I was talking to a man I know, recently, about woods, and how painful it is to see them cut down. "Take Ballyseedy wood," I said, near Tralee. Kerry County Council wants to cut a big strip of it down for a dual-carriageway. Do you know it?" "Do I know it?" he said, dreamily. "Wasn't I in it one night not long ago? Didn't I make love in it? Of course it shouldn't be cut down."
I was impressed by this new argument for saving it. At the same time, I could hardly believe him. This love-making must have taken place at the very edge of the trees, near the hotel they surround. Because I was in Ballyseedy wood a few weeks ago, in the company of some local pro-wood activists. And I have never been in a wood, anywhere, more difficult to stand up in, much less lie down in, than this one.
This corner of the Ballyseedy woodland is very wet, and as a consequence it has hardly been touched by humans or by animals over the centuries. It is dense with dead, dying and regenerating trees and saplings. Even the hungriest animals can't get in because a palisade of trunks and branches defends the living trees and their bark. We hacked our way slowly through this deep green universe, through briars and hawthorn bushes and sallies, on mats of buttercup and marigold and moss, sending up waves of the scent of wild garlic as we moved.
Far above us, the sun dappled the top canopies of the noble alders and ash trees and old sessile oaks. When we finally squelched out of a drainage ditch and through a bamboo thicket to reach the edge, we had covered about a quarter of a mile, and it had taken us nearly two hours. No wonder the English couldn't get at Irish rebels when they hid in woods like these.
It took a very, very long time for the wood to get like that. To me, that is reason enough for any generation to be very, very slow in cutting it down. But Kerry County Council has its reasons, of course.
Better reasons, it seems to me, than Killarney Golf Club has, a half-an-hour south, for cutting down oakwoods for the sake of a larger golf course - a proposal discussed in this space, recently. But Killarney raises different issues to Tralee. And may I say, in case Kerry is beginning to feel persecuted - I didn't go to Ballyseedy because of anything written in a paper.
I went to Ballyseedy, incidentally, because one Sunday this summer I met a friend in Tinahely, Co Wicklow, to go to an Irish traditional music concert. Neither of us had ever been in those parts before. We saw a sign for Coolattin, so we asked for directions to Tomnafinogue wood - the one that was saved from destruction after a long and determined campaign.
We walked through Tomnafinogue - drifts of bluebells under the trees, rhododendrons with great white flowers massed under graceful Scotch pines, the clear river streaked with flowery half-submerged grasses, sun turning the oak leaves to jewelled green - and said to each other: "They were going to cut this down? This?"
THEY are not a bit alike, the two woods. Ballyseedy is far more secretive and primeval. But they're both beautiful. That is, if you see beauty in woods. And let us be straightforward about this. The reason that natural beauties of one kind or another are endangered in this State is because at least half the population don't know what the other half is talking about when they say such things are beautiful.
We are - at best - in a transition period between two ways of valuing the natural heritage. One lot thinks of conservationists as airy-fairy elitists: many conservationists think of their opponents as dull-souled philistines. What matters, in a case like Ballyseedy, where the State is the destructive agency, is how many of one or the other kind is in power in local or national government.
I'm not talking about road engineers when I talk about philistines. They have a very necessary job to do and of course want to go ahead and do it as well as they can within a reasonable budget.
In the case of Tralee, they want to upgrade a road, shared by the traffic from Killarney and Cork, and the traffic from Limerick and Dublin, as it comes into town. No one could deny that this stretch is excessively narrow and dangerous, that something must be done, and that the council's plan to do away with about eight acres of the wet-wood by widening the road and diverting a river is in engineering terms an exciting plan.
The alternative which the woods activists favour wouldn't have a dual-carriageway with fly-overs at all traffic approaching the town from the east would use two widened roads, one of which would be the Ballyseedy route. As soon as all this traffic gets into town anyway, it is caught in Tralee's narrow streets, so speed isn't the point.
European funds are driving the dual-carriageway project. The Tralee town manager is reported in Kerry's Eye as telling urban district councillors: "It's very important we don't lose the money . . . If this does not go ahead there is a national programme drawn up and a substitute project somewhere in the country will step in and get the funding
Yet any hope for the wood also lies with Europe. Because it is a Special Conservation Area - an ancient eco-system as untouched is very rare - it is protected to a degree under the EU Habitats Directive. But that directive says even such a rarity can be destroyed if the public interest needs it and if there is no alternative. But who is to say whether there is an alternative? Surely there is an alternative, though it might take longer to build or cost more than the one proposed?
THE local councillors would oppose the Ballyseedy plan if their voters wanted them to, but their voters are largely indifferent. Few of us were educated to feel for these things. And, therefore, a wood related to the greenwood that was here before we were is likely to be sacrificed for ever to a late 20th-century road that will not last 30 years.
Imagine if instead they hung wooden walkways through the wood, and made shelters, and put up information panels and transformed it into a unique tourist attraction and a pioneering educational instrument. But although a man from Tralee practically ran the European Union when we had the Presidency, the local rather than the European perspective is the one that will decide the fate of Ballyseedy.
On the Icarus Environment Watch site on the Internet someone has posted the thought that some of these trees, "particularly the oaks, are of great age and could possibly have been alive before the Treaty of Limerick in 1691, growing as saplings and changing with the seasons in the time of Gaelic Ireland." Imagine. And then, to be cut down in our time.