A walk in the woodland wonder of Oak Park

THE other day I visited Oak Park Forest Park by Carlow town for the first time and was very impressed.

This is a relatively new forest park, only opened to the public in 2006, and while most Forest Parks in the country are run by Coillte Oak Park is run by the local authorities, Carlow Town Council and County Council, on land donated by Teagasc that was formerly its agricultural research station.

I was there to lead guided walks as part of the Carlow Floral Festival and to expound on the woodland and its wildlife. But this was a bit like the blind leading the blind because I’d never been there before. So I arrived a few hours early to explore the park in advance.

This task was made a lot easier by the Lone Ranger. Jimmy Doyle is the park ranger, the only one, and he has great enthusiasm for his job. He also has an electric golf buggy which was very useful because the longest of the loop walks in the park is four kilometres.

His briefing started with a warning. In recent weeks the wildlife had been attacking the visitors. He displayed three impressive mosquito bites on his forearm. The reaction to this development was interesting. Warning signs and dispensers of insect repellent had been placed at several points in the park. This is free and there is no charge for entering the park, car parking or using the toilet.

Oak Park is an old estate woodland that was privately owned until 1960. It also contains a shallow artificial lake with several islands. This, in fact, is the largest lake in the county. There is a mystery surrounding the fact that the name Carlow means “four lakes” but it is possibly the only county in Ireland that has no natural lakes at all.

The job of developing the woodland into a Forest Park was done with great sensitivity and the management regime is a model one. The car park was developed by cutting small parking bays in the woodland and where trees had to be felled native species were spared at the expense of exotic ones. The toilet block is small and made of timber so that it blends in to the surroundings.

There is an open grassy area beside the lake where kids can run around but most of the park is quite dense mixed woodland where visitors are confined to paths that are surfaced with natural wooden boards. One of these paths leads to a large bird observation hide overlooking the lake.

The idea of boardwalk paths is a nice one that allows full access for wheelchairs and buggies but Jimmy said they had some problems because the paths got slippery when they were wet. In other parks, such as Glendalough, they’ve tried to counteract this by surfacing boards with chicken wire, but the wire soon frays and becomes dangerous. In Oak Park they use a machine to sweep leaves off paths and then sand them.

One of the best things about the way the woodland is managed here is that dead and dying trees are left strictly alone. Such trees are vital to the ecological health of the park. They provide roosting and breeding sites for birds and for the seven species of bat that have already been found here. Beetle larvae flourish in the rotting wood and are dug out by the many badgers. And eventually the nutrients are recycled to fuel the regeneration of replacement trees.

And the end result is an extremely beautiful place that anyone with an interest in woodlands and flora and fauna should really try to visit.