Sunday, March 25, 2007

derelict boats on the Liffey

I didn't take this picture of three boats on the River Liffey at Chapelizod for their inherent beauty, but even derelict boats on water look picturesque if the composition is OK. I had been trying for several days to get out in bright light to experiment with my first digital SLR, but the tupperware light continued to be unrelieved by even a glimmer of sunshine. So I went with the leaden-grey skies and had a great time.
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Chapelizod old village centre

This is the village sqare of Chapelizod, Dublin. The pub is the Villager and behind it you see the medieval tower of the Church of Ireland church. This is Isolde's tower and by far the most important single structure in the village. At present the square is little more than a glorified car park and roadway for thousands of cars passing from the city centre to the suburbs and beyond (and vice versa), but plans are afoot to smarten it up and create a feature that recognises the importance at one time of Chapelizod's military connections. Let's hope they can do something to stop all these cars passing through the village at the same time (other than road pricing it's hard to know what options are available).
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Saturday, March 24, 2007

ruined trees

This once-handsome tree has been butchered by a brutal process known as topping. It's a form of 'pruning' that's all too common in Ireland, the country with the fewest trees in Europe. There are so few properly qualified tree surgeons in the country that total charlatans are entrusted with the job of making trees a little ‘neater’. The one pictured above is in a neighbour’s garden here in Chapelizod. It was for many years a most handsome, mature tree. Now for reasons that eternally elude me, its beauty has been raped by this most ugly deformation. Moreover, its chances of survival have also been curtailed: it is now much more likely to become diseased. It will also need more maintenance rather than less. All over Dublin and indeed Ireland we see this awful treatment of trees. Simply on aesthetic grounds it is unacceptable, but for a whole host of environmental reasons it is criminal. They say the Irish are visually illiterate – a point so obvious to any visitor here it hardly needs repeating – but this disregard for trees seems to me to indicate a deeper dysfunction in this strange, often wilful society. To single out only the Irish for blame is unfair, however (for all that the shortage of trees in Ireland and the widespread incompetence in their pruning makes it a greater problem than in other countries): even a casual amble along the Thames embankment in London reveals whole rows of mutilated trees, the work, presumably, of London council. See the excellent website http://66.165.117.218/topping.asp for a detailed discussion of what they describe as 'perhaps the most harmful tree pruning practice known'.Posted by Picasa