Amanda Ralph

So we're about eight kilometres from the centre of Loughan, but it's a very different landscape.

We're here in the very south country of Scombe and Caernarfulla Bog is located on a bend on the River Shannon.

So we have the Shannon Callows, which is the largest wetland in Western Europe, surrounds us here on three sides.

And then on the fourth side we have Caernarfulla Bog, which extends out for a few kilometres north of us.

So Cornifalla means the hill of blood.

There was a battle here back centuries ago.

There are seven townlands that actually feed into Cornifalla bog, as it's called.

So one of them is Callowbeg.

So Calla is flood meadow.

So it's a small flood meadow.

And to the left of me here, we're in the tiny townland of Cregan o Beaca.

So Cregan is rock or ridge and Beaca is a specific type of wailing or sobbing sound associated with grief.

So families would have brought their loved ones across to Shannon to be buried by crossing the fords or by Shannon Cot in more recent times.

Kernofulla School is a large national school at the very northern end of the bog.

My daughter mentioned that they had a large flock of pooper swans migrating back to Iceland to fly over the school earlier this year and it sparked a conversation in the class about pooper swans, where they live, the difference with new swans.

I feel like we're at a crossroads here.

We're either going to lose this bog forever and everything that goes with that, or we have the potential for that to be fast-tracked and brought back to what it would have been like back in the day.

You know, you talk to any experts, I'm not an expert on bog hydrology, but the bog is a single living mass.

If you start to divvy up parts of that bog and start putting in major roadway infrastructure, which is what will be needed here, you lose that potential in terms of carbon capture.

So I disagree.