A passion for planting trees

IT began when Michael Hyde went to plant trees on scrub land in the estate he inherited from a cousin in Co Galway nearly 60 years ago.

The location was not far from the main site of the 1691 Battle of Aughrim, which changed the course of Irish and European history for 200 years. During a much later conflict, the Second World War, a lot of the timber was cut on the estate and all over Ireland.

But the estate land was never replanted and that posed a dilemma for Michael Hyde when he applied to the Department of Lands for a felling licence in 1959.