A walk in Richard’s native Irish woodland
REPORTER DAVID MEDCALF ENJOYED A WALK IN A WOOD NEAR ASHFORD WITH ECOLOGIST RICHARD NAIRN. THEY DISCUSSED HOW IRISH TREE SPECIES SUCH AS OAK AND ALDER ARE NATURALLY BEST FOR BIODIVERSITY IN THE IRISH LANDSCAPE
FIRST things first, as Richard Nairn makes clear. Please, he requests politely but firmly, there will be no mention of precisely where this interview was conducted. Suffice it to say that we are talking somewhere near Ashford, give or take a few kilometres. Suffice it to mention that the trees he monitors and cares for here grow within an easy stone’s throw of a minor tributary of the River Vartry. Suffice it to suggest if you want to know more about his work, then read his book rather than come calling in person.
Where one of Ireland’s leading ecologists has his haunt is not a public place, he stresses. Yet he hopes that what is going on here, in his little (no more than three acres) slice of old-fashioned Irish woodland, may be of general interest.
Richard regularly patrols the patch which is his canvas, his workshop, his hobby. But the paths are too mucky and the land is too uneven to allow casual callers ramble at will around the grounds.
The book, issued last year, is called ‘Wild Woods – the magic of Ireland’s native woodlands’ – and it was published by Gill Books. It records the turn of the seasons in what he calls ‘Ned’s Wood’ in honour of a previous occupant of this part of County Wicklow.
Ned was a tenant of the Glanmore Estate in the 19th century, when the Synge family were the local big-wigs controlling thousands of acres. The house in which he lived shows up on the Ordnance Survey maps of the 1830s and, if you know where to poke around, a few stones from the walls of his cottage may still be found.
The present-day owner draws on such history for inspiration and guidance in his attempts to re-create the old-style forestry which used to cloak much of this island. The 68-year-old reveals that he was brought up on the southside of Dublin.
‘I consider myself a countryman,’ he insists, conjuring up boyhood memories of farm fields in Dean’s Grange before the area became completely covered in modern suburbia. He studied natural science in Trinity College after leaving school and then went to work for the National Trust in Northern Ireland. His mission in the North was to care for the nature reserve at Murlough, fascinating sand dune country on the coast beside the Mourne Mountains.
Returning to Dublin after five years, Richard worked briefly for a publishing firm in the capital before landing a post with Birdwatch Ireland, serving as the organisation’s national director for 10 years. Then he reckoned it was time to move on, setting up Natura, a firm which dealt with matters environmental for 30 busy years.
Jobs taken on included preparations for an Arklow sewage treatment scheme which is only now being built, two decades after his team drew up their plans. Natura also played a part in selecting routes for the national road building programme, suggesting ways of limiting ecological damage by directing traffic around bogs and wetlands.
Probably the highest-profile project on which Natura was engaged was the widening of the N11 as it passed through the Glen of the Downs. Wicklow County Council called in Richard and his colleagues in the 1990s to assist with a project which became highly controversial.
On one side were hapless commuters keen to reduce travel time while, on the other, the woods were
occupied by eco-warriors whose declared aim was to save the glen’s precious oaks. While traffic tail-backs created by a combination of roadworks and protests left motorists fuming, the warriors set up homes in trees and refused to budge for months on end.
Richard is reluctant to rehash the old battles but he declares himself content with the solution found to the problem. The capacity of the road was increased simply by widening the existing thoroughfare, leaving most of the mature timber overlooking the route untouched.
He reckons that the majority of the trees felled to make way for the cars were beech or sycamore, imported species which he rates of little value. The issue of which trees are actual, bona fide, genuine Irish has become a hot topic in recent times and Richard knows where he stands.
Beeches, so far as he is concerned, come from the south of England and are not the real McCoy, no matter how common. Along with rhododendrons and laurels, as well as the sycamores, they are dismissed as intrusive aliens.
Though the name suggests otherwise, Scots pines with their feathery long needles make the cut, among two dozen species that are rated native. The list also includes ash, holly, birch, alder, willow and yew, most of which are represented in Ned’s Wood.
Looking across the countryside to the slopes of the Devil’s Glen and Carrig, he notes that the planting of commercial forestry is not generally guided by such discrimination. Richard is proud and glad to reside in the county which boasts Ireland’s greatest concentration of woodland, though much of it is comprised of imported species.
The reality is that the country had to take drastic action after years of felling reduced tree cover to around one measly per cent of Irish land at the start of the 20th century. In playing catch-up, it made sense to turn to quick growing North American conifers such as Sitka spruce and Douglas fir.
More recently, the value of Irish trees in Irish countryside has been promoted by government through the Native Woodland Conservation Scheme. The Nairn family acquired their smallholding near Ashford about four years ago and have willingly taken to the scheme’s quest for old-style biodiversity.
‘It was a chance to put into practice what I had been campaigning on,’ muses Richard, ‘and it is just such a lovely place – it’s great to be here. I spend a lot of my time here.’ Of benefit to the planet is the fact that the trees lock up carbon in the fight against climate change and they also protect water quality, soaking up the fertiliser run-off from adjoining farmland.
As well as managing the existing woodland, the conservation consultant-turned-forester has planted a couple of grassy fields with a mixture of oaks, willows, Scots pines and hazels – all protected by high deerproof fencing. However, his principal pre-occupation is the established woodland which yields a healthy crop of timber to keep himself and wife Wendy warm.
The result of clearing out the alien species and salvaging logs from ash affected by the fatal dieback disease also feeds the stove of daughter Hazel and her partner Davi Leon. The latter reminds the older man that he took a healthy crop of cep mushrooms from the woods this year but Richard confesses that he is not keen on such fancy fungi. He prefers to harvest elderflower blossoms to make cordial.
Richard bids the visiting reporter to join him down in the valley, with a warning that conditions will be boggy underfoot. We pass a stand of young oaks, planted three years ago, and still requiring 1.8 metre high guards to keep nibbling deer at bay.
Other animals he sees regularly around here include squirrels and badgers but he has yet to see a pine marten. No better man to identify pine marten droppings, however, and he has used a movement sensitive camera to capture images of the notoriously shy creature.
The path through Ned’s Wood is meandering and the trees are never in anything resembling a straight line. Here is a hulking ancient birch, a metre and a half in diameter. There is a scattering of young hazels.
Richard points out how alder, with its distinctive catkins, populates the wetter spots while holly is found in shady places. He reckons that maybe 10 per cent of the trees are ash, doubtless doomed to fall victim to the dieback plague unless some prove by happy chance to be resistant.
‘We don’t take out all the dead wood because it is very important,’ he insists, noting that many insect species rely on dead or dying timber. It is also attractive to the woodpeckers which were frequently heard tapping at the bark last year in search of food.
This is biodiversity in action, with room for a family barbecue venue around a collapsed alder. Ferns and brambles abound but there is space too for bluebells and wood anemone, along with examples of a shrub called tutsan, a shrub which bears poisonous blackberries.
The master of this everyday wonderland speaks of coppicing, cutting back trees as a gardener might prune back roses. A native wild forest, it seems, requires constant attention and monitoring and experimentation – but if this is work, Richard makes it look like pleasure.
‘We want to let it develop as naturally as possible, so that it is self-sustaining,’ says Richard, taking the long view of a man who has three grandchildren. Incidentally, three of his four offspring have tree names – Hazel, Derry (as in oak) and Rowan, while the exception, Tim, recently qualified as a forester.
WE WANT TO LET IT DEVELOP AS NATURALLY AS POSSIBLE. IT IS JUST SUCH A LOVELY PLACE. IT’S GREAT TO BE HERE. I SPEND A LOT OF MY TIME HERE