Wild Ireland Comes Alive Through Grounded Ecological Hope
This nature writing stands out because rewilding is made local and concrete. Bogs, forests, seas and restoration work turn ecological hope into something visible, giving readers urgency without reducing the subject to despair.
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Setting The Land Free: Visions Of A Rewilded Ireland
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Wild Ireland Comes Alive Through Grounded Ecological Hope
This nature writing stands out because rewilding is made local and concrete. Bogs, forests, seas and restoration work turn ecological hope into something visible, giving readers urgency without reducing the subject to despair.
- Book Synopsis
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In Setting the Land Free, award-winning author and rewilder Eoghan Daltun explores the state of rewilding in Ireland, as the beginnings of a mass movement - the like of which has been successfully modelled in Scotland - grows in impact and stature. As he considers the radical shift that is needed in our relationship with our natural world, he takes to the high roads and by-roads to meet with those at the forefront of change.
The book provides an inspiring vision for rewilding in an Irish context, creating refuges for wild nature in a landscape that has been given over almost entirely to human extractive processes, such as industrialised farming or monoculture plantation forestry.
From those involved in bog ecosystem restoration, to native species reintroduction, to rewilding at sea, forest rewilding and much more, Eoghan meets with the pioneers at the cutting edge of the transformed relationship with nature required for the future of diverse species and habitats, and for ecological balance. A courageous book that forges a vision that is as inspiring as it is urgent.
Ideal for readers who:
- Care about rewilding, biodiversity and Ireland's natural future.
- Respond to environmental nonfiction grounded in real people and local projects.
- Prefer nature writing that connects bogs, forests, seas and species restoration.
- Savour hopeful but urgent thinking about changing our relationship with the land.
- About The Author
- Eoghan Daltun is a sculpture conservator, a farmer, an author and, above all, a rewilder. Reared in Dublin, he has travelled widely, as well as living abroad in London, Paris and Prague. He spent seven years studying sculpture in Carrara, Tuscany. In 2009, he sold the cottage in Kilmainham he had rebuilt mostly single-handed from a ruin - dating back to at least the 1750s - using the original stone. The proceeds went to buy a long-abandoned 73-acre farm overlooking the Atlantic near Eyeries on the Beara Peninsula, West Cork. Much of the land was covered in wild native forest which, although very beautiful, was ecologically wrecked by severe overgrazing and invasion by a host of alien plant species. Over the years since, Eoghan has brought life in all its explosive vibrancy back to the land, with new temperate rainforest spontaneously forming where previously there was only barren grass. Restoring such an incredibly rich ecosystem has taken him on a fantastic voyage of discovery, which he charted in his memoir An Irish Atlantic Rainforest: A Personal Journey into the Magic of Rewilding, which won an An Post Irish Book Award in 2022. Rewilding most of the land, and High Nature Value farming the rest, has given him plenty of time to reflect deeply on the ecological crisis unfolding at terrifying speed all around us, and its solutions. Eoghan followed this up in 2024 with a stunning full-colour illustrated book, The Magic of an Irish Rainforest: A Visual Journey, in which he travelled the length and breadth of Ireland photographing areas of temperate rainforest, in a bid to illustrate their beauty and immense ecological value, and to document, in almost all cases, their state of decline. Eoghan lives on the farm with his two sons, Liam and Seánie, their collie dog, Charlie, and five Dexter cows: Maggie, Gertrude, Amber, Nelly and Minnie. Setting the Land Free: Visions of a Rewilded Ireland is his third book.
- Product Details
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- ISBN
- 9781399749473
- Format
- Hardback
- Publisher
- Hachette Books Ireland, (10 September 2026)
- Number of Pages
- 336
- Weight
- 598 grams
- Language
- English
- Dimensions
- 236 x 154 x 38 mm
- Categories: