Setting the Land Free

Eoghan Daltun is a sculpture conservator, a farmer, an author and, above all, a rewilder.Reared in Dublin, he has travelled widely, as well as living abroad in London, Paris and Prague. He spent seven years studying sculpture in Carrara, Tuscany.In 2009, he sold the cottage in Kilmainham he had rebuilt mostly single-handed from a ruin - dating back to at least the 1750s - using the original stone. The proceeds went to buy a long-abandoned 73-acre farm overlooking the Atlantic near Eyeries on the Beara Peninsula, West Cork. Much of the land was covered in wild native forest which, although very beautiful, was ecologically wrecked by severe overgrazing and invasion by a host of alien plant species.Over the years since, Eoghan has brought life in all its explosive vibrancy back to the land, with new temperate rainforest spontaneously forming where previously there was only barren grass. Restoring such an incredibly rich ecosystem has taken him on a fantastic voyage of discovery, which he charted in his memoir An Irish Atlantic Rainforest: A Personal Journey into the Magic of Rewilding, which won an An Post Irish Book Award in 2022. Rewilding most of the land, and High Nature Value farming the rest, has given him plenty of time to reflect deeply on the ecological crisis unfolding at terrifying speed all around us, and its solutions. Eoghan followed this up in 2024 with a stunning full-colour illustrated book, The Magic of an Irish Rainforest: A Visual Journey, in which he travelled the length and breadth of Ireland photographing areas of temperate rainforest, in a bid to illustrate their beauty and immense ecological value, and to document, in almost all cases, their state of decline.Eoghan lives on the farm with his two sons, Liam and Seánie, their collie dog, Charlie, and five Dexter cows: Maggie, Gertrude, Amber, Nelly and Minnie. Setting the Land Free: Visions of a Rewilded Ireland is his third book.