Torch made from 5,600-year-old bog oak

When the Olympic flame was lit in Athens, a small village near Athlone watched avidly.

This year the Special Olympics runners are carrying torches made from 5,600-year-old Irish bog oak by Helen Conneely in her studio in the village of Ballinahown, four miles east of Athlone.

She made a total of 17 different torches which, since the launching ceremony on the hill of Pynx, have been travelling through 17 different capital cities.

They have been held aloft by runners from police forces across the world, including the Garda Síochána and the Police Service of Northern Ireland.

Since the "Flame of Hope" arrived in Northern Ireland on Friday torch runners from the Garda and PSNI have been bringing the flame to more than 130 towns and villages across Ireland, in three of Helen's 17 torches.

In Croke Park one torch will be handed to a Special Olympics athlete, who will light a gas cauldron which will burn for the duration of the games.

According to Helen, in ancient times "it was possible for a monkey to swing from tree to tree from Dublin to Galway and down as far as Cork. When the ice age came the trees were knocked and became immersed in bogs."

More oak forests were felled in the 1400s by the British when oak timbers were used in such building as Westminster Abbey. Off-cuts and even whole trunks again found their way into bogs where they remained until peat harvesting.

In the 1800s in Ireland, bog oak was occasionally polished and used for decoration but during the famine it was used for firewood.

In recent decades, bog oak, yew, and pine excavated by Bord na Mona was simply considered a nuisance.

Helen started to collect the discarded wood and to sand and shape it in her studio.

Her work was greeted with growing acclaim and recently she sculpted a massive bog oak housing for a fountain in the village green in Ballinahown.

According to Helen, the bog pine is a soft wood and is too soft to be worked. Bog yew is "as hard as stone when dried" while the bog oak is useful.

"When we get it out of the bog it has 200 percent moisture - about the consistency of cheese. It has to be dried for about two years to get the moisture level down to about 98 per cent.

"It is the tannins in the oak which react with the acids in the bog which give it its distinctive black colour," according to Helen.

Earlier this year Helen was approached by the designers of this year's torch, Newbridge Silver.

The resulting "Flame of Hope" torches, made from the same 5,600-year-old bog oak, are decorated in sporting motifs in Newbridge Silver - an entirely Irish production.

"It was amazing to see the ceremony on the hill in Athens, knowing that the athletes were handling Irish bog oak which we sourced from a bog near Tullamore in Co Offaly,"she said this week.