It is humbling to think that when the naturalist Robert Lloyd Praeger's The Way that I Went was first published by Hodges, Figgis in Dublin in 1937, Praeger was 72. The book was based on specific explorations carried out over a five-year period, although the project was of course magnificently based on a lifetime of practical field-work. Natural history was not his first career. Initially he was an engineer, and in 1893, on the advice of a friend, he applied for a job at the National Library of Ireland. He spent more than thirty years there and eventually became Librarian, a position which now enjoys the title of director.
As early as 1901, his reputation as a major field botanist was already assured through the publication of his survey, Irish Topographical Botany, in which he sub-divided Ireland into forty botanical "vice-counties", a system which is still used. It is remarkable that much of his naturalist field-work was done on weekends.
This year marks the 60th anniversary of the publication of, The Way That I Went, Praeger's most famous book, a legendary account of his rambles through Ireland. The conversational ease of his approach conceals a highly systematic methodology, and a daunting range of geological, botanical and even linguistic reference in the context of Irish place-names.
Hardly surprisingly, this lively classic retains a pivotal role in a tradition of Irish naturalist writing, a formidable genre extending back to Sir William Wilde's The Beauties of the Boyne and its Tributary the Blackwater (1849) and on to the present with the great Frank Mitchell, author of Reading the Irish Landscape and The Way That I Followed, and whose recent death marks the end of an era.
Two Irish publishers have now reissued The Way That I Went in facsimile reprints, complete with the original plates of period photographs and drawings. An attractive, large-format paperback edition from Collins Press costs £9.99 while the House of Figgis, through the son of the book's first publisher, has a limited edition of 100 copies casebound in cloth similar to that used for the original, price £50. Both editions include an elegant and thoughtful introduction by Michael Viney, in which the scientific and imaginative legacies of Praeger and Mitchell are linked for posterity.
Praeger, like Mitchell, a fellow president of the Royal Irish Academy, brings an overview to his observations which embraces botany, geology, archaeology and geography, as well as a eye for the beauty of nature and a keen wit. Born in Holywood, Co Down, in 1865, Praeger was the son of a Dutch businessman, while his maternal grandfather, Robert Patterson (1802-72), was a prominent naturalist whose books included a standard text, Zoology for Schools, and The Natural History of Insects Mentioned in Shakespeare's Plays.
By training an engineer, Praeger, true to the pioneering 19th-century tradition of natural history as an essential part of education, became a self-taught botanist at an early age. "Flowers and stones and beasts" fascinated him from the very beginning. "When I was old enough to toddle, my father had to put a fence around a garden patch in front of the house, because I picked all the blossoms; and I knew belemnites and hare-bells and flint-flakes before I was five." He admits at times preferring nature to man. Yet these comments are made with sufficient good humour to leave his reader confident of Praeger being a stimulatingly opinionated, and informed rather than pedantic, companion - although those who knew him leave no doubt as to his being a formidable character. It is also worth noting that the more one investigates the Irish countryside the more one feels at home with Praeger, and the more the extraordinary amount of information he offers excites rather than overwhelms.
Even more important is the fact that after sixty years, the text is not dated. Praeger writes a formal prose in the gentleman's tone of his class and time, but the text, even his criticisms of the destruction of the countryside, is always topical. Praeger's knowledge was not only vast, it was intimate. "I can claim a fairly extensive knowledge of every county in Ireland," he writes - somewhat understatedly - early in the opening chapter, and continues: "my scientific life began in the field, and has continued there. When I was promoted from a small private school to the `Inst.' in Belfast I knew a good deal about local plants - where they grew, when they flowered, what their roots and seeds were like as well as their blossoms." Teaching methods did not impress him, and he recalls attending geology lectures as part of his engineering course where students did not even handle rock-specimens or fossils.
His journey proper begins in Donegal, and of the many fascinating characters he recalls along the way is Henry Chichester Hart (1847-1908), author of Flora of the County Donegal (1898). Hart, Praeger writes, "was a man of many parts - a skilled botanist and zoologist, a profound Shakespearean scholar, a remarkable athlete". Botanists Nathaniel Colgan and Reginald William Scully, geologist Maxwell Close and William Spotswood Green, are other Victorian heroes of science Praeger mentions through these pages, remarkable figures who characterise the richness of the generation immediately preceding that of Praeger's. His asides are fascinating counters to his physical journey. He can move from a complex geological explanation to casual remarks such as "If you halt at Boyle you will find yourself in a very pretty district quite unknown to the tourist." Places he loves, such as Connemara, Jerpoint Abbey, Ross Friary near Headford, or Mount Brandon, are praised; those he doesn't, such as a couple of entire counties, are dismissed as uninteresting.
Praeger discovered the Neolithic passage graves at Carrowkeel in Co Sligo and was first to enter the tombs. He wandered, explored, climbed, studied, investigated and analysed his country. Active to the end, he died in 1953, aged 88. Candid, engaging, erudite and timeless, this is a wonderful book, which should never be forgotten. Now deservedly back in print, it won't be.