project
Wild Nephin National Park
Wilderland is collaborating with Wild Nephin National Park to develop public arts within the park and support their creation of a wilderness sanctuary for biodiversity and habitat preservation.
Wilderland is inviting artists and creative practitioners to engage with Wild Nephin through its landscape and natural, built and cultural heritage, to create site-responsive, public artworks that explore our relationship to wild nature.
Our artists are connecting with the communities living around Wild Nephin and in its neighbouring townlands to explore their lived experience of place and collaboratively address the biodiversity crisis at a local level. Through creative public engagement, embedded research, and art in the landscape they are helping to raise awareness for the park’s biodiversity, conservation and habitat restoration aims.
NPWS is providing guidance for all activities within Wild Nephin, and each artist is paired with a ranger or guide from NPWS, who acts in an advisory capacity to provide scientific expertise and information on the ecology of the park and its habitats, to inform and support each artist's research, and provide best practice guidelines for interaction with and investigation of the landscape.
You can follow each artist's activities from their individual and project pages.
with:
Indeed the Nephin Beg range of mountains is, I think, the very loneliest place in this country
- Robert Lloyd Praeger, The Way That I Went
Located on the Western seaboard in northwest Mayo, Wild Nephin National Park has some of the most remote lands in Ireland. The park covers a vast 15,000 hectares of uninhabited and unspoilt wilderness, dominated by the Nephin Beg mountain range.
To the west of the mountains is the Owenduff Bog, one of the last intact active blanket bog systems in Ireland and Western Europe, and an important scientific and scenic feature of the National Park. The park itself is part of the Owenduff/Nephin Complex Special Area of Conservation (SAC) and Special Protection Area (SPA).
Wild Nephin is part of the Natura 2000 Network, which protects rare and important habitats and species under the EU Habitats and Birds Directive. The park supports and protects habitats including alpine heath, blanket bog, upland grassland, heath, lakes and river catchments, that are home to plants and animals of both national and international importance - at least 80 different species of bird, as well as many mammals, fish, insects and amphibians.
To the east of the mountains is the Nephin Forest, which is currently mainly comprised of Sitka spruce and lodgepole pine, and was originally planted for commercial purposes. This area is now within the National Park and will be managed for biodiversity and recreation.
Prior to their purchase by the State, the National Park lands were used for turbary, agriculture and recreational uses including fishing, shooting, and hillwalking. There is evidence of previous human habitation along the Bangor Trail, near the Owenduff and Tarsaghaun rivers, where the remains of stone buildings and traditional cultivation ridges can be seen, along with a number of historical sites and monuments throughout the area, including promontory forts, crannógs, and the Lios na Gaoithe Bronze Age Ringfort near Letterkeen.
Wild Nephin Monuments & Myths PDF
Find out more on the Wild Nephin National Park website.
Wild Nephin Conversion Plan
Wild Nephin National Park is at the beginning of an ecological restoration of the Nephin Forest, an extensive area of what was previously commercial conifer plantation to the east of the Nephin Beg Mountain Range.
The Nephin Forest Conversion is starting the journey to where nature is once again the driving force. The Conversion Plan will set out the long-term vision for the Nephin Forest with plans to rewild and restore peatlands, woodlands and riparian habitats within an expansive landscape.
Over the past 50 years this area has been dominated by coniferous forests planted for commercial timber production. The Conversion Plan will create conditions for natural processes to become the dominant driver of change, where biodiversity is enhanced, ecosystems restored and where people can connect with nature in a remote and wild environment.
Wilderland is raising awareness and fostering support for this plan within the local communities and the wider county, supported by our project artists through their public art commissions and project activities.
