Setting the Land Free

A powerful beacon of hope * Seán Ronayne *
Eoghan Daltun has given us not just the vision but the instruction manual on what needs to be done to reshape our landscape and unleash Ireland’s natural wilderness * Eoin Reardon *
Eoghan Daltun has brilliantly documented both the sad decline and spectacular recovery of nature through the magic of rewilding. Setting the Land Free opens a whole new chapter in this crucial story. Daltun is a gifted storyteller whose message is both urgent and timely. He skilfully reels us in as readers to join him on a breathless ongoing journey of rediscovery and reawakening * John Gibbons *
Setting the Land Free offers a road map to recovery for Ireland’s natural world. Like a chink of light between heavy curtains, Daltun lifts to reveal the full brightness and beauty of rewilding - of what could be - an Ireland rich and abundant in nature. His writing carries a clarity of vision and thought that excites the reader, offering inspiring examples of how rewilding could be applied in an Irish context. We are at a crossroads, and this book is a call to action. Setting the Land Free is a necessary reimagining - a game changer for Irish nature and our future on this island. * Eoin Warner *

Eoghan Daltun is a sculpture conservator, a farmer, an author, and, above all, a rewilder.

Raised in Dublin, he has travelled widely and lived 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-handedly 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 Seanie, 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.

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