of birds neared the beach on which we stood, many of them dived and skimmed across the water offshore, inches from the surface. Their calls filled the air as they swooped up fifty feet or more and headed for the abundant tall beech trees in the Ballyglan demesne. Even as the first ragged black birds wheeled and turned into the trees, the following line of birds still stretched back across to Creadan, where a circling mass of them awaited their turn in the convoy. It was an amazing sight, and we stood transfixed for about twenty minutes as the movement took place, until all the birds, with the exception of a few stragglers, lined the branches of all the leafless trees in Ballyglan, continuing their chorus of caws.
Rooks are plentiful throughout Ireland. All the better to perform the task that nature designed them for, ridding the landscape of carrion, parasites and unwanted debris of all kinds.
Kilcop, 11 February
Looking out the kitchen window today, I was surprised at how far I could see down the garden through the sparse winter foliage. I could see trees and bushes that are hidden from the window at any other month of the year. As I looked, I saw, in the midst of the grey matrix of branches, a puzzling splash of gold. I had to go out and down into the garden to find out what it was. About fifteen years ago Teresa’s sister gave us a gift of a very small hazel, a tree that long ago got lost in the burgeoning shrubs and trees along the east side of the garden. It was this hazel, or more accurately, its catkins, that had caught my attention. Prompted by the sunshine of the last couple of days, the little overshadowed tree had proudly put forth its version of flowers in the form of long golden catkins, called, in some country areas, ‘lamb’s tails’; I think probably the first time it had produced them. In common with a number of other species of tree, the hazel is mainly pollinated by wind: when the time is right, these catkins will release clouds of yellow pollen, seeking the tiny carmine stigmas, female flowers, protruding from buds on the same or a nearby tree. The pollinated flowers develop eventually into hazelnuts with woody shells, protected by bristly bracts.
Hazel was one of the first trees to spread through Ireland after the last glacial period. Some experts believe that parts of the south of Ireland were not covered by the ice sheet and existed as an area of tundra during this time. It is possible that some hazel grew in sheltered parts of that tundra, and as the ice sheet retreated north, these hazels spread north after it. In places like the limestone-rich Burren in County Clare, hazel thrives in scrubland, and individual trees can reach heights of six metres. Largely forgotten today, in the past it was one of our most important trees. Its nuts were an important food source when man arrived in Ireland, and copious amounts of shells have frequently been found in archaeological excavations of Neolithic sites. Hazel trees were coppiced from earliest times to produce rods for making coracles, cradles, fencing and traditional baskets of every sort. Hazel rods were also used in the wattle and daub walls of houses in the early towns of Ireland, and water diviners often use forked hazel twigs. And we must not forget that St Patrick is said to have used a hazel rod to drive the snakes out of Ireland!
Kilcop, 12 February
A number of my coppiced ash trees are mature enough to harvest, and I have spent today felling them. Coppicing is a system of obtaining a regular harvest of wood; it involves felling a tree, ideally an ash, and leaving a stump about 900mm high. The mass of roots under the ground will continue to feed the stump, and so, when the growing season comes around again, the tree will put out new shoots. The ash tree produces very vigorous growth, the shoots getting up to more than a metre high in the first year. I reduce these to half a dozen shoots, allowing all the growth from the original stump to flow into the selected shoots, and after about seven years they have become a cluster of young saplings, each with a diameter of 100–125mm, ready for easy harvesting. In winter and early spring, before the sap rises, these saplings are easily felled, without having to deal with great amounts of leaves, and the process begins all over again. Today’s harvest is my third here, and will provide this winter’s fuel for our stoves in Kilcop and Dublin. Little coppicing is carried out today, but a careful examination of old hedges in the countryside will often reveal old, long-abandoned coppiced ash trees; they look like a half-dozen mature trees growing from the same base.
I also spent some time today working on our hedges. Bare of foliage at this time of year, individual hawthorn branches can be seen, and it is possible to access and lay some of the bushes. Laying a hedge turns it into a growing matrix of vertical and horizontal spiky branches, a living fence; it is a very ancient craft, certainly practiced since the Neolithic period. In early Christian times Irish farmers grew thick thorn hedges on the top of the banks of their ringforts, which would have been impenetrable to all but a modern tank. In attempting to lay our hedges, I am following the example of the late Tom Hayes, the man who sold the field to us. He was an old-fashioned farmer, and to pass the field out of his ownership in good order he laid all the hedges before handing it over. When I am working at laying the hawthorn and blackthorn, his labour in doing this work forty years ago is often revealed deep in the hedge, in hoary and ancient-seeming horizontal branches, a legacy of his good husbandry.
There is an art to laying hedges, as I have discovered over the years. Selected shrubs or young trees in the hedge are sliced through, near the ground, with a sloping cut, slicing in 80 per cent of the thickness of the trunk or branch. A bill hook or a hand-axe is the best tool for the job, but in recent years I have seen men use chainsaws, which the purist would certainly regard as sacrilege. The sloping cut goes through the heartwood, but leaves one side of the bush’s sap-wood protected by its bark. The cut trunk or branch is then bent over: the sap continues to rise and growth therefore continues out along the branch, which will put out new vertical shoots. The end result, after a few years, is a hedge thick with thorny horizontals and verticals.
Over the years, I have planted many trees in Kilcop, and I am in awe of how fast they grow and change our little world here. Apart from being beautiful and useful, the tree is a magnificent natural engine, playing a significant role in combating erosion and moderating climate, removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, generating oxygen and acting as a highly efficient carbon sink. There are more than 50,000 different species of these amazing and often-ignored plants, and they are among the largest living things on our globe.
In former times, while many rural folk could obtain peat to keep them warm in wintertime, the majority relied on timber. There were severe penalties for cutting down or damaging trees, most of which had been planted by the landlord class, but the country was well clothed in rough forests and thickets, and the poor collected whatever wood and sceachs (bushes) they could find for their fires. This may be one of the reasons why, in the early photos of the Irish countryside dating from about the 1860s onwards, there is hardly a bush to be seen. The gathering of firewood, or connadh, was one of the main tasks of winter, and many illustrations of the period show old people bringing home a great bundle, called a brossna, of withered branches or heather for the fire.
I have learned that some species of trees are better than others for burning, and one can be guided by a poem by Honor Goodheart, ‘Logs to Burn’, which was printed in Punch magazine in October 1920 and passed on to me by my brother Tom:
Logs to burn! Logs to burn!
Logs to save the coal a turn!
Here’s a word to make you wise
When you hear the woodman’s cries.
Beechwood fires burn bright and clear,
Hornbeam blazes too,
If the logs are kept a year
To season through and through.
Oak logs will warm you well
If they’re old and dry
Larch logs of pinewood smell
But
