Thread by @IrelandsFarmers

Good morning all.

Today I'd like to explore a subject that for me is both fascinating, and deeply relevant to the present.

That is: ecological and human history, how they're interconnected, and how we have so completely transformed or eliminated natural ecosystems over time.

I'll be focusing on what I've been able to learn of this immediate locality, the rest of the Beara Peninsula, and southwest Ireland.

While some of it is area-specific, examining one place in more detail can act as a lens through which to understand a much bigger picture.

In prehistory, like most of Ireland, Beara was covered in thick, extremely species-rich old-growth forest, in this case temperate rainforest.

We know this from pollen analysis of peat cores and other evidence, such as actual remains of ancient trees preserved in the peat.

The first people to visit would have been hunter-gatherers in the Mesolithic, pre 4000 BC.

Archaelogists now think these nomadic peoples altered landscapes more substantially than previously imagined, managing wild resources in ways that blur the distinction with actual farming.

The first farmers arrived in the Neolithic, with a culture and economy that was heavily based around cattle.

They cleared patches of forest, and grazing by their animals would have kept them open by preventing trees from regenerating.

The next wave of people to come in was during the Bronze Age, from c. 2000 BC.

They too were primarily cattle farmers, but with more advanced technologies, and they were the first to start clearing the forests where our farm is. There's a copper mine from this period nearby.

Over the following millennia, the forests continued to contract.

But it wasn't a linear progression: the graph of woodland cover is more a series of ups and downs, but with an overall downward trend.

(The core sample below was taken very near here, and goes from right to left.)

The names of the two townlands in which our farm is situated both derive from woodland, showing that they were likely still well wooded in early Christian times.

(Most Irish townland names were "more or less fixed by the 8th century AD" - woodland historian Eileen McCracken.)

Bofickil comes from Badh Fiadh-Choille - 'Recess of the Wild Wood'

Faunkill originated in Fan-Choill - 'Sloping Wood'

Some of the trees in our woods, especially oaks, are very old: according to woodland ecologist/historian @RobertBohan possibly 17th century.

By the tíme the first detailed map was made of Beara in 1558, there was still plenty of forest on the peninsula, with 21km2 in Glengarriff alone, for example.

But these surviving remnants were almost all destroyed over the next 2 centuries.

What happened?

The English gained full military supremacy in Ireland during this time, and the forests were seen by the colonists as

1. Dangerous refuges for native resistance
2. A source of quick cash from timber
3. A hostile wilderness to be tamed and used for farming

So they cleared them.

By the 1830s, only a minuscule 0.2% of Ireland was still covered in forest, according to woodland historian Oliver Rackham.

It was what we now call ecocide: the mass liquidation of natural ecosystems for profit. And it was accompanied by what, at times, verged on genocide.

But the prevalent idea that Ireland's forests were all cut down by the English is also highly oversimplified.

According to all serious estimates, somewhere between 87.5% (McCracken) and 98% (Rackham) of Ireland was already treeless by 1600.

That's all very summarised of course, and the wrangling over who was most to blame for transforming Ireland from a mostly wooded landscape into virtually the barest in Europe still goes on.

Only about 1% is now native forest, *and <0.1% is old growth*, like Uragh (Beara) below.

By the 1800s most people were dirt poor tenant farmers, paying rent to immensely rich Anglo-Irish absentee landlords, and barely scraping by.

Then in 1845-52 the Great Famine hit. In Bofickil the population collapsed by over 50%, in Faunkill by 75%.

A ruined cabin in the woods.

From 1863, our farm was the home of a family called the Crowleys.

Around 1909, Phil Crowley, who was a copper miner, left behind his wife and children to seek work in Butte, Montana (exactly a century before we arrived in 2009).

Whatever happened over there, he never came back.

Most of the Crowley kids also left for America a couple of decades later in the 1930s.

As far as I can piece together, very little was done with the land from around 1909, allowing surviving pockets of wild native woodland to begin spreading back out.

So the woods in our place came into being not through being planted by human hands, nor by human design or agency, but due to *neglect*.

There's an important message in that: what nature generally needs most is to be left well alone, rather than managed by people.

Why bother delving into the past like this?

Because you can't understand where you are now if you don't understand what went before, and how you got here.

And, more crucially: nor can you understand where you might want, or need, to go *in the future*.

Laying all this out isn't just an interesting investigation into historical ecology: it sets the scene for some of the other things I'll be talking about later in the week.

Sorry if some of it has been a little harrowing, but these events shaped the present landscape in Beara.

Tomorrow we'll look at another topic, that will in many ways follow on from today's thread.

I hope you'll be back to check it out!