Another Life: Small is beautiful Irelands lakes, ponds and pools

Remote corner: swans on Dooaghtry Lough. Illustration: Michael Viney

My favourite lake lies at the end of the machair, the grassy plain behind the dunes. Im not sure I can even call it a lake, at least officially, as the EUs water framework directive says a lake has to span at least 50 hectares, and I doubt if this one makes even an old-fashioned acre. But it has long been Dooaghtry Lough on the maps, and thats good enough.

On a crisp January morning the sun glows in the reeds and gleams, perhaps, on a pair of mute swans, taking refuge from the whoopers bugling on the big lagoon next door. Or the peace may yield to a squealing swoop of choughs, bouncing between heights, each beak a bright flash of vermilion.

In this remote corner sea-feeding otters come to rinse the salt and fish scales from their fur. Their pawprints begin at the edge of the tide, print a line on the sand before disappearing into a watery ravine in the dunes, then furrow up through mosses and liverworts to the lake. At its moist margins, too, a hand lens finds tiny snails, Vertigo-somethings, rare survivors from a chilly antiquity.

Pristine and protected, Dooaghtry is a rarity among some 12,200 small lakes across Ireland placid lakes on peatland and pools in raised bogs, park ponds, constructed wetlands, reservoirs and turloughs, rich lakes over limestone and hungry ones on mountains. Only 4 per cent of them are more than 50 hectares, and some 8,000 dont span even a hectare.

Like the streams that help make up Irelands 74,000km of rivers, relatively few have attracted much attention to their chemistry or aquatic life, yet they contribute powerfully to the islands biodiversity and fish life and to its drinkable water.

The figures come from Martin McGarrigle in a special issue of the Royal Irish Academys journal Biology and Environment, edited by Mary Kelly-Quinn and Jan-Robert Baars. There is a growing realisation across Europe, writes McGarrigle, that small is beautiful insofar as small water bodies are concerned.

His special concern is with diffuse pollution, the sort that seeps out from farmland, forestry and septic tanks into ditches and winding streams, thence to small lakes and their outflows into tributaries and rivers. It is only here that monitoring picks up the pollution that gets reported, under the water framework directive, to the European Commission. Tracking it back, McGarrigle says, needs boots on the ground.

His is one of a dozen studies in the issue, called Small Water Bodies: Importance, Threats and Knowledge Gaps. Looking at streams as narrow, tumbling cascades from mountain lakes, threads of water woven from the bogs, pools welling up from deep limestone springs, it is hard to credit how much life they can support, even in their first couple of kilometres.

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Another Life: Small is beautiful Irelands lakes, ponds and pools