The Way That I Went

Written by Ireland's greatest field botanist and published in 1937, this enduring celebration of the Irish landscape is the result of five years of weekends spent walking a mazy 5000 miles across the hills and bogs, swimming through flooded caverns, staying out all night on islands, sifting fossil bones and exploring cattle-tramped tombs. That was when conservation was still in the future, farmers welcomed rambling strangers, bogs were intact, bungalows, cars, ESB poles and chain saws were absent, and the countryside was largely tourist-free. Preaeger was not simply a botanist but, according to Bellamy, also a 'geologist, zoologist, archaeologist, Irish Naturalist Optimus Omnium'. His journey began in Donegal and ended in Kerry. Along the way he discovered much, including the passage tombs of Carrowkeel in Sligo which he was first to enter.