"THE beautiful demesne of Lady Bellingham had been destroyed upwards of two hundred noble trees have been laid low." This was the sad news conveyed to readers of the Drogheda Journal on January 12th, 1839, and similar reports, many telling of damage considerably worse, were, coming in from every corner of the country.
Lady Bellingham's trees were victims of the "Big Wind", which occurred on the night of January 6th that year and was perhaps the most ferocious storm ever in this country. The woodland casualties were nationwide "Several hundreds of thousands of trees have been levelled to the ground", lamented the Dublin Evening Post. "Markree Castle has suffered severely, with" nearly all the ornamental trees torn up", joined in the Enniskillen Chronicle, and went on to report the loss of 100,000 more on the estate of the Earl of Belmore.
Two thousand were blown down on the Bishop of Meath's estate at Ardbracken, Co Meath, while according to the Limerick Chronicle. "At Newgrove, seat of Thomas Browne Esq, over 3,000 trees were blown away, many of which had been the beauty and the ornament of that demesne for more than 100 years."
But why, you might well wonder as you read, were all these trees a growing in the first place, on an island that we tend to think of as arboreally challenged? On this point, I can be of help. This is National Tree Week, and the annual Augustine Henry Lecture, one of the many events to celebrate the week, deals with the great surge of tree planting that occurred in Ireland from the late 18th century to the Famine period. During this relatively short time, many of the nation's great demesnes were laid, and the enduring landscape of hedgerows, avenues and shelter belts created.
The speaker at 8 pm tonight in the Merrion Room of the RDS in Dublin will be Professor William Smyth of the geography department, UCC, and his topic will be "The Greening of Ireland Tenant Tree planting in the 18th and 19th centuries". He will tell how Ireland's forests virtually disappeared, both for economic and strategic reasons, with the conquests and plantations beginning in the 15th century. Subsequently, however, a series of Acts of Parliament between 1731 and 1783, provided great incentives to those who might wish to devote a portion of their lands to trees.
Professor Smyth will explore the economic and cultural aspects of this arboreal activity and its effects upon the rural landscape, then and now. He will also tell us why the fashion faded and why there was little planting in the closing decades of the 19th century.