Wildwoods E-Book

Richard Nairn

• Herausgeber: Gill Books
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Ecologist Richard Nairn has spent a lifetime studying – and learning from – nature. When an opportunity arose for him to buy a small woodland filled with mature native trees beside a fast-flowing river, he set about understanding all its moods and seasons, discovering its wildlife secrets and learning how to manage it properly. Wildwoods is a fascinating account of his journey over a typical year. Along the way, he uncovers the ancient roles of trees in Irish life, he examines lost skills such as coppicing and he explores new uses of woodlands for forest schools, foraging and rewilding. Ultimately, Wildwoods inspires all of us to pay attention to what nature can teach us. 'A book to inspire anyone who wants Ireland to grow more Irish trees.' Michael Viney

Leseprobe

WILDWOODS

THE MAGIC OFIRELAND'S NATIVEWOODLANDS

RICHARDNAIRN

GILL BOOKS

Gill BooksHume AvenuePark WestDublin 12www.gillbooks.ie

Gill Books is an imprint of M.H. Gill and Co.

© Richard Nairn 2020978 07171 9021 8 (paperback)

978 07171 9081 2 (ebook)

Photos © Richard Nairn, except where stated

The author and publisher thank Coillte Nature for its support towards the publication of this book.

Edited by Sheila ArmstrongProofread by Neil Burkey

All rights reserved.No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without written permission of the publishers.A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.5 4 3 2 1

For my grandchildren, Ivy, Iris and Robyn

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Preface

Introduction

Winter – Sleeping trees

Spring – Rising sap

Summer – Forest flowering

Autumn – Fruits of the forest

Future forests – Long life

Photo section

References

About the Author

About Gill Books

Preface

The final parts of this book were written in 2020 during the Coronavirus pandemic that swept across the world, stopping a lot of normal human activity in its tracks. My usual work was suspended, travel was restricted to local journeys only and I found myself largely confined to my home place.

But nature continued pretty much as usual. Primroses flowered in spring, hazel catkins glowed yellow at dawn, the first swallows appeared on the same date as the previous year and the sun shone each day of that early summer. The familiarity of nature’s seasons was more than reassuring. My daily routine slowed and every day seemed to be the same. I left my mobile phone at home and spent much more time that year alone in our woodland, planting trees, chopping logs and just observing nature around me. I cooked meals on an open wood fire and I sat for hours by the river, listening to birdsong and the rustling of the leaves. The wood gave me the sanctuary that I needed as the world outside was consumed by a deadly illness. I learnt the true value of nature to the human soul.

The book has benefitted from information, photographs and guidance generously provided by Michael Carey, Mike Carswell, John Cross, Joanne Denyer, Paul Dowding, Katharine Duff, Shirley Gleeson, Amber Godwin, Joe Gowran, Ciara Hamilton, Clare Heardman, Matthew Jebb, Colin Kelleher, Daniel Kelly, Mary Kelly-Quinn, Ian Killeen, Declan Little, Coilin Maclochlainn, Evelyn Moorkens, Declan Murphy, Derry Nairn, Tim Nairn, Will O’Connor, Christian Osthoff, Karl Partridge, Paddy Purser, Jenni Roche, Tim Roderick, Marc Ruddock, Liz Sheppard, Ralph Sheppard, Courtney Tyler, Angus Tyner and Paddy Woodworth. Members of Woodlands of Ireland have provided much stimulation and discussion about all aspects of native woodlands that prompted many of the ideas in this book.

I would like to acknowledge Bloodaxe Books for permission to reproduce the poem ‘When the Tree Falls’ by Jane Clarke. I also acknowledge Faber & Faber for permission to reproduce an extract from ‘Blackberry Picking’ by Seamus Heaney. My thanks are due to Margaret Connolly. Her excellent local history of a neighbouring townland called Aghowle gave me the factual context for describing the lives of previous owners of our land, who themselves are fictitious with no connection to any living person.

Coillte Nature* is acknowledged for supporting the publication of this book, which I hope will be helpful in their valuable work. Declan Little read the entire manuscript and made many useful suggestions for its improvement. The editor Sheila Armstrong kept the whole project on track and helped me turn the science into readable form.

Last but not least, I am thankful for the support of my wife, Wendy, and our family in the exciting project we have taken on together to manage our land in a more sustainable way into the future.

*Note: Coillte Nature is the non-profit branch of Coillte that is dedicated to delivering real impact on the climate and biodiversity crises through innovative projects of scale. Its aims are to create, restore, regenerate and rehabilitate biodiverse habitats across Ireland, to manage those habitats for ecological and recreational value in perpetuity and, in doing so, to maximise the ecosystem services they provide to people for the benefit of everyone, now and into the future. www.coillte.ie/coillte-nature

Introduction

Its early morning and I set off with my dog Molly to walk to a woodland that is just five minutes from our house. On the way, we walk beneath a line of centuries-old oak trees that must have witnessed some interesting people passing by over the years on this quiet road to the village.

This land on all sides was once part of a large estate known as Glanmore, acquired in stages by one Francis Synge in the early nineteenth century. This was just a few years after the upheavals of the 1798 Rebellion and local people were still coming to terms with some horrific deaths in their own county. Some survivors were forced to take refuge in the local woods.1 The tenants here were pleased that their new landlord was living locally in a big house at the edge of the Devil’s Glen wood. Up to then, their rents had been paid to a land agent who worked for an absentee landlord.

To plan the expansion of his estate, Synge commissioned an extensive survey of the lands in this valley. In the eight years after 1816, he supervised the planting of over 160,000 trees on his newly acquired lands. I suspect that these included the oak trees that still line the road today. By 1840 there was also a group of small cottages, probably with thatched roofs, along the road between the young oak trees.

Ned Byrne’s father had inherited the lease of twenty acres of good land here, including a small woodland, in the bottom of the valley. The laneway which led down to the river in the wood was used by all the occupants of the cottages to collect water for the houses and firewood for the hearths. In a corner of a field I find a heap of large stones, all that remains of the cottage that had been built by Ned’s grandfather. It was in this cottage that Ned was born.

This was a time of serious difficulty for the Glanmore Estate. Francis Synge had died in 1831 and his son John Synge took over the running of the estate. But his tenants became increasingly impoverished and most lived on a diet dominated by potatoes. Some were evicted when they could not pay the rents. Meanwhile, the new landlord was spending money that he did not have to create a grand demesne and maintain his standing in society. He ignored the fact that the estate was falling deeper and deeper into debt. When he died in 1845, the very year that the Great Famine began, the estate was bankrupt and his son, called Francis Synge after his grandfather, was faced with court proceedings to sell the land and pay the debtors. But he managed, after several years, to buy back the estate house and some other properties.2 Francis Synge was popular in the locality as he was said to be a hardworking farmer and looked after his tenants.

Ned was just a small child when the Potato Famine hit this area in 1846 but he could remember some of his neighbours being evicted and living in animal sheds through the winter. As a small child, he saw poor families make their last journey along the road beneath the growing oak trees. In the following years, many local people emigrated or tried to rebuild their lives. But Ned’s parents were determined to stay and make the best of the situation, so he grew up working on his father’s farm. In time this would be Ned’s farm and he loved the place. The work made him healthy and strong, just like the oak trees along the road whose canopies now gave passers-by some welcome shade from the summer sun.

As I walk along the same road, I search the ground beneath the trees for any new acorns that have fallen from the oak trees in the night or stare up into the vast tumble of branches and twigs, never failing to marvel at the sheer size and strength of these gentle giants. A cool wind blows down the valley from the mountain, sweeping across the fields and bending the branches of the trees. I watch the old hedge across the top field for a fox that I know lives just beyond it and for the rabbits that help her to survive through the year. Climbing the stile, I drop down the golden, bracken-covered slope and enter the shelter of the trees. A familiar hawthorn covered with red berries greets me as I pass beneath the mature ash and alder trees. I stand for a minute on the path to listen to the trickling water that flows down the hill from the line of groundwater springs. The air is cool and still on my face. A woodpecker’s distinctive ‘pick-pick’ call and the ticking of a robin are the only evidence of birds in the dawn.

I walk over to my favourite tree, the biggest birch in the wood, and sit beneath it for a few minutes to absorb its wisdom and strength. The trunk is strengthened by splayed buttress roots just like the supports of a cathedral wall. High above, the branches spread wide with their spiral structure adding strength to the timber. This tree, which Ned probably climbed as a child, is now quite rotten in the centre. I can put my entire arm into a large cavity which once held the heartwood but the outer layers, or sapwood, of the tree are as vigorous as the day it was a young sapling in a new woodland.

For years, my own family had been searching for some land to establish a smallholding where we could grow our own food and cut wood for fuel, moving our lives more towards self-sufficiency with a lower environmental footprint. We had searched far and wide and, when Ned’s farm was finally put on the market, we knew that it was again offering an opportunity. On the south-facing side of the valley were the permanent pasture fields and hedgerows where he had toiled all those years ago. I imagined him in summer driving the horse-drawn mower through the flower-rich meadow to save the hay that would sustain his cows over winter. The woodland where he and his sons had cut timber to roof the cow byre was still there in the valley and the river that wound its way down from the hills still flowed crystal clear.

Throwing caution to the wind, I cashed in part of my pension and bought the land outright. Even if times turned harder, I foolishly reckoned that I could sell the land and the timber to recover my investment. Instead, I fell in love with the place and began to spend more and more time there, experiencing all its moods and seasons, discovering its wildlife secrets and learning how to manage it properly. I realise now that our woodland has found its way into my heart.

For most of my adult life, I have worked to protect the environment – as a nature reserve warden, as director of a voluntary conservation body and more recently advising organisations, large and small, how to avoid or reduce damage to nature. Yet, during my lifetime, Ireland’s wildlife has undergone a catastrophic decline. A third of all species groups examined in Ireland, including plants, birds, butterflies, freshwater fish and dragonflies, are either threatened with extinction or near-threatened. Birds that were once commonplace in the Irish countryside – the curlew, corncrake and yellowhammer – have become so rare that it is a privilege to see even one. Water quality in our rivers and lakes has declined steadily so that now there are only a handful of ‘pristine’ inland waters. Ninety per cent of our highest-value habitats, listed under the EU’s Habitats Directive, are in ‘poor’ or ‘inadequate’ condition. Ireland still has the lowest forest cover of any country in the European Union and little over one per cent of the country is occupied by native woodland.

After years of writing, protesting and trying to influence nature policy, I could see no change in this depressing trend and I worried for the future of our natural world. I needed to be inspired again and I knew that nature could provide this inspiration if I could just see some positive result for my efforts. In this land I found a project, no matter how small, where I could make a real contribution to restoring the natural environment. The baton had been passed from Ned’s family to me to protect this heritage for the coming generations, including my children and grandchildren. Everyone has something to offer, even if it is just planting a few trees or saving a hedgerow from destruction.

This land had also stirred up childhood memories from the days when I played in the local fields and woodland near my family home. Nobody seemed to know who owned that particular woodland so all the local kids met there after school. We lit campfires, built treehouses and made dams across the river that ran through the wood. I imagined that I was an adventurer in a far-away land carving out a place in the wilderness. In an attempt to keep me and my brothers at home, my father built a primitive wooden house in an old tree in our garden. It was entered by a rope ladder that we could pull up through a trapdoor. Without knowing it, I was re-enacting the type of lifestyle that my ancestors may have lived thousands of years ago.

Living close to nature is no longer a necessity today but more of a privilege. Centuries ago, it was the only option for most people as the growing human population scraped a living from the surface of the earth. But somewhere along the way we have lost that vital connection with nature. No longer do most people in the Western world have to build their own shelters, grow their staple food or catch their own dinner. This disconnect with the natural world has enormous implications for the protection of nature, but also for our personal happiness. Few modern children know the simple pleasures of climbing a tree, fishing in a stream or picking a handful of wild berries. Increasingly, we experience the natural world remotely – if at all – through television, the internet or through a car window.

Children today would have to search quite hard to find a woodland near their home. The native forests that once covered the island were cut and cleared centuries ago, leaving a country dominated by agriculture. While the colonial power that ruled Ireland for over 800 years is widely blamed for deforesting the country, most of the native woodland was already gone by the medieval period. By the early twentieth century, when Ireland achieved independence, there were just a few fragments of the old woodland remaining, a tiny fraction of which is classed as ‘ancient woodland’. And, as the new country geared up to the modern world, it chose to replace the natural vegetation with fast-growing forests comprising exotic conifer species imported from North America. For most people today, a walk in the woods means visiting lines of dense, coniferous plantation or watching these forests cleared like a field of corn.

In the twenty-first century, Ireland’s native woodland is in the emergency ward. A few of the remaining fragments are protected as nature reserves. Even there, uncontrolled deer populations are grazing out new seedlings and natural regeneration is rare. Invasive plants such as rhododendron and laurel infest many old estate woodlands blocking out the light and leaving the ground beneath bare and lifeless. Of the 1,320 sites covered in the National Survey of Native Woodland, ‘the majority were small or very small in extent with half being six hectares or less and only three per cent of those surveyed being over 50 hectares’.3 Traditional skills of woodland management, such as coppicing with standards, which can open dense canopies to let in the sunlight, have been largely forgotten. The patient is on life support and, unless radical treatment is administered, our grandchildren will not have a chance to experience the joy of the wild woods.

Becoming the owner of this farm and woodland was a special privilege for me but also a big responsibility. I had to learn to manage it properly. It all seemed a bit like a dream but my voyage of discovery had begun. Exploring this small piece of countryside is exciting. Finding old trees, looking for good places to cross a stream or just standing still to listen to the sounds in the wood is like experiencing childhood again. Simple pleasures for all the senses. I search for fallen nuts, collect sticks for the fire in winter or shoulder a fallen log, just as Ned would have done, and carry it back along the track to the house.

Everything in the world seems to be changing rapidly. Attitudes to the current climate breakdown are changing too and there is a growing awareness that planting trees and restoration of permanent woodland cover are among the best ways to capture the excess carbon that we are daily releasing to the atmosphere. But woodlands offer so much more – to our environment, to our health and as a renewable resource to replace the fossil fuels that will soon be in short supply.

Restoring Ireland’s native woodland is just as important to me as safeguarding our traditional culture. Ned’s farm and woodland are part of our heritage and should be passed on to future generations intact. But protection of this priceless asset will not happen by itself. It will take vision, commitment and long-term management such as that shown by some landowners in past centuries who planted trees for their grandchildren and harvested timber that their grandparents had planted for them. The remaining native woods of Ireland are like fragments of a long-lost landscape. They are disappearing and new native woodlands are not being added quickly enough to replace them. It is the equivalent of a decaying oak tree that is no longer producing seed. My ambition is to keep this one small patch of wildwood alive.

In this land, I had found the practical project and the inspiration that I needed. It offered no material profit but an opportunity to learn and to make a real difference to one small patch of wild nature. This book is the story of my journey of discovery about woodland here and in different parts of Ireland where other people are striving to hold on to these fragments of our heritage. Ned had a vision for the future of his land and it is our responsibility to make this happen.

Winter – Sleeping trees

The oak trees were bare in the winter of 1860 when Ned’s father, a previous tenant of our land, died suddenly in his late thirties having contracted pneumonia during a bout of severe weather. Ned was still a young man when he took over the tenancy of the farm from his father. The work was hard, but Ned was helped in the daily tasks by his teenage brothers. A few years later, his mother married a second time and moved out of the family home with the younger children to live with her new husband in the neighbouring townland. Ned married a local girl, Sarah, when he was twenty-five and she was just twenty. His new wife moved into the cottage and their first child, William, was born in the mild winter of 1869.

Fortunately, the weather was favourable in those years and things went well for the young family. Winters were less severe than those of Ned’s father’s time on the farm and they were able to cook and to heat the small cabin with firewood cut from the wood down by the river. The land was mainly tilled but by winter the family had harvested their potatoes and oats and the summer’s hay was stacked in the yard. As well as the cows, they kept a few pigs which were allowed to roam in the woodland foraging for roots and bulbs. For Christmas, Ned killed one of the fattest and they ate well that year.

In December the sun rises late but I like to go out at first light or even before, while all the local people are still sleeping, as this is when the wildlife is most active. At this time of day, I see foxes, deer, buzzards and woodpeckers, all busy finding their first meal of the day, having survived another cold night. There is little or no disturbance, traffic noise is intermittent and natural sounds dominate.

It has been snowing for two days now with bitterly cold temperatures, enough to freeze the water in the puddles along the lane. There is a thick blanket of snow lying on the meadow where Ned once worked a century and a half before. The meadow was mowed last September and is still waiting for the spring signals to start growing again. I follow the tracks of a fox, weaving across the field, yet with a definite purpose. He detoured several times to investigate rabbit burrows and maybe a mouse beneath the grass. Winter is a tough time for our mammals when survival is the name of the game. Food is scarce and they must live on the fat they have accumulated during the summer. The bountiful days of autumn are gone and the last of the blackberries and sloes are now just a memory.

It is just after dawn and I am standing at the top of the field when an adult fox comes trotting along the hedge at the bottom. He is carrying some prey that looks like a small bird. Crossing the meadow, he slips effortlessly through a sheep fence in the corner and I watch him pick his way through some willow trees and into the woodland. I follow his trail which leads down a muddy track. Here there are lots of fox prints, droppings, feathers and scraps of bone that suggest many meals. In a corner beneath some brambles, I find the entrance to the fox earth. It is dark and secret. I doubt if many people have been here so the fox and his mate are mostly left to their own devices. As the sun rises over the valley, the lonely call of a soaring buzzard is the loudest sound.

I leave the fox in peace and enter a magical world of tall trees, flowing streams and ferns. In some places where the water bubbles to the surface, I sink to the top of my boots in soft, sucking mud. All around are small diggings where some other animal has been searching for buried food during the night. And then I come upon the badger sett. It is the largest and most active sett I have ever seen. Great mounds of spoil lie outside the entrances to a maze of underground tunnels and regular trails lead off in several directions into the undergrowth.

The trees around the badger sett are tall and their trunks close together, with many even entwined as if they are closely connected below ground. I can identify nearly a dozen types of trees all mixed together in seemingly random order. There are standing dead stems, known to foresters as snags, and there is plenty of fallen timber in various states of decay. In places, I have to wade through shallow water to pass by a dense jungle of bramble, fern and honeysuckle.

Some of the older hazel and alder trees have huge bases and multiple stems, suggesting that these were cut a century and a half ago by Ned and his family to produce a continuous crop of timber that had many uses on the farm. In those days, horses would have been used to extract heavy timbers. I can imagine the men working together as a team among the trees. Since those days the woodland has been largely forgotten by the local farmers as the ground is too wet for cultivation and livestock are discouraged from entering here for fear that they will become trapped in the soft ground.

Getting to know the wood

I spent the first year after becoming the owner of Ned’s Wood just observing and getting to know my way around the place. Finding a dry path was important as some areas flood in the winter and it is good to be able to keep dry feet. This meant building a boardwalk across some small springs and streams. As well as the fox, I found where the tracks of deer and badgers were leading in and out of the wood. I found many fallen trees, some recent but others so rotten that they had almost been absorbed back into the woodland soil. I found the best areas for bluebells and wild garlic and I made a note of the locations of old hazel trees that might provide a good source of poles later on.

Ned’s Wood lies in a fold of the Wicklow landscape that makes it difficult to see from anywhere, even from the top of nearby Carrick Mountain. Close by is a well-known landmark, the Devil’s Glen, where the River Vartry flows through a deep glacial gorge filled with a mixed woodland. One small tributary of this river rises to the west and powers down through a wide valley carrying leaves and sticks from many small copses and plantations along its banks. The woodland itself is small, about three hectares, and it has grown up in the wet floodplain of the river, where the water frequently overtops its banks and spreads out to saturate the soils. This makes parts of it impassable in winter.

The woodland is dominated by tall trees reaching towards the light. Unlike a planted forest, this native woodland has a tangled mixture of species, ages and sizes of tree that has evolved over centuries. The trunks are fairly close together and in summer the canopy is dense, casting a deep shadow on the ground below. The commonest trees are alder but there is plenty of ash, birch, holly, hazel and oak with willow in more open areas. In winter, when the leaves have gone, the alder trees still hold onto their crop of tiny cones, the seed from which has long blown away in the wind. Alder is adapted to living in waterlogged soils and the largest specimens grow along the riverbank where their roots are permanently in the water.

Alder has a close relationship with a specialised bacterium, Frankia alni, in its roots. The bacteria absorb nitrogen from the air and make it available to the tree. In return, the alder tree provides the bacteria with sugars and minerals, and they use these to create enzymes which are eventually converted into amino acids – the building blocks of protein. When the leaves fall, they also add mulch and more nitrogen to the soil as well as providing food for worms and other decomposers. This nitrogen then becomes available to other trees in the wood. I have often found holly growing so close to an alder tree that it looks like it is in an embrace. The holly clearly benefits from the nitrogen levels in the soil around its neighbour. When a branch falls, the exposed wood of the alder is a rich orangey-red colour, but the timber is light and does not make good firewood due to its high moisture content.

The fact that alder evolved to grow best in wet soils made it a valuable wood for many specialised uses over the centuries. A fast-growing hardwood, it was widely used for building boats, mill wheels and anything that was frequently in contact with water.4 During the Industrial Revolution, alder was used to make wooden clogs for the workers who had to stand all day on the cold, wet floors of the factories, mills and mines of England. When Ned was a child in the mid-nineteenth century, he would have seen men from Lancashire making clogs in the woods around this part of Wicklow. These migrant woodsmen lived among the trees where they worked and the local children called them the ‘cloggers’.

After one year, the wood started to feel familiar. I knew when to expect the first leaves on each of the trees and where the deer liked to wallow in a muddy hollow. But I am just a casual visitor to the wood compared with indigenous forest dwellers around the world, who know every corner of their habitat as well as I know my own house.

History in the woodland

In the early days of exploring the woodland, I began to get curious about its history. How old are the trees? Were they planted or did they seed themselves? Were they ever cut down or managed? Did anyone ever live here?

My first sources of information were old maps. In the nineteenth century, the Ordnance Survey of Ireland was run by the British military authorities. Army sappers and their officers were dispatched to the far corners of the empire with their draftsmen and chain measures. Invented by the English mathematician Edmund Gunter in the early seventeenth century, the chain used by the soldiers measured exactly twenty-two yards (about twenty metres) long and was divided into one hundred links. I pity the men who had to carry this around!

Few local place names had been written down before this, so the soldiers talked to local people and interpreted the Irish names as best they could. There were often puzzling results. The Irish word for woodland, coill, was sometimes confused with cill, meaning church, so the wooded origin of a townland might be forgotten. But they did produce the first accurate maps of the countryside which were published at a scale of six inches to one mile.

By the 1830s, so-called ‘old stand woodland’ had been reduced to only a fifth of one per cent of the land area of Ireland when the British Army surveyors scoured the Irish landscape for the first edition of the six-inch scale maps. In Britain, ancient woodland survived for much longer but it is estimated that more than a third of that remaining there was destroyed in the second half of the twentieth century as modern agriculture was rolled out.5

On the 1834 map sheet for this part of Wicklow I found the river which forms the boundary of our small townland. Sure enough, it shows a line of large trees along the banks just in the location where some giant alder trees stand today. By the 1920s, and the last edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, the outline of Ned’s Wood was much as it remains today. The line of cottages along the road had gone, leaving only the vague outline of stones in the field and fading memories of the tenant families that lived there. Perhaps the dwindling population in the area meant less pressure for firewood and other timber, which allowed trees to grow to maturity. Old maps and documents give us an insight into how the land would have looked but they only go back a century or two. To understand the origins of woodland in the wider countryside, I need to go back a lot longer.

Does wildwood survive today?

The early clearance of the natural forests in Ireland suggests that virtually everything we see today is secondary growth. However, there could be sites where ancient woodland persists in places that have a history of forest cover. Oliver Rackham of Cambridge University made an exhaustive search of Ireland for any fragments of ancient woodland that may have remained. He used a number of clues to recognise such areas.6

Place names such as Derry (doire or oakwood) or Youghal (eochaill or yewwood) suggest not only that the site was wooded but indicate the dominant tree species. However, on most such sites there is no trace of remaining woodland. A few exceptions include Derrycunihy wood in Killarney, which is still an oakwood today. Old documentation such as The Civil Survey of Ireland in 1654–56 gives details of thousands of woods by townland. Analysing these extensive records, Rackham estimated that Ireland had at least 170,000 hectares of woodland in the mid-seventeenth century covering over two per cent of the land area. He considered that, by comparison with contemporary English woodlands, the Irish woodlands were in a neglected state by this stage.

After the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, large tracts of land were transferred to former soldiers to reward them for their loyalty. The Civil Survey, based as it was on the records of the original owners and not the result of an official or government survey, was considered by many of the new owners to be inaccurate. The Down Survey (so-called because a chain was laid down and a scale made) was organised from 1656 to 1658 under the direction of William Petty. The survey employed about a thousand men, mostly unemployed soldiers, and was carried out very rapidly. Using the Civil Survey as a guide, teams of surveyors were sent out under Petty’s direction to measure every townland to be forfeited to soldiers and adventurers. The resulting maps, made at a scale of forty perches to one inch, were the first systematic mapping of a large area on such a scale attempted anywhere. The primary purpose of these maps was to record the boundaries of each townland and to calculate their areas with great precision. The maps are also rich in other detail showing churches, roads, rivers, castles, houses and fortifications, and also include some woodlands. When his mapping was finished, Petty had difficulty in collecting some of the agreed payments. To settle this debt, nearly 10,000 acres of land were transferred to him, but he was not out of the woods yet. He was charged with fraud as the allocations of land to him in lieu of payment were alleged to be over-stated.

I checked Petty’s map for this part of Wicklow to see if there were any tree symbols on our land. Strangely, there is a large unshaded area covering this townland with the word ‘unforfeited’ printed across it in handwritten script. This must mean that it was retained in the original ownership. So, it gives me no further clues to the ancient history of our woodland.

Signs of historical woodland industries are another indicator of antiquity. Walking across the hill in the Devil’s Glen, another old woodland site close to my home, I have sometimes come across a circular platform about the size of a small garden. Scooping away the deep leaf mould from centuries of leaf-fall, I find a debris of charred wood in the soil indicating that this forest was once used for the industrial process of charcoal-making.

Good charcoal is mostly pure carbon, called char. This was made by ‘cooking’ wood for a long period in a low-oxygen environment, a process that could take days and burned off volatile compounds such as water, methane, hydrogen and tar. The process leaves black lumps and powder, about one-quarter of the original weight. When set alight, the carbon in charcoal combines with oxygen and forms carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, water, other gases releasing significant quantities of energy. Because charcoal burns hotter, cleaner and more evenly than wood, it was used by smelters for melting iron ore in blast furnaces, and by blacksmiths who formed and shaped iron tools. Commercial production was first done in pits covered with soil by specially trained craftsmen called colliers. Charcoalmaking was widespread in the country up to the eighteenth century. Isaac Weld wrote in 1807 of the Killarney woods:

Not long since all these mountains were clothed down to the water’s edge with oaks of large growth; most of these venerable trees have fallen to the axe which has been busily plied year after year. The destruction of these forests is principally attributable to the manufacture of iron – a business carried on with great spirit in various parts of the country and for which an abundant supply of charcoal was required. As fuel became scarce, the iron works declined, and at last they were totally abandoned. The woods are now cut for other purposes, as timber in this country is becoming extremely valuable, in consequence of the prodigal use that was formerly made of it.7

Among the indicators of very old woodland is the presence of certain trees such as the whitebeam and crab apple. Yew trees are another indicator of ancient pedigree, but yew woods are now very rare and of special interest. The Killarney yew wood is one of the oldest known stands in Europe and is estimated to be over 3000 years old.8 The yews themselves are gnarled and twisted. They bear bright scarlet fruits in autumn – a delicacy for thrushes and blackbirds.

Oliver Rackham of Cambridge University also suggested that lichens or Atlantic mosses and liverworts could be used as indicators of antiquity. Using a combination of all these clues, he concluded that much less ancient woodland survived in Ireland because of the depredations of a burgeoning population in the centuries leading up to the Great Famine of the 1840s.

Frazer Mitchell, of Trinity College Dublin, has confirmed from pollen analysis that Irish forests have been in constant flux over the last 10,000 years and that periods of stability were rare and short-lived. The interplay of a constantly changing climate and evolving human impacts on the landscape made for a dynamic history in the woods. The concept of a stable forest being undisturbed for thousands of years is not supported by the available evidence. Conservation management of the remaining native woodland needs to accept this history of dynamic change and to be aware of the sensitivity of the forests to minor changes in future climate.9

Coppicing

As February hands over the baton to March there are signs that winter is coming to a close. I am convinced that the shade cast later in the year by a dense canopy in some of our wood is restricting the ground flora and preventing regeneration of trees. The darkest areas are beneath the large holly trees that grow in the dryer soils near the bank of the river. The ground is covered in little more than some creeping ivy and slowly decaying holly leaves that have dropped from the trees. At the south of the wood there are a number of old hazel trees that are so shaded they produce few flowers in the spring and hardly any hazelnuts in autumn. So, there is no regeneration of hazel. It is time to introduce some positive management here.

Fortunately, my friend Mike Carswell, an experienced woodsman, lives and carries on his craft in Wicklow. I spend a while with Mike working out what we are going to do to encourage regrowth in the hazel area. Finally, we decide that the only way to bring sunlight back to this dark place is to cut some of the holly trees to the ground and coppice the hazels. So, the work begins with the help of various volunteers.