Restoring the Brosna could be one of Offaly and Westmeath’s most significant civic accomplishments

One afternoon in Kilkenny many years ago, I struck up a conversation with an older gentleman who was fly fishing on a tributary of the river Nore. Clad in waders, he cast the line across the river with a graceful flick of his wrist. I watched as the fly, made from hackle feathers to mimic an insect, landed on the water’s surface and drifted with the current.

We sat at the banks. I mentioned that I knew little about the Nore. In return, he told its story, from the underlying geology along its course – the old red sandstone of the Devil’s Bit Mountain where the Nore rises, onwards through areas of sandstone, shales and limestone – and how the tributaries of the Erkina, the Dinan, the Little Arrigle and the King’s River were formed. He described his memories of life in the river as a boy, of swarming mayflies dancing above the water, tempting the salmon and trout below. Within half an hour of his storytelling, the Nore and her tributaries felt remarkably familiar, like an old friend.

Most of us experience a river in moments – as fragments along its course – and, like individual pieces of a mosaic, we rarely understand the whole. But rivers, of course, have a life and story of their own. They shape-shift in response to natural processes over millions of years and, more recently, have been dramatically changed by the human hand.

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Offaly native John Feehan is one of our great storytellers of nature. The professional geologist and botanist has shared his immense knowledge by writing the stories of bogs and meadows, islands and rivers, rocks and woodlands.

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Feehan’s latest book tells the story of the river Brosna. It’s the third largest tributary of the Shannon, but if you’ve never heard of it, fear not; it is, says Feehan, one of Ireland’s hidden rivers, attracting little more than a cursory mention in many tomes on the Irish landscape. For local people who live along its course, access to the river is all but gone, obscured by obstacles, vegetation and deep drainage ditches.

Feehan takes the river out of the shadows and shines a glittering light on its ancient formation. The Brosna rises in Bunbrosna in Co Westmeath and flows into the midland’s highest lake, Lough Owel, north of Mullingar. It then travels downward into Lough Ennell, past Kilbeggan and Ferbane, and meets the Shannon at Shannonharbour.

For Feehan, deciphering the rocks and underlying geology allows us to imagine how the landscape appeared millions of years ago. It is as if we were there, walking through the pre-Ice Age forests. He writes of an “ancient Brosna”, carved through the underlying limestone. This buried channel influences the southwesterly course of the river today.

Until relatively recently, the Brosna naturally followed a gloriously meandering course and, similar to the Shannon callows, occupied a far greater share of the land during winter flooding. In the 17th and 18th centuries, as corn mills and distilleries were constructed along the river and the burgeoning populations of towns like Mullingar required new sources of drinking water, the river’s course was changed. A drainage scheme, described by Feehan as a “remarkable feat of engineering and a gargantuan task for the men engaged in its execution”, straightened the river, curbing its curves and deepened its channel.

This provided much-needed employment for local people and created new land for farmers to graze their cattle and grow crops of oats and wheat. But in return, the life in the river has slipped away, including the trees that grew along the banks (the water-loving alder was so prominent along the Brosna that it could have been considered Offaly’s “county tree”). Many of the insects found in the Brosna are sensitive to pollution, most notably the stoneflies, which Feehan notes are now “almost absent”.

Like all good storytellers, Feehan pays attention to the small things. The larvae of blackflies, still numerous in the river, live in the fast-flowing parts. Feehan describes how they attach to stones in the river by sticky silk, which they cling to “by means of a rosette of tiny hooks”. This anchors them as they sway in the water, filtering out food, but they will detach from the stone if the current is too strong.

“But watch closely,” he writes. “You will see it haul itself back to its pad by means of a slender thread of silk, which it spun in the instant the current carried it away and which still anchors it securely to its home pad.” When the larvae pupate, the adult fly must emerge in the air, not the water, but millions of years of evolution have perfected the solution.

He strikes a note of hope for the Brosna in the future, ‘cleansed of pollution…where nature is allowed to weave its web of slow return’

“As the adult develops, a film of air builds up inside the pupal skin. When this splits and the fly emerges, it does so enclosed in a bubble of air that immediately floats to the surface, where it bursts, liberating the fly, which instantly takes wing and flies to nearby vegetation to pause and take a first look at the world that lay above its watery nursery.”

Stories, like rivers, have a beginning, middle and end. As the Brosna’s biographer, Feehan imagines a better end for the river than its current state. He strikes a note of hope for the Brosna in the future, “cleansed of pollution…where nature is allowed to weave its web of slow return”. Restoring the Brosna could be one of Offaly and Westmeath’s most significant civic accomplishments; in telling its story, Feehan will undoubtedly spur people to action.

The River Brosna: An Environmental History by John Feehan is available in the Offaly History shop in Tullamore and online from offalyhistory.com.

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