On Tuesday 16th July, we visited the Michael Davitt Museum. The Museum is a community enterprise project housed in a pre-penal Church in the beautiful village of Straide, Co. Mayo. As the curator of the museum told us as we arrived, the museum runs almost entirely off the €5 entrance fee it charges visitors (which includes a short film, coffee or tea, and a free pass to visit the Ceide fields). There were several people in and out of the museum, including the man who gave us a tour, who were keen to host us.  The feel of the place and the people – the care taken, the pride in what it stood for – was reminiscent of Group Water Schemes we have visited.

Michael Davitt is most famous for his role in establishing the Land League in the 1870s. He was a social reformer and his politics were radical, calling for an end to Landlordism and collective ownership of land. He was born in Straide but his family were evicted during the famine. They moved to Haslingden, a town just outside Manchester where there was work in the cotton mills. Like so many, Davitt and his family were victims twice – driven off the land and then forced to work under terrible conditions in the factories. Davitt started work in the cotton mills at the age of 9, working 12 hour shifts. At the age of 11 he had his right arm amputated after it was caught and mangled in a cogwheel. He didn’t receive any compensation but the owner of the cotton mill decided to pay for Davitt’s education in a local Weslyan school. Davitt learnt to read and write. In 1857 he had begun working again but by night took evening classes in the Mechanics’ Institute, and here learnt about Irish history.

Earlier in the day we visited a Group Water Scheme in Roscommon. A farmer who was passing on his tractor stopped to talk to us as he remembered when the scheme was set up in the late 1970s. We talked about the challenges facing the scheme and various issues affecting the water quality. The caretaker of the scheme said that the greatest threat was the loss of people: ‘without people you have no water scheme’. This led to a conversation about what it was that was causing the loss of people. The farmer was clear: it was Government policy favouring the expansion of big dairy farms and big forestry plantations. He also talked about everything else that was being closed – post offices, small farms, hospitals. Rural Ireland was becoming an impossible place to live. It wasn’t the first time we have heard this but it was hard not to recall it as we heard about Davitt and the Land League, particularly the campaigns to stop the expansion of grasslands for cattle.

Something we hadn’t appreciated about Davitt, or the Land League, was the extent to which they were connected to international struggles and movements of the time. Along the bottom of one of the posters was a small verse calling for solidarity between peasants, landworkers and indigenous peoples from North America to Peru to Australia. Davitt was an international figures – apparently his strategies of peaceful resistance influenced Gandhi. One side of the museum was covered with documents and artifacts illustrating the extent of Davitt’s travels and recogntion. In Australia, his visits brought tens of thousands of people out on to the streets. Some of the posters marking the events appear handmade.

Outside the Museum there is a recently installed memorial plaque to mark the events of 1966 when farmers demanded rights and marched to Dublin. We asked a man about the memorial and he told us it had been put there by the Mayo branch of the IFA and that it had been controversial. Davitt, he said, would not have supported the big farmers today who are represented by the IFA. He fought for an end to Landlordism so that collective land ownership could be instituted, ensuring a fair livelihood for tenant farmers.

After the Museum we stopped by Moore Hall on the way to a Community Catchment meeting in Partry. The old walled garden had been bare back in February when we last visited and diggers had been moving the earth in preparation for some development. It was like a different place now in mid-summer, full of purple loosestrife and bright green growth. The scene was hopeful.

It has been a couple of months since we were last down at Lough Carra. The changes are remarkable – mid-summer and the foliage is dense and green, the thick hedges smattered with purple vetch and wild roses. Hay is being cut, or out to dry. Many of the fields were a bright, uniform green and from a far even seemed to glow. We have learnt a lot over the course of this project about how these green fields are not as benign as they may seem. The green glow is a healthy sign for a certain type of farmer – it means more grass, more productivity. But maintaining this level of productivity involves heavy inputs of organic and inorganic chemicals, in the form of slurry, inorganic fertilizers, and herbicides. The soil can’t absorb all these chemicals. The excess has to go somewhere, migrating through ditches, rivers, and underground, until much of it arrives in the lake.

Eutrophication is when excess nutrients (namely phosphorus and nitrogen) generate intense plant growth in a body of water. The origin of the word is Greek – eutrophus, or ‘well-fed’. We saw signs of eutrophication on this trip – particularly in the choked rivers and streams that feed the lake. Two things that people most often refer to when describing changes on the lake over the past two decades are the increase in reeds, and the changing colour of the lake – the mottled surface of light and dark blue which indicates the growth of weeds on the white marl bottom, and a green tinge to the water from algae. The presence of reeds and the changing composition of the lake’s colour evidence an over-abundance of nutrients. Another, less easily detectable sign of eutrophication in the lake is a change in biodiversity. When plant growth in the lake dies back, bacteria consume dissolved oxygen as they break down the organic matter. This affects the ecology of the lake in complex ways. The mayfly is particularly sensitive to oxygen depletion, and was, at least, an important source of food for the lake fish. Once ‘like locusts in May’, we were told, the mayfly are now hard to find. In Carra, the build-up of nutrients has undoubtedly affected the lake but these affects have not been documented and are hard to demonstrate conclusively. Nor are they the outcome of a single, discrete event, but rather the creeping  manifestation of a slow, extended process that is hard to pinpoint or resolve.

Earlier in the day, we had also returned to familiar areas on Lough Carra, noting subtle changes in the plant life growing in and around the water. As we drove around the lake, we were also struck by the colour of many of the fields in the area, given it was mid-January. It had so far been a mild winter and many fields were a deep saturated green. We saw the equipment that farmers were reading for the opening of slurry spreading after a several-months-long closed period.

On a trip to Co. Mayo to attend the monthly meeting of the Lough Carra Catchment Association, we spent some time at Moore Hall. Burned down during the Irish Civil War in 1923, the ruins of Moore Hall are an important place for many who care about the lake and the area’s history. Moore Hall and those who resided there play important roles in the region’s past and the stories told of area’s experience of the famine. It also has a symbolic role in understandings of Lough Carra’s more recent changes. Moore Hall inspires memories of how the area, and the lake, looked just a few decades ago. The area around Moore Hall has become heavily forested and the home’s clear view of the lake is now obscured by trees and foliage. A local foresty company operates nearby and until recently owned the land at Moore Hall. In 2018, Mayo County Council bought Moore Hall from the forestry company to redevelop the area into a local tourist attraction.

Before we went to the meeting, we had a chance to visit a two other parts of Lough Carra.  The smell of the air clearly indicated that the closed period for slurry spreading had just ended; the smell of fertilizer was strong in the air. At one point in the southwest, we saw swans and other birds, but our view of the lake were made partial by the towering reeds all along the shore. The rain came in and out while we were there, creating impressive clouds backlit by the sun. But the water, maybe from the rain or maybe because of the status of the water in that location, was more cloudy than where we went next, and the bottom of the lake looked murkier. We have been told so much about the distinctive marl bottom to the lake and the effect this has on the colour of the water but so far we haven’t been able to see beyond the cloudy water and brown sediment below. Travelling further north, we came to the ruin of Castle Bourke, the home of the Anglo-Norman Bourke family, nestled into the side of a hill. Below the ruin, on the lake shore, we came across a stone sculpture of Jesus Christ breaking bread, salmon cooking over a fire, and a table and seats. There was a quote from the New Testament recounting when Jesus appeared to the disciples after he was crucified and asked them to break bread and eat fish with him. There was no other clue as to where it came from or why it was there. Even with the biblical reference, the form of the sculpture and where it was sited suggested something pre-Christian. Nearby, tires used to help tie down boats dotted the water’s edge. These tires provide a trace of the recreation and fishing that may originate from this point.

Our guide’s relationship with the lake has been built over many years of its use and enjoyment, a kind of relationship we have heard from others who care about and for its quality. As we skipped along the water, our guide pointed to locations where water washed over ancient histories of the lake’s use, and made note of old estates around the lake’s shores that mark important political histories. Our guide reflected on more recent memories, too, including recent winters’ ice fishing, changes to local agriculture and land use, and height of the lake’s shores as they rise and fall with the seasons. Throughout the afternoon, the sun moved in and out, and the wind was mild but cold.

As we made our way to Castle Island, we passed through reeds poking out from the lake’s shallowest parts into its deeper waters. The island, a densely wooded patch of land inside the lake, held more markers of the area’s history. We came upon the grave of Irish author George Moore that local groups habitually care for, and a ruin, one of several we have seen around the lake. Now covered by tree growth and vines it is a remnant of past infrastructures. In our short visit, we saw many ways that Lough Carra’s waters and shores embody local histories of politics, economics, and culture.