We’re back with Martino Newcombe in the West of Ireland, where he reflects on a winter’s day of planting a shelter belt of native tree species. Not on his farm, but on that of his neighbour, a retired farmer, with the help of another neighbour – echoing the traditional Irish practice of helping each other out that is known as “meitheal”. On this particular day it’s an act of coming together in community that nurtures the ecosystem of people as well as biodiversity. As a wildlife corridor connects flora and fauna, local networks of knowledge and skills spawn opportunities to build resilience. Martino shares the insights of a day’s work.
One Sunday morning last winter a neighbour and myself dragged bags containing a variety of young native trees to a barbed wire fence line, intending to plant four hundred of them for a shelter belt before dinner time. This was for an elderly retired farmer who loves to feed the small birds around her home knowing any extra cover would increase shelter and food for them, and shelter for livestock too.
No favour, merely doing her a turn as she does us, always ready with advice on local resources such as the nature of particular spring wells – one is good for making tea, another for ensuring vigour in cattle – and as importantly the techniques that were used to ‘sweeten’ the wells to keep the water potable – invaluable local knowledge not written down in any book. Spring wells are places where underground freshwater naturally rises to the surface.
Good company
We walked through mist to reach the fence line, a still morning with only curlew calls piercing the quiet, good planting weather. Four hundred trees sounds a lot – is a lot – if you go at it by yourself, but in good company the bags empty before you know it.
Myself and the other lad hadn’t worked together in a long time so talk turned to all we had been doing in the intervening years. Woods knocked and started, sheds, stables and bridges built, ponds and streams dug and the occasional reverent moment that being outdoors in all weathers brings, from stepping into an untouched valley in the Burren or meeting a stoat while eating lunch by a hedge on the Sky Road.
Savoured fleeting moments that offset winter’s biting cold and summer’s biting insects. Something is always eating something else, everything is connected – ecology. We mostly work in Connacht, a wet and windswept region in the west of Ireland, whose mountains, islands and plains still retain much of their ancient wildness, so natural wonders are never far away.
One bag empty.
The weather here can be harsher here than drier snow-covered climates due to winds driving rain hard in from the Atlantic which does benefit crop growers by blowing away insect pests but those winds also drive heat from the body very quickly – with livestock as with people. To keep body temperature up more food needs to be consumed than if they had shelter. Long before housing was used to keep livestock alive in harsh weather beasts were sheltered under trees or behind hedges, considered healthier kept out under ‘God’s roof’ in the words of older people.
Wildlife corridor
As the mist lifted we had a clearer view of nearby wide ‘callows’ which are seasonally flooded grasslands found on low-lying river floodplains. Callows where I mentioned I had seen a little egret perched on a dead tree by the river some winters past – until I saw one, I didn’t realise they even existed in Ireland.
Talk of little known wildlife reminded the other lad about his previous night’s discovery when he had been looking at a map of the area. He realised that this one tree line we were planting was linking up existing hedge and tree lines on neighbouring gardens and farms creating a wildlife corridor over three miles long. It began south of us high on a hill on an old abandoned road closed in with uncut (relict) whitethorn running through cattle pasture before dropping down to a furze covered callow, through copses of blackthorn across into more relict whitethorn to this new line of alder and Scots pine. These joined young willows running between the wide callows on one side and marshy pasture to a turlough before blending into a line of mature ash, itself bordering pine plantations and woods eventually spreading out into hundreds of acres of bogs.
A wildlife corridor of jays and foxes, buzzards and martens, orchids and kingfishers passing through cattle, sheep and horse pastures farmed by people who mill timber, forge iron and work stone (to name a few) and some – as it turned out – on our doorstep just fields away, and many as unaware of each other’s work as we were of them – until we began talking. Practical people, quietly working away improving theirs and others’ self-sufficiency and biodiversity. A lot was going on and a lot was on the move judging by the new yellow deer warning signs appearing on roads near us. We wondered what else was out there, what other skills were out there – just out of sight, just beyond local knowledge branching off in every direction from this one strip that includes ponds, streams and rivers.
When we came back to the job at hand another bag was empty.
Fragmented knowledge, scattered skills
For all the talk of the internet being an information highway, it seems that practical knowledge is as fragmented and scattered as habitats and landscapes.
More talk of finding a way to remedy this emptied another bag.
So came the idea of gathering together these skilled people into a network mirroring the network of habitats that a wildlife corridor creates, and linking those practised hands with anyone with a plot of land big or small that wants it cultivated, restored or managed to improve their self-sufficiency and nature value. When orchards needed pruning, bee swarms moved, timber milled for planking – whatever was needed. A loose network, a half dozen or so practised hands with the machinery, tools, skills, experience and just as importantly, a lifetime’s worth of contacts. If we couldn’t do it then at the very least, we would know someone reliable who could.
All bags empty now – four hundred new trees in the ground, and the dinner not eaten yet.
The work is here at your feet
And if ever proof was needed of what can be achieved by creating a network of practical people it was right in front of us in what we had planted – free trees – courtesy of a little known charity called Trees on the Land. One woman’s dream to help reforest Ireland turned into reality by trusting her work to like-minded individuals and groups, leading to the planting of over two million new native trees across the island in a mere decade.
This winter we were sent another 1800 free trees of various species for more neighbours joining into our wildlife corridor and also more oak to add to a young wood started in Connemara last winter. Early days for us all yet but we reckon we are in good company which according to the old people is half the battle when facing into any laborious field task: “Don’t look at what’s far off ahead of you,” they say. “The work is here at your feet – take heart instead by looking back at all you have already done, and always and ever keep your arse to the wind.”
They’re not far wrong. They rarely are.
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