Ash is not only for making hurleys

I LIVE surrounded by ash trees.

The soil around here is rich in lime and free draining, which suits them perfectly. They are by far the tallest of the native trees in the area and obviously the top dog in the plant kingdom.

Actually their place in the plant kingdom is a bit surprising. They have no relatives among other Irish native trees because they are members of the olive family. This shows in the fact that they are a little sensitive to cold. They are the last of our native trees to break bud in the spring and a late frost in the second half of May can damage them.

Most people associate ash timber with hurleys. They are all made from ash nowadays and you can make a correlation between areas of the country with strong hurling traditions and lime-rich soils suitable for ash trees. But in the past in other parts of the country where soils were wet or acid hurleys were made from the roots of large furze bushes.

Over the past 15 years or so there have been a lot of grants and incentives for farm forestry. Ash qualifies for the highest grants so considerable amounts have been planted. But these trees are not yet old enough to provide timber with the curved grain required by the hurley makers so we import timber, mainly from Britain.

Ash has many other uses too. It makes attractive and durable furniture and is the traditional timber for the handles of shovels and pick-axes, for billiard cues and hockey sticks and the rungs of wooden ladders, as well as providing excellent firewood logs. It’s still used to a small extent in traditional boat building and at one time was used in the bodywork of both cars and aircraft.

Going even further back in time ash trees were so useful that they were venerated. In Viking mythology Yggdrasil is a giant ash tree connecting the nine worlds of Norse cosmology. In a curious parallel to the Crucifixion, Odin hangs for nine days on the tree with his side pierced by a spear in order to obtain the magic runes that provided his people with an alphabet.

DURING the Iron Age ash trees seem to have been iconic in this country too. Dr Charles Nelson notes: “Massive, old ash trees seem to have been especially venerated for reasons that cannot now be explained, and suffice it to note in contrast that the oak held a lesser place of veneration in Ireland, though oaks of similar age and stature undoubtedly existed.”

A giant ash stood beside Saint Brigid’s original Cathedral in Kildare and they are still associated with some Holy Wells.

It seems that in the past Irish trees were much bigger than they are today. We know this from finds of bog wood and from old wooden objects in museum collections. It’s believed that this is because people have been selectively felling and ring-barking larger trees for nearly 6,000 years to clear land for agriculture and this has had an evolutionary impact.

Even in historical times there seem to have been ash trees around that were larger than any we know today. Samuel Hayes described a number of them, including the Great Ash of Leix at Emo in Co Laois. By the time he got to it the trunk had broken off nine feet above the ground but it was still alive with some massive horizontal branches.

“I measured it in April 1792; at one foot from the ground it was 40 feet six inches round, and at five feet higher, which is actually the smallest part of the trunk, it is full 25 feet in circumference …”

Now that must have been some ash tree.

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