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No fairy tale
Once upon a time there was an island called ‘Wolf land’, so numerous were the wolves who lived in its wild woods. The people living there were rumoured to be half wolf themselves, and their native word for wolf literally meant ‘Son of the Land’.
In one part of their ancient forest called the great Scaldwood were wolves so savage that a great hunt was mounted to wipe them out.
Such talk sounds like the stuff of fairy tales yet all of it is recorded history; the wolf cull in the great Scaldwood was in 1652. It happened not in the remote mountains of some far off country but here in Ireland, six miles from the capital city. Wars and rebellions fracturing both communities and landscape caused an upsurge in wolf numbers who increased their attacks upon livestock1.
Their hunting territory dwindled from deforestation coupled with an official extermination policy which saw the Irish Wolf extinct just over a century later2.
Erased from history
It would be hard to make up a clearer example of the knock on effects of habitat loss for school lessons in nature study or better hooks for the childish imagination in history lessons, yet neither the great Scaldwood nor the cull were ever mentioned in the schools I attended on the site of where it stood - and one of those schools was bordered by the only surviving woodland for miles around.
That the memory of such an evocative event is almost forgotten in less than four centuries is odd considering the influence wolves had on aspects of native life - the Irish wolfhound was bred the largest hound in the world specifically to fend off these predators and the ‘fairy forts’ that still cover the land are the remains of Iron Age enclosures built so cattle could be kept safe at night from wolf attack.
Oral tradition has proven strong enough to carry the facts about Newgrange being a type of ‘clock’ over thousands of year so it is curious that an incident involving two iconic elements like wolves and woodland can be lost in so short a time. There appears to have been fractures in not only communities and landscape but memory too.
That the woodland element alone of this story is almost forgotten is remarkable considering the vast forest that covered the island for nine thousand years provided the inhabitants with food, buildings, transport, medicine and even spirituality. A forest environment that was managed in such detail that not only was each species of tree classed as to their uses, and therefore ‘nobility’, but that the protection of these trees was included in the ancient law system, which detailed specific punishments for damage to each and every species of tree3.
Mirror to the past
Such ‘wildwoods’ still exist in Europe, their biodiversity supporting a myriad of animals and plants, with some still large enough to sustain wolf packs and their supporting prey species. To walk in these is to step back in time and see how much of Ireland looked before the seventeenth century; trees as far as the eye can see where the occasional human settlement in a glade is the exception rather the rule. The opposite of what we see here now, where most woodland is usually a dour conifer plantation whose monotony offers little interaction for man or beast.
An intimate relationship and interaction with woodland environments was the natural state for many Northern European cultures and the romantic spell that such a heritage casts over the descendants of forest dwelling peoples continues to echo through folklore and fairy tales into art, literature and cinema4.
Forest regeneration
A return of such wildwoods here would seem pure fantasy given that it would be impossible to get enough ground to replant a vast territory to produce the effect of such a diverse habitat - though one man across in England is single-handedly creating an immense broadleaf forest for public use. Calling it the ‘Forest of Dennis’, he is using his personal wealth to buy up tracts of adjoining farmland. A pity he will never see his forest mature, which fits the old foresters’ lament that they rarely get to see fruits of their work, trees aging slower than people do.
Being able to see the end result must surely be the greatest motivation to undertake this type of project. This could be achieved by not trying to plant such a forest from scratch but instead transforming existing single species plantations. Rather than, for example, knocking a conifer plantation to the ground using it instead as a framework for mixed woodland.
No fairy tale but a proven way to create woodlands that are multi-functional by providing not only timber but wildlife habitats and leisure facilities. Introducing light to allow regeneration and interplanting with other tree species, this innovative strategy is called ‘Close-To-Nature’ Forestry Management or ‘Continuous Cover Forestry’ 5.
From this perspective the wild wood is standing right in front of us, inside every conifer plantation literally waiting to be carved out. While the Irish Wolf cannot return, the host of other creatures that thrive in such mixed woodland would. Recreation of such an environment would restore a major part of our natural heritage, and remembering the fact that this was the natural state of this island for thousands of years, render its absence for a few centuries as little more than a brief lapse in landscape and memory.
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