Irish Landscape - Tapa dura

Here, magnificently told for the general reader, is the story of how Ireland's landscape has been shaped by successive events and forces from 2000 million years ago to the present day.
The author is Professor of Quaternary Studies (a chair typically created to accommodate his Protean energies) at Trinity College, Dublin; and has recently been elected President of the Royal Irish Academy. All his life Professor Mitchell has been studying - and in the field as much as the laboratory and library - Irish geology, geography, meteorology, botany, zoology, archaeology and human history. It is this impatience with the traditional frontiers between disciplines that makes him a notable teacher and this a unique book. It is a mark of its brilliance that the reader looking for a comparable account of the landscape of England, Wales, Scotland - indeed of any European or American country - will look in vain.
The first part describes Ireland's geological origins; the second covers the fluctuations of heat and cold that set the scene for man's arrival in the land; the third recounts the part that man has played in moulding the landscape - through the devastations of the nineteenth century to the present day. The text is thorough yet clear, and well illustrated with photographs and line drawings.