How I Almost Found an Endangered Snail in the Wild West of Ireland: A Place Where Rare Beauty and the Environment Prevail

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A woman was walking her clutch bag-sized dog Toby along Streedagh Beach near Grange, Ireland. Since I love dogs and miss my friend Brogan, who died a few weeks ago, I try to fill the hole in my heart by asking other people about their dogs.

Toby looked like a Yorkie, only he was deep sienna brown with coarse hair. “I don’t really know what breed he is, surely a mixture of everything,” the young lady replied when I asked her about her pup. “He thinks he’s the boss.”

Since Kathleen and I were the only other people on the beach, this led to a short conversation with the woman, who lived nearby and was enjoying the suffuse celebration of North Atlantic waves in a conservation area. Satisfied with my daily dog fix, I asked about the pristine dunes.

“There’s a snail here that’s found nowhere else,” she remarked, just before we ended the chat by walking back to our car. The tiny creature is a narrow—mouthed whorl snail (vertigo angustior), which generally lives in wet, marshy grasslands or dunes.

I love random walks, whether they are in a city or a natural area. I never know what I will encounter. Now that I was in proximity of rare fauna, the sinewy waves pounding the striated ridges of the beach energized me. Would I actually see this rare species in this dune conservation area?

Although the dunes and beach at Streedagh are spectacular, they are not the main attraction in this small town north of Sligo on what the Irish tourist board calls the “Wild Atlantic Way.” In 1588, a trio of Spanish ships – remnants of the doomed Spanish Armada – were splintered by a storm on the rocky shoals in this Western Irish enclave.

Captain Francisco De Cuellar, lumbering home after the defeat of the Spanish invasion due to the punishing weather and nimble seamanship of Sir Francis Drake, was trying to return to Spain when hurricane-force winds pummeled his ships into the sandbars and razor-like escarpment along the coast. Some 1,100 men were lost. De Cuellar was one of the few who eventually made it back to Spain.

The defeat of the Armanda, the largest and best-financed navy in the world at the time, was a painful pivot in history for the Spanish Empire. England under the “Virgin Queen” Elizabeth would not marry a Spanish nobleman. Elizabethan England also would not return to the domination of the Roman Catholic Church after Queen Bess’s father – Henry the VIII – broke off from Rome and declared himself head of the Church of England and Ireland. That troubled union of church and state remains today in the United Kingdom despite three civil wars.

Shakespeare, who was beginning his career in London at the time, wisely never touched upon religion in his plays or sonnets. Meanwhile Europe, led by English thinkers such as Francis Bacon, was mounting the tide of new thinking that explored powerful new ideas in natural and political philosophy. Religion as a state-guiding institution, which would haunt England and Ireland well into the 20^th Century, would be gobsmacked by unforgiving Atlantic waves here.

People have been living in the Sligo area for more than 5,700 years. Sligo is also Yeats country, once the home of Nobel Prize-winning poet William Butler Yeats. He’s buried in the shadow of Ben Bulben, the table-top mountain that glowers over the countryside. Multiple sites celebrate his presence and work.

Still, I was not immediately reminded of history at Streedagh. The waves at low tide reverberated rhythmic music that reminded me that nature is a relentlessly inventive composer with chords both grandiose and as small as a snail. Nature has the last word in any history. Although we were there to enjoy the blessings of the Irish West Coast, where ponies and horses roam free – and my daughters rode them on the beach – it was a pleasure not to see the usual landmarks of human habitation. Out of our back patio window (below) we could observe the tide and stars serenaded by crows and gulls. No massive resorts spilling ambient light into the skies.

Did I actually see the rare snail? No, but it didn’t matter if I did. I knew I was in an environment that people deeply cared about. Although it wasn’t a tangible revelation, the awareness that such a rare place was being preserved for eternity was more than enough. Love brought us here. Certainly, it can help us save places like this — or our own backyards.

Note: This is the first of three installments on Ireland. Next week: Some beautiful things happening in Belfast.

Vincit Omnia Veritas

(Truth Conquers All)

Noli Temere (Don’t be afraid)

This essay was not produced by AI. I am a sentient writer, journalist, author, environmentalist, speaker, musician and elected county forest preserve commissioner who’s written 19 books and contributed to The New York Times, PBS/Next Avenue, Bloomberg and Reuters. To contact me about speaking and writing or offer even more dangerous ideas, email me: johnwasik@gmail.com