Duntally Wood

Pippin and I took a walk in Duntally Wood, near Creeslough—where I had to go to the post office to mail our passports to Dublin to get The Stamp. Our visas were renewed!

Duntally Wood is a National Nature Preserve established almost 40 years ago with funding from the EU. I found it years ago on a map. There are no signs on the road, and it isn’t on any tourist brochures. Every time I go I wish I had returned sooner. 

Duntally wood is a National Nature reserve as well as a candidate Special Area of Conservation under the EU habitats Directive. Extending to over 15 hectares it is a fantastic example of an oak, ash, hazel woodland. Other notable tree species include Holly, Elm and Downy Birch. Ground flora is varied throughout the woodland and changes with soil and habitat type, common species include wood anemone, early purple orchid, hard fern, wild garlic, meadowsweet, bugle, and bluebell.

Birdlife in the wood is very diverse from the colourful Jays to the agile Tree-creepers. Raven, Buzzard and Sparrowhawk all breed within or close to the woodland, while Wood pigeon and Blue and Long-tailed tits are regularly encountered on a walk.

Duntally wood is a good place to explore some of our native mammal species. Deer visit the woodland occasionally during the winter months, while evidence of fox and badger can be found by their tracks and trails. Stoats and otters also frequent the woodland.

A friend of mine has been helping me identify bird songs, but I turned on the app that helps when she’s not around.

The Parks Service pretty much leaves this place alone. There used to be an interpretive plaque at the entrance but even that is gone now. The trail is less than a mile long. I only walked half of it.

I assume Duntally Wood was wee forest that survived because it’s in a creek bottom, protected from Donegal weather and farming. Locals say the creek was good for fishing, maybe it still is.

Recently the Irish Passport podcast spent three episodes on Ireland’s forests. They corrected the story that Ireland’s forests were cut down to build the English Navy. Much of Ireland’s forests were destroyed thousands of years before the English, by Neolithic and Iron Age farmers. If you let cows wander in a woodland, they eat all the tree seedlings, and in a few hundred years, the forest has died away, and no one knows why no young trees grew in their place.

Something similar happened to Santa Cruz’s redwood forests. After clearcutting, in areas without cattle ranching, the redwoods came back. That was only 120 years ago. The forests of Santa Cruz aren’t ancient. After 2020, most of them are burned over—but renewing now. I wonder what Santa Cruz’s forests will be like in 1000 years?

The podcast introduced a new phrase to me, the “Atlantic Rain Forest.” That’s what Ireland’s forests were, temperate rain forests, warmed and watered by the Gulf Stream. 

The phrase is the title of a book by a disaffected Dubliner, Eoghan Daltun. He bought a 70 acre farm on the remote Beara peninsula in Kerry. It had a small woodland on it because the family that owned it had emigrated, thinking they would return, but they didn’t. Without farmers, the forest returned.

After the famine, so many families left the Beara, as beautiful as it is. “You can’t eat the view,” as they say. Daltun proposes that the economics of that despairing aphorism have changed.

Daltun keeps returning to the word “pulse” to describe what happened when he made two key changes. A deer fence was built to protect the woodland, and he cut out and killed the invasive rhododendron. Then the forest pulsed back to life. It is happening at different paces across the farm, but in some areas it was just six years before young trees had formed a closed canopy.

You don’t need to manage a forest, or even plant one. If left alone, it comes back. 

He is firmly convinced that giving farmers the option to wild land will result in a significant shift. “I do think if you manage to change the farm subsidies criteria to make letting your land go back to nature eligible for farm subsidies in exactly the same way as grazing sheep you’d get some people who’d say: ‘no it’s my identity, I like grazing sheep, it’s my way of life. My family have done it forever I’m going to carry on doing it.’ Fine. You’d get other people who’d say ‘great’, either because they love nature or because almost all of the farmers in a place like this are only part-time.

“They all have some other job, and to have the option to let that land go back to nature so they don’t have to spend their weekends running around after sheep or dosing them or shearing them or whatever, a huge amount would say ‘well I’ll take that option’. Others will say ‘I’ll do a bit of both’.”

When I come home from the walk in Duntally wood, Artemis asked if “the beautiful tree” was still there. Yes it was, the big beech next to the creek. Pippin sniffed in the thick cover of beech nut shells for a long while. I could smell something musky like a stoat or an otter or a fox. 

We won’t be here in a thousand years to see what becomes of that tree, the otters, or the birds. But we get at least one more year.