Wood engravers who carved out a niche

Another Life: My solitary box bush stands just about two feet high after almost two decades of growth from a slip. It is my one crude attempt at topiary, minimal annual haircut (with scissors, indeed) having produced a basic, evergreen sphere. It is not, alas, of the treeforming strain, which in time - a good deal of time - might have nourished another ball or two on top, or even a cockerel.

But topiary is the very least of the arts to be nourished by this tree, brought north by the Romans to the island next door. Its golden timber, very smooth, hard, dense and heavy, made it the choice for carving religious statuettes, mathematical instruments, weavers' shuttles, bobbins, wooden screws and chessmen.

Then, in about 1790, a Northumbrian artist and naturalist called John Bewick discovered the qualities of boxwood endgrain, so uniform as to be virtually grainless and accepting a line in any direction from a fine cutting tool. His work supplanted the crude medieval woodcut with the infinitely superior art and skill of wood-engraving.

An engraved block of end-grain box will print almost endless copies, and Bewick's own work - leafy vignettes of hunters, anglers, birds, and so on - has been reproduced ever since (nowadays photographically and often for nothing) as atmospheric decoration for "country" books.

As printing technology changed, wood engraving survived as the dwindling province of artists prepared to take the time it needs, and to risk a slip of the burin (the engraving tool), which could wreck days or weeks of work. English boxwood has become increasingly scarce and expensive, and any block larger than the natural diameter of a slender branch has to be built of several smaller pieces, all meticulously seasoned, matched and dovetailed without perceptible join.

In Britain, which led the renaissance of wood engraving early last century (Eric Gill, Gertrude Hermes, Eric Ravilious were among the outstanding names), some 70 artists still depend mainly on a single provider, Chris Daunt of Gateshead.

He also supplies Ireland's only woodengraving artist, Jeffrey Morgan of Co Down, whose work in a beautiful new book immortalises the landscape and wildlife on my doorstep.

Carrigskeewaun, beyond the lakes, is also the fount of much of Michael Longley's best poetry, and it is the long friendship between the two men that has borne fruit in The Lake Without a Name: Poems of Mayo, just published by Blackstaff Press of Belfast.

This is one of those posh and strokable, cloth-bound books with pages that lie flat when you open them. Their heavy paper lifts ink from the wood in rich and velvety blacks, yet there's a crispness even to the finest white lines, so that whooper swans by moonlight or the feathers of a peregrine shimmer with their own illumination. Such immaculate bookmaking, in a limited and signed edition (50 of 275 are left as I write) makes £150 a logical sort of price.

Jeffrey Morgan took a year over his 29 engravings. The art goes into the original creation and design, every line and chiselpeck considered in advance, their tones and textures conjuring water, fur, rock, the hair of a bumblebee or a special light in the sky. Then comes the unforgiving craft, the block resting on a leathercovered sandbag and swivelled about to engrave, say, the shining circle of a falcon's eye. All breath stills as the point of the tool swoops on.

For Michael Longley, the book celebrates more than 30 years of visiting Carrigskeewaun from Belfast with his family, and the minting, then or later, of the intimate, evocative poems that have helped to bring him so many literary honours (not least, as he would agree, his inclusion in the Republic's Leaving Cert syllabus).

The lake without a name lies beside the cottage he borrows from ornithologist David Cabot. It was once a sandy arm of the sea, and, the way the world is going, may soon be such again. New houses mushroom - almost overnight, it seems - along the road above the shore, so that a landscape engraved to its rocky bones by wind and rain is made to feel suddenly fragile. The very first time Longley walked along the strand with Jeffrey Morgan, they saw bottlenose dolphins, an otter "capering out of the waves" and five whooper swans, bugling their way to the lake.

The Lake Without a Name preserves and treasures a time and place in the countryside at once special to nature yet haunted by a particular past. The book's twin arts seem fated to remember what is lost, even before it is entirely gone.

preserves and treasures a time and place in the countryside at once special to nature yet haunted by a particular past. The book's twin arts seem fated to remember what is lost, even before it is entirely gone.