One afternoon last week, when the weather was just warm enough for summer clothes, but with a wool cardigan on hand, I walked out along the Cunnigar in Waterford. This sandy spit reaches three kilometres into Dungarvan Bay and stops just a few hundred metres short of the town at the far end.
The two sides of this spit feel entirely different. On the seaward side, the shingle beach is full of shells, sand and sea glass, the rattle and clink resonating as the sea waters draw back. The muddy bay side, which I faced, felt like a sheltered, much calmer space, full of wading birds, rushes, dune habitats and salt marsh.
The place looked a little forsaken.
I walked along the spit. Against the gilded light, the matte blue-grey of sea holly held out. It looks like a thistle, but is actually a member of the carrot family, related to cow parsley and hogweed.
The waxy surface of the leathery, spiny leaves acts like wax on a jacket, waterproofing the plant against the continuous salt spray and helping to ensure it doesn’t lose moisture. Sea holly roots reach down a couple of metres into the mobile sand; what is visible above ground is just a fraction of the plant itself. It’s evolved to survive the foredune, and it’s a good indicator – where it’s thriving – that the fragile dune system is intact. I spotted intensely coloured saffron-orange butterflies – probably clouded yellows, although I couldn’t get near enough to them to be certain – flying across the sea holly, landing and closing their wings to reveal a less impressive, dustier yellow-green.
I walked halfway up. Black cattle wandered loose, their heads down as they grazed the green patches of grass. Hints of autumn were everywhere. A woman walked by, her two hands cupped full of blackberries – “they’re for my grandchildren,” she told me. In Irish, this spit is known as An Coinigéar, the “rabbit warren”, and it’s a name that can’t be older than rabbits, which are non-native to Ireland and only arrived 800 or so years ago with the Anglo-Normans.
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Dungarvan was right there. The spit was once a shortcut to the town. In the 1880s, the building of a bridge was proposed, but it never happened. A family ran a ferry with two rowing boats – those who could pay would wave a white handkerchief when they wanted to be picked up. Everyone else waded across. For generations, women from An Rinn carried baskets of freshly caught fish to Dungarvan market, then returned later in the day. Each year, in late summer, several hundred people wade the river Brickey – the small river that comes into the harbour from the west – and walk the spit to Baile na nGall in the Gaeltacht at the far end. The date of this annual marking of the old tradition, the “Cunnigar Crossing”, is set by the lowest possible tide.
The Brickey is a small river in a very large valley here, and it’s a valley that was cut by the river Blackwater, which used to run east from Cappoquin and pour into the sea at Dungarvan. But at some point it turned sharply southwards, cutting through the hills, and it never came back, and reaches the sea at Youghal instead. Three smaller rivers flow into Dungarvan Harbour – the Colligan from the Comeragh Mountains, the Brickey from the west, and the Glendine from the north – but none of them is remotely equal in size to the basin they empty into. This is the limestone-floored valley the Blackwater abandoned, with no large river reaching it. The place is essentially marine.
On a sandy bank, with my back turned to the sea, I sat down and watched the birds. Curlew flew hard and fast just above the waterline and joined a group of oystercatchers and godwits at the rushes on the southern side. As the days shorten there will be more than 20,000 birds out here on the mud, many of them coming from places far colder than this: internationally important numbers of light-bellied brent geese will be here by October – they breed in the Canadian high Arctic and then cross Greenland and Iceland to reach Irish estuaries, where they’ll remain for the winter. They’re joined by dunlin, golden plover and black-tailed godwit in a kind of winter abundance that will mean Dungarvan Bay will draw many of us in to watch these birds during the colder, shorter days ahead on the Cunnigar.
These birds are protected, but the shingle they’re on is not. Dungarvan Harbour is a Ramsar Convention site and Special Protection Area but with no Special Area of Conservation. In 2017, 30 vegetated shingle sites were surveyed across Ireland, and of the 27 sites holding the habitat, the Cunnigar was the only one outside the network of legal protection. It scored poorly, with 26 per cent of its vegetated shingle gone since the early 2000s – mainly due to recreational pressure – and with deteriorating structure, function and prospects. Earlier this year Waterford council minutes record members discussing the levels of erosion of the Cunnigar – one councillor later said that it’s happening at an “alarming” rate – and asking for nature-based solutions to be found. It needs a bit of care and protection.
Across in the rushes, an egret, snow-white against the dark mud, appeared. Little egrets were rare in Ireland until the late 1990s, when a pair bred in Fota in Cork. They’re now in almost every coastal county.