There are, declares Michael Fewer in his enchanting little volume By Swerve of Shore (Gill and Macmillan), an account of a journey on foot down the Dublin coastline, the ruins of some 60 13th-century churches in north Co Dublin. Sixty: what does that say about the civilisation which suddenly erupted in Leinster after the arrival of the Normans and Welsh and English? How energetic and confident those people were; and they left a mark on Fingal which lingers to this day. Fingal is where farmers have strange names - Norman, Flemish, Old English. Fingal has still perhaps the largest stock of thatched dwellings in the country, though there has been a deplorable assault on these buildings in the past decade. Fingal is a land of old orchards and hard, nutty apples which explode in the mouth. Fingal is where working-class people play cricket and discuss its details with fluent fervour; and Fingal has a coastline of exquisite little towns and villages where Michael Fewer began his exploration of the Dublin shores.
This is a discursive odyssey which ambles easily through both space and time; it tells of the iron-hulled John Tayleur, which was storm-blown onto Lambay Island in 1854. The ethic of "women and children first" had clearly not taken hold: of the 250 women and children aboard, only three survived, but 279 men did. One rather hopes that they stood around on Lambay looking suitably sheepish. Whatever arguments there might be for allowing women to sink or swim, there are moderately few for children.
Skerries
There can be no capital city in Europe which has so close to it a seaside town as lovely and as pretty as Skerries, one of the great secrets of Co Dublin. South-siders, of course, who think they take their lives in their hands going to Dublin airport, probably would have difficulty finding it; and for an awful lot of north-siders it seems to be that little bit out of the way. Heaven forbid that the DART ever stretches its tentacles to Skerries: it was a triumph of suburbanitical stupidity for Greystones to want to be connected to the DART, for that way lies its death.
One of the most wondrous aspects of this part of Dublin are the vast views - far grander than those available on the south side of the bay; and lowering over the horizon on most days are the Mountains of Mourne. It was of course the view of the Mournes from Skerries which caused Percy French to write his famous anthem to them. But more than anything else, this part of Dublin, from Balbriggan to Bull Island, has enormous skies, with a huge, amphi-theatrical luminosity which spends its time shifting, changing and dancing. And the air is special too, a mixture of brine and sunlight and the light, sandy soil of those coastal fields.
Strip development
The worrying question about this part of Dublin concerns the stewardship of the local council, once Dublin County Council, now Fingal. It was my concern over the way the area was being governed - and more to the point, would in the future be governed - which caused me to decide not to move there when I decided to quit city life. The outskirts of Skerries, for example, seem doomed to strip development, and Michael Fewer expresses concern for Loughshinny, a quite lovely little village which remains miraculously undiscovered even today.
"A cobbled lane took me into the hamlet's cluster of tiny cottages," he writes. "It was once a very poor place, and the quaint character it has today is largely attributable to the tiny house plots and the organic way in which the village developed around the shore of the inlet. This framework should give Loughshinny all the makings of a picturesque seaside village reminiscent of villages of similar size in Devon and Cornwall, if the local authority insisted that individual developments were designed with sensitivity and concern for context. This has plainly not been the case. . ."
Kenure Park
There are more melancholy contemplations too when he views the remains of Kenure Park, which in 1978 "was torn down by the local authority in just two days and its overgrown gardens, rich in exotic species, were levelled by bulldozers." And his mood is hardly improved by his experience of Rush, which "was until the 1960s a very handsome place because of the large number of thatched houses it contained. At the time of my visit, there were only 14 left, well scattered about the town."
And what is happening to the Rush-Lusk area is the despair of local families; it seems no barrier is being erected by Fingal Council to prevent the entire region being turned into a Tallaght by instalments. Quite the reverse, indeed: it seems that the rezoning that is being perpetrated there will ensure that those lovely seaside villages will soon be engulfed in suburban sprawl. It is a truly depressing thought.
Not that By Swerve of Shore is depressing. It is a delightful little chronicle of Dublin, and an admirable stocking-filler: but one senses both in the author's reflections and in the things he actually sees that great changes are sweeping old Dublin aside. Even the virtuous nudity of the Forty Foot has been transformed into something suggestive, sleazy. Old ways are dying or dead, and we are being standardised, homogenised; ahead of us lies McDublin.