The Gearagh: the River Lee’s ancient inland empire

The Gearagh is no ordinary woodland. It is an alluvial forest, an ancient wooded wilderness of islands interlaced by a delta-like network of streams and rivulets that characterise this stretch of the River Lee in Co Cork.

For millenniums people have been getting lost in the Gearagh. Some, such as the locally famous Robin Hood-like Sean Rua na Gaoire, got lost on purpose.

Kevin Corcoran, an author, retired science teacher, and descendant of Gearagh dwellers, is steeped in its ecology and folklore. He warns of the bewildering nature of the place as he hands me a sturdy hazel rod for testing the stream as we wade into the forest.

We pause to watch a Prussian blue damselfly, catch the splash of a rising trout, and haul ourselves on to the first wooded island, a bank of silt and humus covered with wild garlic and rarities such as Irish spurge. Corcoran rather reluctantly tells me that the latter was a poaching plant, its caustic milky white fluid used to stun fish.

“There are over 200 different varieties of flowering plants in here,” he says, “so the biodiversity is enormous.”

Back in the water we see flat, green-tinged freshwater sponges, some 15cm wide, others smaller, and slimy to touch. And then another gem, half buried in the dark-brown gravel: a pair of freshwater mussels, visible only when the light, penetrating the canopy of oak and ash and alder, catches the line of the open shells and filters the flowing water.

“That one could be 100 years old,” he says. “In medieval times all rivers in Ireland had freshwater mussels.”

Probing with our hazel rods, we stick to the shallows, avoid a fallen trunk, cross another stream, clamber on to an islet, pick our way across another stream and then step on to more dry land, soft and springy underfoot.

A sprawling oak stump sprouting five modest trunks is a clue to the Gearagh’s recent history, says Corcoran. In 1954 the ESB clear-felled about half of the forest as part of its hydroelectric works, in anticipation of the area becoming a reservoir behind the Carrigadrohid dam.

“But you don’t kill a wood by just cutting down the trees,” he says. “You’ve just coppiced it.” Coppicing, whereby trees are chopped back to promote extra growth, is an age-old woodland technique. The forest is creeping down towards the dam and restoring itself, Corcoran says. “There is maybe 400 acres of alluvial forest coming back – and it is increasing all the time.”

The Gearagh is of unique scientific interest, according to the National Parks and Wildlife Service. It is a nature reserve, a biogenetic reserve, a European protected habitat and a so-called Ramsar site, a wetland of international importance. “Despite the fact that about half of the original area has been destroyed, the Gearagh still represents the only extensive alluvial forest in Ireland or Britain, or indeed western Europe west of the Rhine,” reads a NPWS report from 2014.

For decades Corcoran has sought to keep publicity of the Gearagh to a minimum, content simply to help produce an information leaflet about it with the then OPW and the ESB, and to encourage his students to explore its wonders.

Now he is keen to attract attention to the area, particularly highlighting the fact that there is no management plan for the Gearagh, despite its international importance.

The release of River Runner, a documentary about the catastrophic demise of the wild Atlantic salmon in the Lee (from 15,000 in the 1950s to 500 now), has helped focus attention on this unique forest, which was once a thriving salmon spawning ground.

There are now no known runs of wild salmon in the Gearagh, it being upstream of what the film describes as antiquated fish passes at both the ESB’s hydroelectric dams on the River Lee.

Corcoran complained to the European Commission three years ago about the lack of a management plan for the Gearagh. Cork County Council says that after a complaint to Brussels “a commitment has been made by the Government of Ireland that a management plan will be prepared for the Gearagh Special Area of Conservation.

“Cork County Council is involved on a committee with the ESB, the National Parks and Wildlife Service, the Department of Environment and Local Government and Inland Fisheries Ireland, who are working together on the development of this plan.”

The county council “will do all it can to assist with the process of its making,” according to a spokeswoman. “The management committee for the plan is currently conducting a scoping exercise to identify and agree the issues to be addressed in the plan.”

Corcoran, interviewed in River Runner, calls for the water in the Carrigadrohid reservoir to be lowered, to encourage further rejuvenation of the Gearagh. The blackened stumps of the trees felled 60 years ago are still eerily visible when the water is low.

When emailed by The Irish Times about this, as well as other aspects of the Gearagh, the ESB fails to respond. Cork County Council says it is not in a position to comment on the film.

The need for a management plan is all the more important now, says Corcoran, who claims that the Gearagh is being eroded by increased flash flooding from upstream developments such as forestry and windfarms.

“If you remove the bogs and their function of flood control, and add in climate change, you are creating a recipe for disaster,” he says. “The engineers who say that dykes and ponds and silting areas can replace the bog’s anti-flooding function say so with such audacity that they remind me of the Titanic: ‘Oh, shut up: this boat cannot be sunk.’ ”

The plan will address flash flooding, according to the county council, which says the scheme will also address “issues relating to interpretation and visitor management at the site”.

Corcoran says that the Gearagh could be to Co Cork what the Cliffs of Moher are to Co Clare, but he is keen that sensitive areas should be accessible only with a guide. He envisages ecotourism similar to that in Bialowieza Forest, in Poland, although that primeval area is now is under serious logging threat.

The need to protect the Gearagh is clear, but any plan must also ensure that visitors don’t disappear into the wilderness never to re-emerge. The forest’s befuddling effect on one’s sense of direction – what Corcoran calls meascán mearaí – can be quite distressing. “One time I got lost and, no matter what way I went, half an hour later I’d come back to the same point.”

At one watery junction on our wander along the southern edge of the Gearagh Corcoran asks which direction I think we should take. I defer to him, and we eventually emerge over a bank into a wild-flower meadow. It’s beautiful, but it’s not where he had expected us to end up. “I took you in. We went upstream and we’ve ended up downriver.”