are told that 2013 was the best year the tourism industry has enjoyed since 2009. Obviously, all stakeholders will want to build on that success. If that is to happen, we need to offer something different, something fresh or new. And there might be nothing more new than what is truly old. A clean environment such as can no longer be found in so many other lands, and even in parts of our own.
So there’s one for the year ahead. And who knows, a decade from now it might not be that one bridge over the Cong River that gives us such a splendid view of our living heritage, but every second bridge throughout the country, and this to the benefit of all.
