Original subtitles

The west coast of Ireland for millennia was really, I guess,

the edge of the known world.

Our ancestors had no idea what lay beyond the horizon.

The vast Atlantic was a place of complete mystery.

My name is Colin Stafford-Johnson.

I've spent 30 years working as a wildlife cameraman around the world

and I've seen some of the most beautiful places on Earth,

but somehow I'm always drawn back to the west coast of Ireland.

This is where I now call home.

Once you've lived by the sea for part of your life,

it's very hard to leave it behind.

I love its isolation and its wildness.

I've always wanted to travel the length of Ireland's Atlantic coast,

seeking out its secret places and wild creatures.

SEALS SNARL

So much of life is, sort of, timetabled

and when you don't have a timetable, you can't be late.

When you don't have a destination, you can't get lost.

I suppose, in ways, I'll be wandering up the west coast...

..and if my journey has any direction,

I guess it's roughly north.

And I think it's going to change my view

of the island that I've lived on for much of my life.

PUFFINS SQUAWK

Up till now I've spent most of my life very much really a land-lover,

but travel 100 metres from the shore

and the soundscape changes completely.

You leave the world behind.

When you think about going on a journey,

you've got to think of a place to begin

and when I thought of what it would be like to paddle up the west coast,

where will I begin, there was really only one place.

For me, the Skelligs, it's such an icon for the west of Ireland,

I guess.

Isolated, wild, desolate place.

Two jagged pyramids of sandstone,

one of them home to the second largest colony of gannets

in the world.

Come spring, some 70,000 individuals arrive on Little Skellig.

GANNETS SQUAWK

They're constantly scouring the ocean looking for food

and any fish that's within their range has very little chance.

They're doing really well here.

Year on year, this colony is getting bigger.

There's no place for another nest, it seems to be now.

This rock is now full.

There's really nowhere in the world quite like Skellig Michael.

No wonder it's a World Heritage Site, because it's truly unique.

It was a monastic settlement 1,500 years ago.

How they survived, it's just hard to imagine.

With an extraordinary decision to make,

to sail off in a boat from the west coast of Ireland to come here.

We may only be 12 miles offshore

but they can be 12 very dangerous miles.

It's just hard to imagine the effort to construct these beehive homes

and churches.

They must have been a special kind of people though,

because this wouldn't have been everyone's cup of tea.

And the monks who chose to build this monastery here

thought this place was the very edge of the world.

It was the edge of the known world for European man at that time.

The ocean, to them, was just vast and endless.

This endless void.

And the people who came here

came here to contemplate life...

..and I can't think of a better place to do it.

Tough place to do it - physically hard and challenging.

All they had to keep them company were the elements.

And the sea birds in summer.

Every year, puffins just arrive out of the blue.

They've spent the winter out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean

being tossed around in storms and it always amazes me

how they actually arrive unscathed.

They look perfect, extraordinary little birds, constantly busy,

constantly moaning and groaning and chatting to each other.

Every place you go on this island in summer,

little puffins waddling all over the place.

When they start bill tapping, a way of reaffirming the bond

is to do this little bill tapping ceremony,

and it's just something that you never tire of.

Some of the younger non-breeding birds,

they literally loaf around over these rocks, called loafing rocks,

where the young, non-breeding birds gather.

And they will just arrive and, sort of, strut around the place,

maybe with fish in their mouths

as if showing to potential future partners,

"Look, I can fish. I know this place."

One thing puffins can do, which is remarkable,

the bill is designed to catch and hold multiple fish.

While on the bill, it's got these little grooves, so as soon as

they catch the first one between the bill and their tongue

they can just, kind of, store it there and then open their bill

and catch a second one, so it's all pretty clever.

There's just one single puffling born every season

and for three months their parents' only goal

is to keep them safe and well fed.

It's only when you look at them closely you realise

that they're not just comical little guys

but they're actually constantly looking out for predators.

Here, the biggest predators are the black-backed gulls

and the herring gulls.

There are thousands of burrows on this island.

The puffins, they find sanctuary underground.

It doesn't seem it on the surface,

but it really is a jungle out here, you know?

The gulls are responsible for the puffins being pretty much

on tenterhooks all day long,

even though a puffin never really looks like it's on tenterhooks.

At night, then everything changes completely.

The day birds have now pretty much stopped calling

and the island goes strangely quiet just after sunset.

But out at sea there are birds gathering

and they're waiting to come ashore.

It's only safe for them to come ashore

under cover of darkness - complete darkness.

LOUD SQUAWKING

This is really a very Irish sound

because Manx shearwaters breed on the west coast of Ireland

in really big numbers.

There are thousands of burrows on this island

and there's great competition for those burrows,

so much so that some of the shearwaters have actually started

nesting above ground in these old beehive huts.

SHEARWATERS SQUAWK

They're calling to let their mates know that they're on their way.

You will also then hear the response coming from underground.

It's as if their mate underground has said, "Look, I'm here,

"you're in the right area,

"and I'm going to lure you into this very spot."

SHEARWATER CALLS

It's incubation time.

The partners of these birds have been sitting patiently underground,

waiting for their mates to return from the sea.

They love the darkness.

This is what protects them from predators like gulls.

They are so poor on land.

Their feet are set very far back on their bodies

and they really are very ungainly.

If you're a shearwater, you really want to land

as close to your nest as possible.

Sometimes, if there are bright nights,

the poor old bird sitting on the egg will be there for days on end,

waiting for their mate to relieve them of duty.

And they'll spend some time in each other's company, you know?

Other birds, I've often found,

they will just literally swap over without making any contact.

As soon as one arrives, the other one leaves.

Not the case with shearwaters.

SHEARWATER SQUAWKS

They start preening each other and bill tapping

and it seems like they're delighted to see each other.

Perhaps romance is not just confined to the human world.

LOUD SQUAWKING

The shearwaters spend all winter travelling around the Atlantic,

flying over as far as Brazil in search of food

and then they make their way back and find the very same burrow

that they nested in last year.

And they'll do that for possibly decades

because they're a very long-lived bird.

And this is where they find sanctuary,

like the monks did long ago.

Ireland looks really like an island from out here.

I think that's the thing about the coastal journey.

It makes you see a country in a whole new light.

The land has changed.

Human influence tends to mould the land

but that doesn't change the surface of the ocean.

That just, sort of, defines itself in some way.

It can't be tamed, as such.

Even when you set out for a day at sea by yourself,

you're never alone for long, not on the west coast of Ireland.

Even when you stop, it's not long before the common dolphins find you.

They seem to just love company.

And I love theirs.

There's something very reassuring about seeing

such a concentration of mammals along this coast

because it means there must be plenty of life left in the sea.

My favourite places in Ireland have got to be these offshore islands.

And when you come to these places, that's where you get a real sense

of wildness and a real sense of what the whole coast must have been like

once upon a time.

You really feel like you're on the very edge of Europe.

Nothing to stop the waves between here and America.

The Blasket Islands may be only 20 miles north of the Skelligs

but they feel like a totally different world.

These west coast islands would once have been intensively farmed.

The old ruins of the houses are still here

but they won't last forever.

I'm sure in another hundred years or so

there will hardly be a sign that man was ever here.

So many of the islands off the west coast have been deserted by people

in the last, you know, 60, 70, 80 years

and wildlife has moved in.

FIRE CRACKLES

If you come to the Great Blasket at the right time of year,

you'll see a sight that few people have ever witnessed.

Certainly, the islanders who lived here once

would have been very familiar with these creatures

but they never would have seen them in numbers like this.

These animals are only here now because man has left this place.

This was the main beach in front of what would have been

a bustling village once upon a time.

It's lovely to see them all lying side-by-side.

It's more like a sight you'd see on a...

A Subantarctic island or something like that.

SEALS GRUNT AND GROWL

This must be the greatest gathering of mammals in Ireland.

Some days you can see over a thousand grey seals

all hauled out on the beach.

It's their island now.

For centuries they were hunted and harassed

and the numbers have plummeted.

But grey seals, in fact, were the first protected animal in the world.

The numbers have come back but we still have a duty

and responsibility to look after them here.

They're not built for land, that's for sure.

You've got to feel sorry for them because there's nothing worse

than having an itch you can't scratch,

and if your arms are only a foot long, it's not easy getting to

all the bits of the body that you've got to get to.

Sometimes you need a neighbour to lend a hand.

They're supreme swimmers. They can dive to depths of 600 feet.

And snoozing underwater?

Not a problem.

At breeding time there's loads of aggression.

Females are barking at females

and the bulls have come to mate

so they're very aggressive towards each other.

Everyone's, sort of, trying to protect their patch.

SEAL GROWLS

The entire year is spent building up to this time.

They're doing all this on an empty stomach too.

They're being driven by hormones.

And this fighting can be difficult to watch.

It can be extremely aggressive

and they can inflict serious damage on each other.

If you become the dominant male of a patch of beach,

that means you will have access to all the females that lie therein.

Mating, for grey seals, is not a very elegant process.

The male's got to keep away other males at this time

and he's also thinking that as soon as he's finished with one female

he's got to get on to the next one.

When they leave here they will spend the next six months or so

just wandering, on their own,

because they can travel from here all the way up as far as Scotland

or down to the Bay of Biscay, wandering around foraging.

So much of Europe's coastline has been developed

and undisturbed places like this are becoming rarer and rarer

in the world now.

For great stretches of the west coast,

mountains drop straight into the ocean

and travelling just a few miles inland

can transport you to a completely different world.

These are the MacGillycuddy's Reeks, Ireland's greatest mountain range.

There's somehow always like a dull roar coming from the sea,

but that's absent here.

The lake doesn't have that same kind of energy.

Still waters like this, such a different experience.

Last night was a perfectly clear night

and as a result this seems like the coldest morning of the year so far.

There's a real chill the air.

DEERS CALL

These mountains and these valleys have borne witness to this sound

for thousands of years.

These are the calls of male red deer...

..proclaiming their territories.

The rut has begun.

And that voice...

..it's telling the other males to stay away.

Don't mess with me.

Some of them have been rolling in the mud.

Sometimes you'll get them with grass attached to their antlers

and that's all about making themselves look bigger.

The only thing that these guys have on their mind right now

is fatherhood.

It's fatherhood or failure.

It's all they live for

and if you're not strong enough and powerful enough,

then you will never become...

a father.

Biggest land animal in Ireland.

And there are several big stags displaying this morning,

but there's one of them who is just...

..bigger and more powerful than all the rest

and he's the one that's got all the females.

Once a stag has gathered a harem,

he's got to keep a very close eye on them.

Sometimes one of them will slip away,

perhaps attracted by other calls,

and as soon as he spots her

he goes back and retrieves her in no uncertain manner.

He's gone to all that trouble gathering them.

LOUD CALL

He's not for sharing.

Now, stags will do whatever they can to avoid conflict

because it's dangerous for both parties.

Those calls and that posturing is normally enough

to keep rivals apart.

But when you have two males of similar size,

sometimes neither of them will back down.

LOUD CALL

The loser looks utterly exhausted.

Everyone has seen that he's been beaten.

The females have seen it, the males have seen it,

and so he will not be feared again.

It's the sole purpose of their lives, I guess, is to...

..become fathers, and they will put all their energies into doing that.

And there are some winners but more losers.

And it seems like Stone Age man

brought this herd here 5,000 years ago,

and they've been here ever since.

They've been hunted and harassed for millennia.

But it's something very reassuring that they're still here.

They are such powerful animals and somehow

a real symbol of ancient Ireland.

Just 20 miles north as the crow flies is the Dingle Peninsula.

When you wander the dunes here by day

you have this wonderful soundscape

of skylarks and stonechats and linnets

and those sounds slowly disappear with the setting sun.

TOADS CROAK

This is a sound that you only hear in this part of the country.

Wonderful sound.

Almost seems otherworldly to me, or certainly...

..it's hard to believe sometimes that you're in Ireland.

Here in Ireland we've only got three different kinds of amphibians.

We've got a newt, we've got a frog and one toad.

For some reason the natterjack toads ended up here

and no-one quite knows how.

Some funny anomaly from the Ice Age, maybe,

and a little population got left here.

Right now there are lots of male natterjack toads

in the ponds, hidden.

And they're calling for one purpose and one purpose only

and that is to lure the females in from the surrounding dunes.

They've been waking up from their winter slumber and they're...

..listening to these calls now and I wonder what they're thinking.

But the females could be well spread out.

They could be several hundred metres away,

which doesn't sound that far but if you're only a couple of inches long

it's quite a long journey.

TOADS CROAK

LOUD CROAKS

These little males have been waiting for this event all winter long.

It's probably the loudest natural sound in Ireland

when they all get going.

You can hear them, I reckon, a mile away on a calm night.

And those little females that are stirring on the dunes right now,

they're going to become crawling laden with eggs.

As soon as a female arrives on the edge of this pond and is spotted...

..there's going to be a little bit of a frenzy

to see who can get to her first.

Once he actually gets into what's known as amplexus,

when he tucks his arms under her,

he will not let go for love or money.

He'll stay with her right through the spawning process.

They lay these long strings of eggs and the male fertilises them

as they emerge.

And that's it done.

CROAKING

This is what this little corner of Ireland has sounded like

for thousands of years.

You could almost be by a water hole in Africa or something like that.

That's what it sort of reminds me of.

Just to be in a place with natural sounds.

You somehow feel that this is what the world should be like.

You feel very small out here sometimes.

My boat is a currach.

It's a traditional boat that would have been used

right along this coast for hundreds of years.

They were often made just from scrap wood and canvas.

It's the perfect way for exploring this coast

because it was designed here.

It was designed for these conditions.

There's a wonderful story from these parts.

It's said that there were a group of men

rowing their currach back to their home on the Blasket Islands.

And as they rowed, they heard this very strange sound -

sounds that they had never heard before in their lives,

that seemed to come from the very ocean itself,

through the skin of their boat.

Now, one of the fellows on the boat was a musician

and when he got home that night, he started composing a piece of music

based on the strange sounds that he had heard.

Now, that piece of music became a very famous Irish tune.

MUSIC: Port Na Bpucai

In the Irish language it was known as Port na bPucai.

The Song of the Fairies.

And years later, someone was listening to it

and when they thought about it, they realised

that it reminded them of the song of the humpback whale.

People said there was no way they could have heard a humpback singing.

You just didn't find humpback whales in these waters.

Amongst the dolphins, we have a visitor

and it's wonderful to see them back.

I love the sounds of their breathing.

When I was growing up, I remember I had that sort of iconic photograph

of a humpback fluke on my bedroom wall and I remember thinking,

I'd love to see one of those one day.

Well, never in a million years did I think

I'd be watching sights like this here.

This is now a relatively common sight off the west coast of Ireland.

These are almost resident humpback whales.

And the locals recognise one male humpback

that's been coming here for years.

He comes back so often, they call him Boomerang.

It seems that once one creature finds a bowl of food, a big bowl,

all the other creatures are, sort of, called in.

They could be anywhere in the whole ocean but they choose to be here.

It makes you feel a bit special.

Humpbacks have developed their own unique hunting method.

They blow circles of bubbles to frighten and corral

a shoal of the fish.

And then swallow the lot.

They're the only whale that has developed this particular

hunting technique and it seems to work incredibly effectively.

When they've had a good day's foraging,

what better way to end the day

than to lie on your back and just flail your limbs around?

Sure, why not?

Hello.

There's something youthful about them.

It's almost as if they're just enjoying themselves.

I'd like to think that other animals can be happy.

So many whale species just briefly visit the surface when they have to

to literally pick up air and disappear into the depths again

but humpbacks seem to, sort of, enjoy that transition

between sea and air, between those two dimensions.

It seems like cessation of whaling

has been a massive conservation success story

and it's taken a few decades for the numbers to come back

but the whole coast of Ireland is a whale sanctuary now,

so they're safe here.

So isn't it a wonderful thought that maybe...

..just maybe, all those years ago,

as this group of men were paddling themselves out to their island home,

there was a humpback hanging in the water

and that there was actually, somehow their craft,

the skin of their currach,

had somehow managed to pick up these calls of the humpback.

50 miles north of Kerry,

County Clare is home to one of the most unique landscapes in Ireland.

BIRDS SING

A dawn chorus.

At this time of year, it seems to hardly stop all day sometimes.

It's at its strongest early in the morning but...

..it seems to keep going for hours.

The weather is nice.

The birds just seem to sing all day long.

What a beautiful place to raise a family.

There are five chicks here this year.

That's a lot of chicks for ravens.

It just shows how productive the whole area must be.

Over here in the Burren,

there's such a variety of, sort of, habitats for them to...

to find food.

There's the seashore and there's little woodlands

and then the open limestone landscape as well.

There's no end of food

and I guess that's why they're so successful here.

Ravens will stay together for life

and then every individual raven is different.

They're amazing birds. They're so smart.

They probably know me.

They come here a few times, then they go up, back to your mam.

"Yeah, that's the short little fellow in the blue shirt again.

"He's harmless."

The people who built this place

obviously needed security.

And they built it here because they could obviously feed their community

and the raven family has chosen this site for that very same reason.

They are the kings of the castle now.

When you sit in a place like this on the Burren,

you can't help but think about change and how...

..the very landscape and nature just changes and adapts all the time.

All that exposed limestone was once at the bottom of an ocean.

This seabed moved up here from the equator,

got pushed up into mountains

and now...

you've got this extraordinary landscape.

A place that, from a distance, may look sort of barren

and lifeless and almost like a moonscape

but it's far from it.

This place is full of life

but it's life that's not always immediately obvious.

Reptiles really don't want to live in Ireland.

We only have one native species here.

That's the common lizard.

But the females, in summer, have young developing inside them

and they can be really big at this time of year.

Most lizards in the world lay eggs

but for these ones it's not an option.

It's too cold here so the females give birth to live young.

I guess it's an adaptation to northern climes.

Her job as a mother is at an end.

She looks literally deflated.

But as soon as she's given birth, that's it.

She pays no attention to the youngsters she's left behind at all.

They are completely on their own.

Some transition.

They're born within a membrane and their first job in life

is to fight their way out of that membrane.

They've got to learn to hunt and to feed themselves from day one.

They've got to find places to get warm. That's really important.

They're going to have to learn the geography

of the territory that they take up.

But they do well here.

There's no competition from other lizards, I guess,

and the land is still in good condition.

There's a lack of pesticides so there's lots of little insect food.

It's amazing what instinct can do.

Looking down on the...

beautiful old abbey,

it must have been such a hive of human activity once upon a time.

The people who built it could never foresee the day

when it would be abandoned and just overtaken by birds.

Great foraging to be had in this landscape.

Good place to be a kestrel.

They'll deliver all sorts of things back to the nest.

Little mice, birds.

Even reptiles.

They're a regular on the dinner table for kestrels.

You'd wonder how the kestrels managed to gain a foothold here

this year at all.

But my guess is there must have been a pretty determined female involved.

Not easy to nest amongst these jackdaws. Not easy to find a space.

She must have just been lucky to be in before the jackdaws arrived

and got too territorial.

Somehow, she managed to...

hold her ground, because there's big competition for space here.

JACKDAWS SQUAWK

Noisy neighbours.

But still a good place to be a kestrel.

They fix the ground with such a gaze.

Kestrels perceive the world in a very different way than we do.

When they're scanning a patch of ground

they can actually sometimes see little urine trails

that have been left by rodents.

A lot of the rodents leave trails and that can be their undoing.

Because then kestrels are not just looking at a patch of grass,

they're actually looking at a system of little, sort of, rodent highways.

They follow them and look for movement.

It looks like this family are going to do pretty well now this year.

So what more would anyone want but a family, security...

and food.

That's what we have in common with all creatures, I guess.

There's something about rowing.

It's just so gentle on the water, gentle on the planet.

And you're much more connected with the ocean

when you're in a rowing boat.

You really, sort of, appreciate and you can imagine

what's going on underneath.

All the creatures drifting in the tide.

The west of Ireland has always, sort of, attracted

these lone individual dolphins.

Some of them have lived for 30 years or more on their own.

This is Dusty and she lives her life off the coast of Clare.

She's a bottlenose dolphin and it's always bottlenose dolphins

that become these, sort of, lone individuals.

No-one quite knows why.

They're probably misfits in some way.

Don't know if they get lost or maybe they were thrown out of the pod.

For some reason they didn't fit in in some way, but they don't like

being on their own and they soon seek out human company.

Dolphins make such great travelling companions...

..and they've such an aura of real intelligence and almost compassion.

But soon she leaves me behind.

She's got her home and I've got mine.

This is where I now call home.

I first discovered Clew Bay, I guess, about 12 years ago or so.

I was moving up and down the west coast of Ireland

and, sort of, looking for a place to settle

after years of travelling.

I remember just thinking there was something very restful

and peaceful about this place.

This is really my halfway point.

I see Clew Bay as the halfway point along the west coast of Ireland.

Everything changes north of here now.

North of here is somehow, sort of, wilder, less tame, less visited.

Lots of little islands. I don't know it well.

I'm looking forward to getting to know it better.

Look at this.

What an extraordinary beautiful creature that is.

It feels like I've, sort of, landed on some tropical paradise.

The west coast of Ireland for millennia was really, I guess,

the edge of the known world.

Our ancestors had no idea what lay beyond the horizon.

The vast Atlantic was a place of complete mystery.

My name is Colin Stafford-Johnson.

I've spent 30 years working as a wildlife cameraman around the world

and I've seen some of the most beautiful places on Earth,

but somehow I'm always drawn back to the west coast of Ireland.

This is where I now call home.

Once you've lived by the sea for part of your life,

it's very hard to leave it behind.

I've always wanted to travel the length of Ireland's Atlantic coast,

seeking out its secret places and wild creatures.

And if my journey has any direction, I guess it's roughly north.

I began on the Skellig rocks off southwest Ireland before heading

north to reach Clew Bay, halfway up the west coast.

From here, I'll be exploring Galway and my homeland of Mayo,

before heading north for the wild country of Donegal

and my journey's end on the north coast.

And I think it's going to change my view

of the island that I've lived on for much of my life.

It's been a really tough winter this year.

On the west coast of Ireland,

you can get constant storms and, particularly the last two years,

they have become more prolonged and more frequent.

The west coast of Ireland is incredibly exposed to the Atlantic.

Here you have this enormous ocean, and in winter,

when it's really gathered power,

it unleashes its power against the coastline.

The first thing that it hits in Europe is the west coast of Ireland.

It's a wild coast,

because the Atlantic always almost seems permanently upset.

Sometimes, in the middle of winter,

you feel as if the spring is never going to come.

BIRD CALLS

BIRD CALLS

Those calls are really the soundscape

of the west of Ireland in winter.

At this time of year in County Mayo and these valleys,

there is almost total silence.

The whoopers are the only birds breaking that silence.

No wonder whoopers featured so much in Irish legends and mythology,

because they must have been really important

to the people who lived here.

They must have given them a great sense of season and time of year.

And they must have wondered where on earth they went to.

All Ireland's whooper swans actually nest in Iceland.

They just come here to escape the freezing temperatures up there.

Once they decide to leave Iceland, there is no going back.

All they're going to see is open ocean.

They've got to be very careful

that they've got their weather forecast right.

Anything kicks up along that journey, they won't make it.

There are over 1,000km of ocean.

For those chicks that have sort of been blindly following

their parents, they must have been thinking, "What is going on?

"Are we ever going to get there?"

The west coast of Ireland is the first thing that they will see.

Sometimes, you just hear them way, way, way in the distance.

WHOOPERS HONK

The sound of whoopers flying overhead

just makes you feel good.

They always strike me as happy birds.

And when they land in a sort of cacophony of honking and squawking,

they really bring life to a valley such as this.

WHOOPER SQUAWKS

Ireland is really their home away from home.

It's hard to sort of see Ireland as being a sort of

winter sunshine break

for anybody, but for whoopers, this has everything they need.

Lots of fuel to keep them going through the winter,

and they're constantly foraging.

It won't be long before the whoopers leave, but then,

just at that time, is when all the birds here start

proclaiming their territories.

And these valleys will be noisy with birdsong once again.

This is the bay I call home now.

Moving around the west coast of Ireland,

and I came to Clew Bay on an evening such as this...

..and I just felt that this would be a good place to settle,

and because I could explore both up and down the coast from here.

And now that's just what I'm doing.

If you have a look at a map of Ireland and you sort of look midway

down the west coast, you see a bay that looks like someone's

taken a bite out of it.

People say there's an island for every of the year.

Whoever said that wasn't very good at counting islands, but there's

quite a few of them!

Croagh Patrick dominating the bay.

That mountain looks different on every day of the year.

I'm very glad I made this my home,

and it's very much halfway on my journey.

If I was to pick one habitat I couldn't live without,

I think it would be woodlands.

And woodlands in spring, what could get better than this?

BIRDSONG

I spent a lot of time travelling around the world

and one thing I really missed

from Ireland was sort of the dawn chorus of birdsong

in an Irish woodland.

BIRDSONG

There is aggression in the air, but it doesn't sound like it at all.

It sounds wonderful.

A woodland doesn't have to be big to feel like a woodland.

When you walk into one,

it's not long before you sort of disappear

and really enter another world,

and all the little birds that you'd expect to find in a bigger

woodland are right there.

Just the smell and the sights, and every time you come into the woods

at this time of year, they change.

You know, you come one week and things are about to burst

into flower, and then the next week, you come,

and there's a carpet of bluebells or something stretching off

into the distance.

Just lovely.

But this is a great little wood.

You wouldn't really know that you were by the sea.

So few woodlands along the coast of Ireland these days.

We've almost lost our connection with woodlands.

It's a pity.

RAIN PATTERS

There is one animal I always wanted to see,

and people said it was in Ireland.

I've spent lots of time looking for it.

I remember the very first time I saw one.

I was walking through a little woodland...

..and I heard alarm calls.

You know that there is a predator on the move.

It's normally a fox.

Lo and behold, it was a pine marten.

Beautiful looking creature.

Shiny, with its lovely creamy chest.

I couldn't quite believe what I was seeing.

That was the sort of mythical creature from my childhood.

It was in all the books, you know,

that told you that pine martens are present in Ireland,

but they were incredibly rare.

But now they're making a really good comeback.

They're spreading out across Ireland.

They're very agile hunters.

They're almost as fast moving up the trees as they are on the ground.

Pretty adaptable, resourceful creatures.

It's great to have them back.

Days like these really stick out like rare jewels.

It's easy to forget how unstable the Atlantic is so much of the time.

Most of our interactions with the sea are very much on the surface.

So we rarely notice what's going on underneath.

But at this time of year, all sorts of creatures can turn up.

You never know where they're going to crop up next.

I think there are lots of them here today.

But if they're just ten feet below the surface,

you'd never know that they were here.

The warming waters bring in one of the most beautiful fish in the sea.

The blue shark.

They are found in every ocean in the world.

Sometimes you'll get them following each other...

..sort of nose to tail.

It seems that our blues follow the Gulf Stream

on a great tour of the Atlantic Ocean.

Millions of years of evolution

have honed this perfect travelling machine.

They appear almost like ghosts out of the very depths.

It's a very natural sort of boat and they don't seem to mind at all.

There's no engine noises.

Creatures don't seem to be scared of curraghs.

But they'll come and they'll go, for the most part unseen.

Sometimes, we just get to glimpse them, briefly.

Just for a few weeks every summer.

Halfway up the west coast,

there's a string of enchanting islands that lie off County Galway.

They give great shelter around here.

It's a wonderful quiet, isolated part of Ireland.

Places like this are just good for the soul.

Just the distant sort of roar of the sea.

And the birds.

You tend to instantly sort of relax.

BIRDS CALL

Winged plover alarm call.

Lots of them on the island at this time of year.

Keeping an eye on me.

They don't want me being here at all.

They'd prefer if I keep moving.

They love sort of open, rocky, stony patches like this.

This is where they build their little nest,

lay their eggs on the ground.

Good place to hide your eggs.

There's always something magical for me about finding a bird's nest.

I remember, as a kid, finding them

and it was just like finding treasure.

There's something about their construction

and the fact that they're so sort of delicate and vulnerable.

Sort of really got to appreciate the fact that you were...

..finding something that you weren't supposed to see.

There seems to be almost a truce at this time of year.

The gulls are sitting all around here.

They're nesting here, too.

I think they're so involved with their own nests,

they're not too bothered about the plovers at the moment, but once

the little chicks start moving around, they are very vulnerable.

They have the most adorable little chicks, lovely little things.

BIRD CRIES

They know they're going to lose several of them.

They have all sorts of little behaviours.

When they get upset, first of all, they whistle.

As soon as the sentry whistles,

its mate will sort of creep away from the nest.

It keeps its head down and sort of moves in a zigzag pattern,

away from the nest.

A predator moving along, they think it's an injured bird,

they follow it.

And little do they know that they're being led away from the nest.

Very clever.

Little did we realise, I guess,

that when these islands were being abandoned,

how important that they would become for wildlife.

One big empty coastline,

no creatures being disturbed as far as the eye can see.

Wouldn't it be nice if the world was ever thus?

So many of the creatures I encounter are really of no fixed abode.

But it's around about this time of year when there is an animal that

returns to our shores.

These are

Irish creatures that have spent the last year or more of their lives

travelling the ocean.

But now, they're picking up the scent of home once again.

And they've been on a pretty extraordinary journey.

For me, there's something very reassuring

about the return of the salmon.

The fact that a salmon can still leave a little stream in the west of

Ireland, go out to sea,

travel across the ocean and come all the way back

to complete its own life cycle,

the fact that that still takes place

fills me with a great deal of hope.

This is Connemara, the heart of Ireland's wild west.

And it's a place of bogs and mountains

and the salmon have been seeking out these streams

for maybe 10,000 years.

There are a lot of obstacles in the river

that they can only overcome after rain.

Once there's enough water in the river,

the salmon are able to find their way.

That's when all the sort of energy and power is needed.

Brief spurts of energy to get from one pool to another.

So the adults have finally made it back to where they were born.

Spawning cannot be far away.

Some of these animals have been in fresh water for the last six months

or so and they haven't eaten during that time.

It seems like each female now has a male by her side.

It's the female who will make the choice.

She will decide when spawning is going to happen,

but the male encourages her by shimmering, by shaking his body.

He's trying to stimulate her

by saying, "Look, I think everything's OK.

"Everything seems right to me."

And it is right. This is the shortest day of the year,

when there's the maximum amount of darkness,

and that seems to be a real trigger for salmon in the west of Ireland.

Fertilisation is instantaneous.

As soon as she starts to lay those eggs,

the male is in there instantly.

The eggs are going to develop in the gravels

for the next couple of months.

They should be relatively safe up here from predators.

They very much deserve to live.

But unfortunately for many,

they've actually come to the end of their lives.

A place that appears now so lifeless

is in fact full of life, but it's new life.

Amongst the gravels, life is just beginning.

And the cycle is going to start once more.

For me, wildlife and wild places very much go together.

The sort of whole experience of being in the wild

and seeing a place that seems so untamed in some way,

you can sort of hear it and sense it and feel it.

That's what adds to the experience.

This is Sheskinmore, a wonderfully quiet corner of Donegal.

It feels like I've sort of landed on some...

coral island or some tropical paradise.

Well, it may not be

the tropics, but it feels like paradise.

These dunes are really exceptional.

I've never seen anything quite like them in Ireland.

Sand dunes by their nature are really unstable.

The wind is constantly carving them into new shapes.

You can almost see them moving with the naked eye.

But here, the vegetation has gotten such a grip over time,

that these dunes do not appear to be moving any more,

and because of that,

a whole sort of range of wild flowers have established themselves.

I've never seen anything quite as good.

And there's nobody here.

And that's the great thing about the west coast of Ireland still.

In the middle of summer...

..you can have a place like this all to yourself.

I've been wandering around now for

a full day and I haven't seen a single person.

The sun doesn't shine every single day of the year,

but when it does...

..you're rewarded with something that's really very special.

BIRDS SING

I was literally up with the lark this morning,

and they must have started at five o'clock.

Absolutely alive with sound.

I think they say there's more poetry written about skylarks

than any other bird, and you can sort of see why.

SKYLARKS SING

I think when you hear that call,

it reminds you of all those summer's days you've ever had,

all sort of mixed up together

with the soundtrack, I think, of a lot of people's childhoods.

Busy, busy, busy, gathering as much food as they can.

And the parents take avoidance measures

to not draw attention to the nest.

They land and go running through the grasses to deliver the food.

The skylark chicks seem endlessly hungry.

They need to get in as much energy as they can.

They're born as tiny, naked little things.

If you're hidden in a little nest on the ground,

you are extremely vulnerable to predators,

so you want to eat as quickly as you can,

grow up nice and fast and get out of there and get to the air,

because that's where it's safe.

Skylark parents are absolutely fastidious

about keeping their little nests clean.

They're constantly removing the little faecal sacs

that the chicks produce.

And they pick them up with their mouths

and fly away and drop them some place else, and that way,

keeping the nest clean so there's no...

Predators won't be attracted to its scent.

It's all about disguising scent.

SKYLARKS SING

How they manage to sing and fly constantly -

it must be some feat, really.

There's a huge amount of growth in the ocean at this time of year.

Growth on land is sort of easy to see, you know -

the trees are bare and they come into leaf

and you can see everything growing,

but the very same thing happens in the ocean.

We're just not so aware of that.

It's when the temperatures start to rise, and the sun comes.

It's all down to the sun.

The sun powers the system.

As the temperature rises and there's lots of ultraviolet light around,

all the little plant plankton starts to grow.

And as soon as that grows, all the little grazer plankton come along.

And then, when you've all these little grazers,

the predators of those grazers turn up.

Real creatures of mystery.

Until recently, we knew almost nothing about basking sharks.

People used to say that they spent the winter sleeping on the bottom of

the ocean.

But now, we know they're just real ocean wanderers.

Oh, look at this!

Big white mouth.

You can see he's moving slowly.

What an extraordinary, beautiful creature that is.

There are some unseen changes in the sea.

Sometimes, the plankton seems to rise up to the very surface

and then they just appear.

They can smell it.

But that's how they know how to be here.

If I was to say to someone, like, if there's one thing you've got to

experience in Ireland,

it's being out with basking sharks on a fine day.

Look at this. Two of them swimming, one behind the other.

Three, three together!

Look! You can hear their tails,

swishing from side to side as they turn those bodies.

They're constantly turning and twisting their bodies

into the plankton.

I've never heard them before.

They look like they're socialising, but as far as I know, they're not.

Sometimes it's confusing when you see a couple on the surface,

because they have two fins on their backs so people often think there's

more sharks than there actually are,

but when they're right on the surface,

you can sometimes get the nose.

Right here!

(Look at that.)

The wonderful thing about Ireland is that when you get these conditions,

along the west coast, you can have a site like this all to yourself.

These are just gentle giants.

The second largest fish in the sea.

They spend all day

drifting along as casual as could be.

They move so slowly and steadily.

And in conditions like these,

there's no place better in the world to view basking sharks.

Tucked in the far northwest corner of the island,

Donegal often feels like a place apart.

I guess when I think of wildness,

I think about clinging on to visions of what the world was once like when

we weren't here, or when we were here in low numbers.

When creatures didn't have to worry about us.

When I make an appearance on to that scene,

the behaviour of nearly every creature changes.

And they're scared of us because they've learnt that they have to be.

It doesn't have to be that way.

For thousands of years, the greatest predator in Donegal

was an avian one,

a golden eagle.

They were here in an unbroken chain

until people decided that the only good eagle was a dead eagle...

..and killed every last one.

We were really missing something without these birds.

Perhaps 15 years ago or so,

an ambitious project was launched to bring them back once again and eagle

chicks were taken over from Scotland and they were released

in this place.

There's something special about seeing golden eagles

back in these skies.

EAGLE CALLS

And for me, the call of the eagle is somehow the bird equivalent to

the howling wolves.

There's something visceral,

and almost that sort of primeval connection with the wild,

when you hear that call.

It seems very much like they should be here.

They've brought a real sense of wildness back to Ireland again.

But they haven't thrived.

They have struggled to breed.

Perhaps things aren't as good as they once were here.

So these little guys are really important.

They're among the first golden eagle chicks born in Ireland

in over a century.

Very precious bundles of DNA.

If the project is to be successful,

these chicks must reach maturity and somehow start families of their own.

We need to be mindful of them.

It's hard to contemplate losing them once more.

There is a gathering here at this time,

and it's a gathering that's unseen by most people,

but if you look closely,

you can see these strange, eel-like shapes,

but they're not eels.

They're a creature that very few people ever encounter,

and that's because they have quite an extraordinary lifestyle.

Someone found this fossil not too long ago,

and in that fossil,

there were the remains of a lamprey which looked just like one that is

living today.

That fossil was 300 million years old.

That doesn't just mean that they were living here WITH the dinosaurs,

it means that they were here before most of them.

But when you go underwater,

that's when you see how extraordinary

these creatures really are.

They don't have proper gills,

they don't have jaws,

they don't have scales.

They're a totally different life form, really, altogether.

And in early summer, in May and June,

they come to places just like this.

These are sea lampreys.

Although they spend most of their lives living in the river,

they do go out to sea for a year or so.

And when they get out to the ocean,

they attach themselves to other fish.

They have these fierce-looking, prehistoric, round mouths

full of these rasping teeth.

And they use this process to latch themselves onto other fish.

So they go from these sort of harmless,

filter feeding, blind little creatures

into flesh-eating, vampire-type fish.

They grow very quickly, because when you're eating flesh like that,

you can put on weight very quickly.

And probably after about a year,

they make their way back into rivers again.

And as soon as they do, they get down to business.

But they have this extraordinary sucker-like mouth.

And they use that for shifting rocks.

What they're trying to do is clear an area of the river bed so that

the gravels are exposed.

Any rock or stone, no matter how big, they'll seem to tackle.

There's an otter about.

They must have a field day.

Can you imagine?

As soon as they enter the river system, they've stopped feeding.

They're going to have to clear the riverbed, mate,

and, unfortunately, death will soon follow,

so every lamprey that's here will be dead within days.

Every creature has its place.

That's what I think about lampreys.

I mean, their lifestyle isn't maybe very attractive to a lot of people,

but it's an important one. And I like them very much, I have to say.

Any creature that's been around for that long

has got life sorted!

Will humans be around for 300 million years, unchanged?

Doubt it!

This place has been the graveyard of many a ship,

even ones bigger than mine.

And if I was to try and row my curragh around here today,

I'd probably end up in Scotland.

It's not far away.

This is Malin Head, Ireland's northernmost point.

The little light shining out to sea,

and that's our northernmost island, Inishtrahull,

and that's where I was hoping to get today.

But in these conditions, it won't be possible.

Malin Head marks the northernmost point of my journey,

and it's also where I turn east.

This is where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Irish Sea.

It somehow feels a little gentler up here.

Autumn really is one of my favourite times of year, I think.

It's like the last burst of activity before winter kicks in -

everything is preparing.

Nature, it's great the way it works out.

Just when food is going to go short over winter,

there's this great explosion of high-energy foods

that's just waiting to be gathered.

Great to see the red squirrels around.

They know that there are lean times ahead.

And they're trying to gather as many nuts as they can,

and they find little places to hide them, to cache them.

But what they don't realise is that they're being watched.

There's a whole host of thieves hanging round the trees,

watching their every move.

As soon as they arrive with another nut,

it's not long before it disappears.

Earlier, I found some pine marten scat.

There's an extraordinary thing that's happening

that no-one could really have imagined.

Now, grey squirrels were introduced here a couple of hundred years ago,

and they've done incredibly well.

But as pine martens are moving across the country,

grey squirrels are disappearing.

And red squirrels are coming back.

Now, no-one can figure out exactly why.

When I stop and think about it, though, you know,

pine martens and red squirrels evolved together, so it would make

sense that red squirrels would have something

in their sort of behavioural repertoire

that allows them to escape pine martens,

otherwise there wouldn't be any left.

Whereas grey squirrels are a new arrival here,

and maybe they are lacking those escape mechanisms.

There must be something that they're not doing right.

As a result, the pine marten is really

the saviour of the red squirrel.

It's an extraordinary thing that the return of one native animal is

actually saving another one.

When you walk here during the day,

and it's full of the creatures that we are very familiar with.

But at night, when you come in,

you can hear all sorts of little creatures moving about.

It's not easy to see them, but you know they're here.

These are long-eared bats.

This is just the kind of place they like.

In times past,

you'd only ever have seen them just sort of flitting by,

and you must have wondered about them.

They are unique amongst bats in Ireland.

They have these enormous ears.

Their ears are as long as their bodies.

It is said that they can hear the sound of a caterpillar walking

across a leaf.

Pretty impressive!

People often refer to them as being flying mice, but actually,

they're much more closely related to us than they are to mice.

Busy time of year to be a bat.

They have to get all their feeding done.

Put on little bits of fat between their shoulder blades,

and they'll live off that for the winter.

They hunt by listening.

And they themselves are absolutely silent flyers.

They just go around at night, hoovering up insects.

Nice big moths, and they're perfect long-eared bat food.

I love bats.

The character of the sea has changed now at this time of year.

It's not the place to be in a small little boat any more.

It's a good time to end my journey.

I started a year ago on a remote Atlantic rock

off the southwest corner of Ireland

and I'm finishing on this wild headland,

overlooking Rathlin Island.

This is known as the Sea of Moyle,

and it featured in that ancient Irish story,

The Children Of Lir.

Now, Lir was the god of the sea and he had four children that he adored.

But his wife died, and when he remarried,

their stepmum cursed them

and turned them into swans.

Under the weight of this curse, they had to wander Ireland for 900 years.

They spent 300 years of their banishment here on the Sea of Moyle,

and that story has resonated on this coast.

To this day, you'll still see the whooper swans journeying here every

autumn, escaping from the grip of the Arctic cold.

The fact that those journeys are still happening

gives me a great sense of hope,

for our natural history and our natural world

gives us something to cling onto, a link with the past.

I think that's something I've learnt on my journey.

This place has been my back yard, but I now look at it in a new light.

Sometimes there's this wonderful mix between sort of human history and

natural history.

That is something that is almost the theme of any west coast journey.

You can't travel this coast without being aware

that humans have been here for a long time.

They were able to tread a little bit more lightly on the planet

than we do.

And that's the great thing about a journey.

You can sort of plan steps along the way, but often the greatest times

and the greatest places are ones that you happen upon by chance.

The west coast of Ireland is still pretty wild.

It's a special kind of place.