Queen's University Belfast - Solastalgia

In this episode, we speak with Doris Noe, who together with her husband Chris Murphy, has fought for years against the building of a dual carriageway through wetlands between the freshwater lakes of Lough Neagh and Lough Beg. These lakes and the lands around them form precious wildlife habitats of international environmental significance. For 100s of years, Whooper swans have overwintered in pastu...

In this episode we talk with Dr Nuala Flood, Fulbright Scholar and senior lecturer in Architecture at Queen’s University. In 2019, the School of Architecture declared a climate emergency, integrating climate action into every teaching, research and outreach activity. Each January, Nuala runs an intensive week-long course: Public CoLab. Students work in small teams with local and international expe...

This episode continues the story of poet Emma Must and her part in the extensive and influential environmental activist campaign that worked tirelessly and imaginatively to prevent the carving of a motorway through the beautiful, mythical Twyford Down. We pick up the story in the summer of 1993, when a civil injunction is served against her and 76 others by the Ministry of Transport. We talk about...

In this episode, we talk with Emma Must, poet, Belfast resident and, in another time and place, an accidental activist. We begin by discovering our common appreciations of the city of Belfast, including Emma’s encounter with the tree-felling and vegetation removal along the River Lagan towpath. “Wolf Moon”, the poem she wrote in response to that devastation, is read here for the first time, a worl...

For more than five thousand years, Knock Iveagh (Cnoc Uí Echach) in County Down has been a sacred site of national historical and cultural significance. Freely accessible under common law, the hill is an ancient place of assembly aligned with the path of the sun and other hills in the surrounding Ulster landscape. Since September 2017, that access has been blocked, the cairn (a scheduled historic...

Episode 5: The Silent Hedge As part of the Belfast Tidal Flood Alleviation Scheme that destroyed the avenue of mature sycamore trees discussed in Episodes 1 and 2: Mollie-Rose Way, a mature, well-established and well-loved hawthorn hedge was also destroyed. In the 2018 environmental screening report that concluded the scheme would not require an Environmental Impact Assessment, the hedge was descr...

In early 2021, after a hiatus of over a decade, building works began on a luxury housing estate in South Belfast on the right bank of the River Lagan. Within the Lagan Valley’s Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty – Northern Ireland’s oldest and smallest designated AONB – visitors to ‘Lagan Lands East’ began to notice the presence of enormous ‘spoil heaps’, adjacent to the housing site. These huge m...

In episode 2, we continue the story of Mollie-Rose way and the beginnings of the accidental environmental activist group Save Our Lagan. In conversation with Mollie-Rose's mother, Olivia, we talk about what happened after the 24th of February 2022 and the week-long protest when Save Our Lagan and friends tried to prevent the further destruction of more trees along the river. We talk about the meet...

In Belfast, on 10 January 2022, ten-year-old Mollie-Rose’s favourite part of her walk to school was torn apart and fed into a woodchipper. Without proper consultation or an Environmental Impact Assessment, this lovely part of the towpath along the Lagan Valley was cleared of all its habitats, including a row of 90-year-old trees – a millennium of tree-growth – leaving behind only stumps and tarmac...