Photo credit: Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York Times.
We are delighted to introduce Wilder Reads: a library for our favourite and recommended rewilding-related books. In addition to our team’s small synopsis of the books that you will find on that page, here we intend to provide a deeper delve.
For the first of these in-depth overviews, Alister Scott, our Executive Director, reviews An Irish Atlantic Rainforest: A Personal Journey into the Magic of Rewilding by Eoghan Daltun.
Eoghan and his dog. Credit: Chris Maddaloni/ The Irish Times.
“Rewilding. The word calls to us in mysterious ways.”
“Rewilding … while based on science, manages to excite and engage people’s imagination in a way that the latter generally does not, an enormous bonus in a time of that deep and widespread disconnect from the natural world.”
So says Eoghan Dalton, author of An Irish Atlantic Rainforest – A personal journey into the magic of rewilding. Eoghan combines personal story with deep learning in ecology and history in a book of great insight, accessibly told.
This is quite some skill, and he brings the best of the modern Irish cultural contribution to it: lyrical prose, high intelligence, an unflinching gaze on some brutal aspects of history, and a good dose of craic (that’s Irish for fun, said like ‘crack’). I was particularly interested to read this book; I spent my teenage years in the northwest of Ireland – Fermanagh – an amazing landscape of lakes, hills, caves – and brutally destructive farming.
Eoghan’s prose is simply beautiful in places: “All the cliches about the striking and constantly changing nature of the light in the west of Ireland are entirely justified: visual stimulus simply abounds in the presence of the ocean. Glancing west, perhaps fast-scudding angrily dark clouds are sweeping Inisfarnard or the more distant Skelligs with a near-solid phalanx of gun-metal rain showers, yet are thrown into stark contrast by brilliant sunshine on the flanking sea and islands. Twin concentric arcs of electric-toned rainbows may frame the scene, the inner ring marking a crisp transition from bright to dark. Minutes or even seconds later, the picture is likely to be barely recognizable, over and over, throughout a day”
Eoghan takes us through his journey from a life in Dublin, where he learns to restore a small house in the midst of increasingly brutal urbanisation, to his leap to the southwest of Ireland, buying a neglected and overgrazed woodland and seeing it bounce back, as ever bringing hope: “One of the most beautiful aspects of natural succession is the sheer magnitude of its regenerative power, bringing both inspiration and reason for great hope. It shows that nature can largely heal itself, if we only remove some of the impediments we generally keep firmly and relentlessly in its way, the imposition of artificial grazing regimes being by far the most widespread and significant”.
Despite the ecological devastation that has taken place in that landscape over centuries, Eoghan chronicles how many species of wildflower return once the unwelcome attentions of vast numbers of (non native) sheep are removed from the land. These flowers in turn provide the food plant for a cloud of different butterfly species, most now endangered in the rest of the intensely, chemically ‘farmed’ European landscape.
This is an author who steps deftly between the long waves of history and intricate, magical moments in nature: “The gossamer silk threads of a spider’s web, tautly bridging the airy void between two wet stalks, sequined with glinting aqueous beads of various sizes, each one a lens refracting an optically inverted version of the ghostly world behind”.
Eoghan makes a compelling case for the return of natural forests to Ireland, and State support for this. I suspect that his voice will be having an outsized impact on policy debates, by inspiring and informing decision-makers within policy and political circles. Given the deep, ancient Gaelic connections with nature, it would not surprise me if Ireland grasps this opportunity to restore nature on a grand scale in the coming years.
The one area where I possibly demur with Eoghan’s perspective is his commitment to the idea that the whole of Ireland would, if given the chance, be thickly forested. This is a commonly held view, but the recent ecology of “animating the carbon cycle”, largely appearing from the rewilding movement, gives a significant role for big grazing animals in the landscape, which would have kept the woodland much more open in a more savanna-like habitat, giving many more ecological niches than closed canopy forest. However, I concede that this minor query also needs to acknowledge the context of a largely deforested Ireland, one of the world’s nations with the least native forest.
Rewilded Irish rainforest. Credit: Chris Maddaloni/ The Irish Times.
Eoghan also embodies the spirit of #RewildingTogether, our theme for World Rewilding Day 2025: “Both farming and environmentalism have nothing to lose and everything to gain by rejecting fictional narratives of opposition and seeing each other for what they should be: allies. We need to turn a large proportion of Ireland entirely back over to nature, and some of the best people to deliver that are those who already know the land most intimately: the farmers themselves. All they need is the proper support from the rest of society.” This is just spot on!
To finish, I want to quote Eoghan on the question of motivation, which all rewilders know is our secret sauce: “There is unimaginable satisfaction in life that comes from having a distant – maybe seemingly almost unattainable – dream and beavering away at it for weeks, months or years until it begins to reach fruition. Such choices often involve hard work, sacrifice, discomfort, danger and having to wait patiently before the reward comes, if it comes at all.”
This is the essence of the movement we are building, in the face of odds and deliberate acts of destruction and obstruction by others that are sometimes baffling in their stupidity and self harm. But with this kind of magical inspiration, we know in our hearts that we can do this, re-enchanting our beautiful wild world, re-weaving the web of life and giving our souls the nourishing wild food they crave.
Hear from Eoghan himself in this video.
Last year, Eoghan released a second book called, The Magic of an Irish Rainforest: A Visual Journey.
A review written by Alister Scott
April 2025
Eoghan on his rewilded land, credit: Rory Carroll/ The Guardian.