NATURE Pristine Owenduff and Owenmore Rivers

Pristine beauty of Owenduff and Owenmore Rivers


Country Sights and sounds
John Shelley

Despite the long period of predominantly dry weather with which we have been blessed, the underground water table remains relatively high, as can be seen by the flooding of low lying land that follows any period of rainfall. Yet the rivers, and especially the tributaries and smaller streams, are running almost at summer levels, so that salmon anglers on some waters are finding themselves continually frustrated.
The Moy, of course, has a constant flow of fish entering the lower river and running through to settle in the long, slow pools below Foxford. But that is now an artificial waterway; its heart gouged out decades ago; those still-bare heaps of spoil that line its length testimony to what some consider an enormous act of environmental folly.
No, to find a real river we must now travel north and west, to Erris, where the Owenduff and Owenmore drain the great expanse of blanket bog that lies draped across the landscape. Up here we can lose ourselves, if only for a short while. Here we find a real sense of heritage, as we walk the banks we follow in the steps of those who went before and, in crossing the shallow ford, are wetting our feet with water as clean and as peat-stained as it has been for thousands of years, even since the bogs began to grow.
The stream-pool sequence of both of these rivers extends almost unbroken from their multiple birthplaces of mountain springs to their final outpouring into the ocean. How refreshing it is to take an evening seat for an hour or so at the tail of one of those pools on an evening in the middle of May, especially with the water pouring down after one of those impenetrably dark, frothing floods that rush down from the hills in the aftermath of an early summer downpour.
The rain has washed the haze from the air; the breeze is fresh enough to keep the midges in the heather and clean enough to wipe bloody history from the land and to relieve the mind of its daily toil. The eyes follow careless flecks of foam the length of the pool; see how they seem to hold back for the briefest moment before spilling, to the sound of babbling laughter, down the gravel slip and into the steady embrace of the greater pool below.
We chose this spot carefully, for there, in a deep hole scoured from the acid rock by thousands of years of tumbling water, salmon and sea trout pause to rest along their epic upstream journey. Moments, they may stay, or days or even months, however long they choose, until the restless spirit brings them once more headlong to the rushing stream and onward to their next lodging.
And now, there, tight to the bank, a flat spot in the water lifts and shapes in response to an otherwise hidden movement; an arrowhead cuts across the flow and a dark, wedge-shaped dorsal fin shows the path taken as another salmon marches on toward the place that it found life and the place it will likely die. It holds at the tail of its new pool for half a minute before sliding into the depths, to lie tight by the large rock that interrupts the current.
How many others might be found there? Indeed, how many fish have found refuge in that same location since the stream was born? Could that one salmon be a direct descendent of the first that ever nosed its inquisitive way from the wide Atlantic, long before anybody ever sat where I sat now? 
Then again, how many generations of men (and women; there is something compelling and alluring about the female poacher) have dipped hayfork or leinster into the eddy by that boulder, or have slipped into the dark cold dragging a short net to the far bank with a silver salmon in the belly of it?
There was a time the romantic notion of the nocturnal poacher had an almost universal appeal. Here was a soul obedient to the unwritten laws of nature yet careless to the written law of man, with a heart and mind as free as the wind. We wished him such success as would bring gladness to his hard-pressed family at home in their rough-hewn cabin, and half wished that his freedom might be our own.
I cannot sit here without being eyed with suspicion. Other waters have lost their runs of migratory fish, the weight of our industry too great for them to bear. Let them dredge the Moy to death and poison elsewhere. At least leave us this great western wilderness. Leave it waterlogged and wild, a small piece of Ireland as she was made.