Natural works of art bogged down in history

ANOTHER LIFE: An image for January in Mayo could be a bleak and spiky rampart of bog-deal beneath an ochre tea-time sky. Tangled at the edge of a new-made field, the ploughed-up pine roots speak of "reclamation", a word that asserts altogether too much about human rights to the Earth.

The roots belong to a prehistoric time when brief climate change dried out the western bogs enough to let Ireland's native (now "Scots") pines take root. They prospered without ever feeding from the mineral soil below but died when the rains came back and the peat refilled with water, starving their roots of oxygen; their sodden limbs were buried as the bog rose over them.

Snagging the sléan on a pine root, bright orange in the dark peat, was a frequent diversion of my turf-cutting days on the mountain. Today, in the peaty fields drained and sown with grass, a projecting knuckle of root can break a blade on the silage mower - hence the great effort to wrench them all out, like the fangs of wisdom teeth.

I used to wonder why it was that only the roots remained: a trunk or a branch of pine were rare. Then I learned how "the old people" found buried timbers in a world without wood. Pacing the bog on a dewy or frosty morning, they looked for patches that seemed to dry or thaw more quickly (perhaps because of a seep of methane) and probed with iron rods.

Drying and hardening in the air, bog-deal had uses unthought of today, from roof-beams to flaming torches for night-time salmon-spearing, from crude furniture to tree-fibre rope. The awe of resurrection can be felt at the pine trunk that soars in the heart of north Mayo's Ceide Fields centre - a massive, polished totem that all feel bound to caress. In the National Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin is a three-metre bog-deal plank that was cut from something even bigger - a pine 20 metres long, excavated in Co Fermanagh. The adjusted radiocarbon date of the Ceide trunk, around 4,500 years old, confirmed the general vintage of the buried western pines, but it is far from the oldest Irish timber yet recorded. That distinction belongs to a piece of bog oak found in a drain in a Munster spruce plantation - a dense-grained, blue-black relic more than 7,500 years old.

It was retrieved by a craftsman in wood, Seamus Kelly, who admits himself "totally possessed" by the promise of Ireland's buried trees. Roaming the old fenlands around his home at Knockeen, Butlerstown, Co Waterford, he scans every stack of bog-wood, inspects the debris from every newly-excavated drain. Knee-deep, perhaps, in chilly water, he scrapes a likely-looking timber with his penknife, hoping for something strange.

Last October, for example, his blade struck vivid colours - tints of purple, orange and green, running with a tortuous grain. He had found his first piece of yew, its three metres of heartwood made iridescent by the special chemistry of the bog.

Yew was often overrun by peat at the fenny margins of raised bogs. Dug out in the 18th and 19th centuries, it served not only as imperishable lintels and gateposts but also became prized over rosewood for use in fine furniture. In the modern renaissance of bog-timber craft, the name of Michael Casey of Co Offaly (trading as Celtic Roots) has been synonymous with yew; his dramatic altar, gleaming with ebony-dark, muscular forms, has drawn thousands to a little church at Pollagh at the heart of Bord na Mona's oldest bogland.

Rarest of all the ancient bog timbers is Ireland's original wych elm, whose sudden decline about 5,000 years ago probably involved an early wave of what we now call Dutch elm disease. Seamus Kelly found his first piece at the edge of a drained field, and it became the first elm specimen to be dated at UCD's new radiocarbon laboratory.

The tree was one of the survivors, growing at 3,084 years ago. In the millennia beneath the bog, its traditional rough-hewn qualities (fit for coffins, wheel-hubs, water-pipes) had been quite overtaken by the inner beauty of its grain: golden-yellow and green and ranged in overlapping waves. Quarter-sawn, its rays come up "like jewellery" says Kelly.

Such treasures enrich his furniture, sculptures and wall-hangings. The rich, beeswaxed blackness of bog oak is set into a pale-gold matrix of holly, or matched in jagged sculpture to yew and elm, or the bogwoods of secondary woodland: ash, alder, birch, cherry. Tall cabinets of bog oak and elm, commissioned by Martin Cullen, Minister of State for the Office of Public Works, now stand in the refurbished Leinster House. "This," the minister said confidently, "is art."

It seems right that, in the hands of sculptors and gifted craftsmen, Ireland's ancient bog timbers are contributing to art as they have done, so outstandingly in recent decades, to science. Both come together in the beauty of an object in the visitor centre at the Navan Fort in Co Armagh: a polished cross-section of a great oak trunk in which dense centuries of tree-rings gleam like bands of agate.

IT helps to tell the story of the remarkable, 7,272-year chronology of oak tree rings completed 20 years ago by the Palaeoecology Centre of Queen's University, Belfast, led by Dr Mike Baillie. By overlapping the pattern of rings in sequences of progressively older timbers, the new science of dendrochronology now calibrates the accuracy of radiocarbon analysis, and helps to put precise dates on archaeological finds and environmental events..

In one of Seamus Kelly's finds, for example, a piece of oak dated to 1159 BC showed dense and incredibly narrow rings (and thus the virtual cessation of annual growth) in the long dust-veil winter that followed the eruption of Iceland's Mount Hekla volcano.

One spur to the development of the QUB oak chronology was the widespread excavation of bog oaks in the mid-1960s for the North's big motorway and drainage programmes. Now, similar excavations in the raised-bog country of the South as part of the Republic's new highway programme may provide a wealth of ancient hardwoods for the chisels of craftsmen like Casey and Kelly.

In the meantime, Dúchas assures me that, despite a whimsical letter to the contrary in a recent Eye on Nature, it never proposed to remove a prominent sycamore that roots deep into the passage mound of Dowth in the Boyne valley. It has, however, removed the gorse that had invaded the tumulus, thus giving visitors "a better appreciation of the scale and importance of the third of the great tombs of Brú na Bóinne. So that's all right, then.

Seamus Kelly's website is at

www.homemaker.ie/seamuskelly

Walking in Poppintree Park, just west of Ballymun flats, where an underground river had flooded, I saw about 20 grey/brown waders which turned out to be black-tailed godwits. Any doubts about the possibility of finding a coastal bird some three to four miles from the sea might be confirmed by the even more striking appearance later of a single oystercatcher in the same spot.

John Montague, Sillogue Road, Ballymun, Dublin

Black-tailed godwits go inland to flooded areas, and are found on the Shannon Callows. Oystercatchers are often found in flocks on Dublin football fields in winter.

On New Year's Eve, I observed a barn owl crossing the road in my car headlights at dusk, close to Kilmore Village near Carrick-on-Shannon.

J. Ganley, Co Leitrim

Most of the barn owls in Ireland are found east of a line from Fair Head in Co Antrim to Slea Head in Co Kerry. They feed mainly on small rodents, and can be found where there is likely to be a food source for such beasties.

Recently I was travelling by train to Dublin, and at the creek that leads into Broadmeadow Estuary, where the tide was out, I saw a white wader, larger than a cormorant but smaller than a heron.

E. Mac Duinnshléibhe Ó hEochadha, Co Meath

It was a little egret which are increasingly overwintering along the south and east coasts.

Eye on Nature is edited by Michael Viney, who welcomes observations sent to him at Thallabawn, Carrowniskey PO, Westport, Co Mayo. E-mail: viney@anu.ie. Observations sent by e-mail should be accompanied by postal address.