The trouble with chardonnay conservationists, and other books - ANOTHER LIFE WHEN ITS first, majestic edition appeared, 14 years ago, I described it as an atlas with attitude – this from its weighty protest against the vandalising of the Irish countryside, already well in progress. Digesting the subsequent horrors of the Tiger years, the second edition of the Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape (Cork University Press, €59) verges at times on apoplexy. It rails against “sclerotic engineer-run” local authorities, the failures of “chardonnay conservationists” and planners who “presided over an appalling collapse of landscape quality”. But Prof Kevin Whelan, Ireland’s most acute and passionate rural historian, does more than let off steam. His essay at the heart of the new edition urges a long-overdue reorganisation of public life, swelling upwards from parish and townland. He also offers a vision for rural landscape and society, led by rediscovering “Deep Ireland”. Philosophically, this “represents seasonal, ritual, communal time rather than biographical individual time”. More simply it exhorts “renewed respect for the local, the vernacular, the traditional and the distinctive”, not least the spirit that moves within the GAA and the local Tidy Towns committee. As a geographer with a strong economic awareness, Whelan delves into options that make much timely sense, among them more powerful marketing of artisan food to Europe from a “clean, green” Ireland embodied in the image of the traditional family farm. Our landscape, he says, has been surprisingly forgiving of recent excesses, and as we now have enough new buildings for the next generation the challenge is to “restore and reuse”. But the drive towards a living, characterful landscape, with room for both nature and a human right to roam, will have to find its spark locally – “dragooning, compulsion and adversarial relations with local communities simply do not work.” All of which eminently fits this great book for the bedside table (plus supportive beanbag) of our new President, whose aspirations to the ideal and those of Whelan are clearly in close accord. With renewal of at least a third of its content, fresh regional case studies from new young geographers, and even more abundant and revelatory maps and photographs, it is also a definitive synthesis of the countryside, its habitats and its history that belongs in every Irish home and school. The first edition, also edited by Whelan, with the geographer Prof Fred Aalen and the cartographer Dr Mathew Stour, sold more than 21,000 copies. The second edition deserves to do quite as well.

This is a remarkable work, and there cannot be a national community of historians or environmentalists anywhere else in the world that will not envy the Irish achievement.

Superlatives are inadequate to describe this magnificent Atlas. I cannot do it justice; you must see it yourself to appreciate it properly. Give yourself plenty of time to savor it, because each new page is an entrancing treasure trove, and you will want to linger over each and every one . . . The volume celebrates the glory and the beauty of the entire island, both north and south.