YOU wouldn't think trees could be political. Well, perhaps trees aren't. But woodland definitely is: and the roots of Ireland's woodlands are entangled in a messy undergrowth which is part history, part myth and part the dreamy-but-prickly thicket which results when nobody really knows which is which. If trees could talk, of course, they could sort all this out in a second. "Long, long ago," they might begin, "when Ireland was swathed in a gently waving mantle of green . . ." Or they might just harrumph, in their big, deep, grumpy-old-tree voices, "What do you mean, Ireland was once covered in oak forests? Get real," writes
ARMINTA WALLACE
Enter Michael Carey, who has been digging deep into the history of Wicklow’s woodlands and has produced a fascinating book on the subject called, appropriately, If Trees Could Talk. A brisk man who was once general manager of Coillte, he has a deep understanding of the many benefits trees can bring, from their role in carbon sequestration through their ability to produce a good hurley to the way in which – aesthetically – they shape the world through which we move every day.
But he’s also a realist who’s almost dauntingly down to earth about trees. And while the 289-page book boasts colour photographs of notable arboreal celebrities in Wicklow – such as the sweet chestnut at Rosanna, near Ashford, under which the Methodist preacher John Wesley is said to have given a sermon in 1789, or a stupendous tulip tree at Charleville, Enniskerry – its purpose is not to extol the beauty of individual trees. Carey has a point to make and, with the help of maps, old paintings, and much time digging around in libraries both here and in England, he argues his case as tenaciously as a woodland Richard Dawkins.
In a nutshell, he doesn’t swallow the old ideological chestnut which insists that Ireland was always completely covered in forests until our nasty English neighbours came in and cut it all down. “I wanted to find out how much woodland was actually there,” he says. “It has been grossly overstated because of the way we’ve been taught history, and because the experts disagree big-time on it. A lot of English experts would be of the view that Ireland didn’t have as much woodland as the Irish authors say; my view is that Irish authors have been influenced by what they’ve been told as part of their education. I tried to get underneath all that, and to stand back from the various controversies – but from the historical record I can only get back to about 1650. What was there in 1550, I just don’t know.”
The phrase “historical record” suggests something calm and methodical. More often, though, it’s chaotic, complex and contradictory. One strand of inquiry took Carey down a dark, even sinister, path. For centuries a whopping 90,000 acres of Wicklow, and 60 per cent of its total woodland area, “belonged” to the Fitzwilliam family, originally from Wentworth near Sheffield. Theirs is a tale of immense wealth, dysfunctionality and downright skulduggery. “The family records from 1700 to 1860 are immaculate, and absolutely unique – if you had the patience to go through them all,” he says.
After that, however, the record abruptly stops – until 1973, when tons of papers were burned on bonfires both in England and on their Irish estate based at Coolattin near Shillelagh. The Fitzwilliam story, Michael Carey declares with the air of a man who knows more than he’s prepared to let on, has to do with the lack of a male heir. The Fitzwilliams were not the worst kind of aristocratic landlords – at least, not in Ireland. Many south Yorkshire mining families, on whose misery much of the Fitzwilliam fortune was built, would have a still darker story to tell.
Go too far down that particular road, in fact, and you end up not being able to see the wood for the trees. What’s most striking about this book is how intimately the history of our woodland is bound up with that of the people who plant trees, fell trees, sell trees and – when times get particularly bad – even shoot each other against tree-trunks. If trees could talk, Carey notes grimly, they’d probably have something to say about people being hanged from their branches for relatively minor offences such as a spot of sheep-rustling.
These days our woodlands are mostly State-owned, and synonymous with hiking and camping and happy family days out. Which is not to say that everything in the garden county is rosy. Co Wicklow now has the highest percentage forest cover in Ireland, and planting continues apace – although not as fast as Michael Carey would like. “One of the sad things about Ireland is that we’re not keeping pace with where the planting programme should be at, because of all the cutbacks. A lot of land is still being left idle,” he says.
In many places, broadleaved woodland is gradually replacing the more familiar conifer cover of the past half-century. Once again, however, Carey’s research throws a questioning spotlight on a concept we often bandy about without examining it very closely. “Some of the ‘native’ oak woods here are not as native as people have been led to believe,” he says. “In fact, people were paid to bring in cartloads of acorns from England – and acorns went the other way as well. It’s very hard to say whether woods are native or whether they aren’t. The people at the Botanic gardens have been doing all kinds of analysis in recent years, but haven’t as yet been able to differentiate between the DNA of trees here and those in France and England.” Trees, eh. Even without being able to talk, they can give us quite an earful.
If Trees Could Talk by Michael Carey is available in bookshops or can be ordered online at www.coford.ie