Sir, - Michael Viney, in his interesting article on the pine in Ireland (June 14th), has not done justice to the evidence for its survival. Philip O'Sullivan Beare, in his unpublished natural history of Ireland (1625), refers to the pine as an Irish tree, "especially in the woods of the Curlews", and these "fir" woods on the Curlew Mountains are also referred to in the Strafford Survey of Co Sligo 10 years later. August in Henry, at the beginning of this century, believed he had identified native Irish pines at Doneraile, Co Cork, and I have heard evidence that the same may have been true of Dromana, Co Waterford.
However, there is another piece of purely circumstantial evidence. That large turkey like bird, the capercaillie, survived in Ireland down to the late 17th century, and it is generally accepted by ornithologists that the capercaillie is dependent on pine shoots for an important part of its diet. The reduction of the Scottish pine woods led to its extinction there also, and it was only successfully reintroduced into Scotland from Scandinavia in 1837, alter extensive replanting had taken place.
The fact that the caperaillie still survived, for instance, in the Arklow area in the 1660s thus suggests strongly that native pine woods still existed there. Pollen samples are less helpful in this case than they might seem to be pine woods would have grown on the drier slopes, precisely the areas least favourable for pollen survival (there is, I believe, not a single pollen core so far from the southeast of Ireland).
If native Irish pines still exist, I suggest they should be looked for in the few places where patches of native woodland survived continuously through the early modern period, such as Keanogue Wood in the south of Co Carlow, or the Glen of Aherlow. Yours, etc.,
Department of History,
University College Cork.