Following in Praeger’s footsteps

Island children follow Praeger’s footsteps


Áine Ryan

ISLAND children walked in the steps of famous Edwardian naturalist Robert Lloyd Praeger after members of the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) launched two volumes of the New Survey of Clare Island at the weekend.
Speaking in the island’s community centre, before the fieldtrips, RIA president, Nicholas Canny observed that Praeger – who was the academy’s first president – had travelled the entire country before choosing Clare Island as the place to carry out the groundbreaking ‘microscopic study of how things worked in the environment’.
Both archaeologist, Paul Gosling, and botanist, David John, also outlined some of the discoveries recorded in Volume 5: Archaeology, and Volume 6: Freshwater and Terrestrial Algae.
 Mr Gosling observed that the islanders’ great knowledge of their landscape had significantly contributed to the recording of 256 sites, monuments and artefacts during the 12-year research period. These included the discovery of 53 fulachta fia (megalithic cooking pits), court tombs, hut sites and pre-bog walls.
In the original archaeological survey – carried out between 1909 and 1911 – Thomas Johnson Westropp had only recorded 37 items.
More sophisticated instrumentation and technology, such as radiocarbon dating, had allowed ‘for a long slice of island history’ to be discovered, Mr Gosling said.
The island’s rich archeological heritage also includes a 13th century Cistercian abbey, the reputed burial place of pirate queen Granuaile. In the new survey’s volume on the abbey, published in 2005, painstaking research by a team of conservators revealed highly significant wall-paintings, exceptional for their relative absence of religious iconography and their inclusion of wild animals and warriors.
Botanist Mr David John said the new survey confirmed ‘the island’s rich algal flora’.
“The most diverse algal areas in the whole of Europe are here on Clare Island and in Connemara,” said Mr John. Earlier, with RIA staff, he had distributed microscopes and sketches of some of the algal discoveries to the 19 island schoolchildren.
Participating in the archaeology fieldtrip, former pupil of St Patrick’s national school, geographer, Aisling O’Malley praised the academy for treating the children to ‘such an odyssey’.
“An island is a fascinating and unique place where the landscape still has apparent and hidden stories to tell. As a geographer and islander I can walk over potato ridges from famine times and, in the same field, trip over stones from the megalithic period,” she said. 
Longtime principal of the school, Mary McCabe, also acknowledged the RIA’s inclusive approach to the island community.
“The involvement of the teachers and the schoolchildren in the launch of these two volumes and the follow-up fieldtrips has given a whole new meaning to the island’s land and seascape. We are already planning projects based on the trips,” she said.  
Established in 1908, and driven by Praeger’s scholarly passion, the original Clare Island Survey was the first major biological study of a specific area undertaken in the world.
In I991, former Taoiseach Charles Haughey launched the new inter-disciplinary survey of Clare Island on behalf of the RIA. The managing editor of the survey reports is Professor Martin Steer.  Curiously, up until the mid-1970s, visitors to Clare Island were called ‘praegers’, due to the memory of the teams of scientists that inhabited the island in the early years of the century.