Paul
Murphy
Cork
County Council
Thank
you chairman, ladies and gentleman welcome to
My
name is Paul Murphy. I’m a Senior Planner with Cork County Council and what I
am going to do as briefly as I can is to go through what we have been doing on
landscape and landscape character assessment in Cork County Council in the last
while. I work in the policy section
of Cork County Council, the Planning Policy Unit.
What
I want to do as briefly as I can is to outline what in terms of landscape and
policies on landscape, what we have done, what we are doing and what we hope to
do. The past, the present and the future as it where.
In
We
have designated scenic routes and they are somewhat out of date to some extent.
In 2003 we published our new County Development Plan and as well as having these
designated scenic routes in that plan we are trying to introduce for the first
time in Cork County the concept of Landscape Character Assessment as indicated
by Bruce earlier as part of the government guidelines and landscape character
assessment.
We
use the landscape character assessment to identify areas, strategic areas for
wind farms and wind farm development and that is in our development plan.
We also identified the landscape character areas and we worked on the
areas for the county at large and we broke it down to the smallest units
practicabke. Which is 16 generic
landscape character areas for the county and I will show a slide of that in the
minute. That is what we have done.
What
we are currently doing in
We
published earlier this year 10 in all, the 10 local area plans that are relevant
to the landscape issue and we are three quarters of the way through the
democratic / legal process of these local area plans and they have covered the
entire county of Cork and have focused primarily on the villages and on the
landscape in the county outside the major towns and landscape character
assessment we felt this is an opportunity to bring forward the landscape
character assessment process as identified in government guidelines and bring it
to the next stage and it formed a significant part in the local area plans in
the spring.
We
went out to 24 different exhibitions around the county in early January looking
for public response to our local area plans.
We had 24 public exhibitions in the villages of
This
leads on to the next thing what do we need to do, what to do in the future.
We
need to complete the landscape character area process and as I said earlier we
need to review our scenic routes in the county and we
need to marry landscape character assessment and some method of reviewing
the scenic routes.
Now
we are very conscious that there is a risk involved in removing old designations
of scenic routes because it has been one of the primary bulwarks to
inappropriate development not only in Cork but probably in Ireland so we have a
big challenge ahead of us how to review the scenic routes and how to move
forward with the landscape character assessment, are they compatible, can one
frame the other or can they be combined. We
have a big issue and it is a big challenge we will face in the next two years.
What
I will do now I will briefly just go through these images
These
are the 16 generic areas in
I
just have six examples here of the actual landscape character sites
This
one is Broad fertile
The
next one is Glaciated t or
Just
another example of Ridged and Peak Upland, you will see quite a bit of that
hopefully on Saturday as well as you go down towards west
finally
Rolling Patchwork Farmland,,
This
is the kind of landscape I was born into and funnily enough one of the
ironies of it is that if you look at that landscape carefully
(and it is to me rather attractive but of course I would think it is
wouldn’t I because I was reared in a similar place)
it has changed quite dramatically since
I was young. I would like to
think I’m not that old but that landscape would have looked quite different
before. That field you see in the foreground, that large green field, would have
been divided up with hedgerows mostly Hawthorn and Whitethorn hedgerows and the
landscape would have looked quite different and the interesting thing about that
is that in that landscape, the changes that have occurred did not require
permission or planning permission. The removal of hedgerows
have led to the loss of
natural habitat and all the other things that go with it.
It
was one of possibly the biggest changes in the Irish landscape in the last 30
years certainly would have been the
hedgerow removal and I think it is fairly clear to see or not see depending on
where you come from.
Finally
I will leave you with a quotation and I think Terry mentioned this at the start,
I didn’t know he was going to quote the same man and it not James Joyce.
Though today is Blooms Day but I
couldn’t find any Joyce quotes. , For me this summarises a lot of what
landscape is about.
‘Landscape
is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory
as from layers of rock’
Extract
from Simon Schama, “Landscape and Memory”
Anybody
with an interest in this topic should read this book which I highly recommend.
Thank you very much.