Benefits of forestry are taking root

IT’S not so long since Irish people thought trees were for the birds — a century ago, a miserly 1% of our land had trees on it, the nadir of 1,000 years of plundering and chopping for which we can blame the Vikings, the Normans, the English and ourselves.

Now, thanks to more enlightened times, a realisation of trees’ contribution to reducing the carbon footprint, Irish State policy, private planting backed by EU grants, and a small stand of designated groups like Coillte, the Tree Council, the National Parks and Wildlife Service, forestry is at a more respectable 10% (the European average is 37%) of land cover. We’re aiming for 17% by 2030.

Last week’s column touched on the benefits of walking, urban or rural; this week, we’re looking at greener days out, in glorious surroundings, and there’s options to walk, run, orienteer, camp, canoe, sail or picnic — and to forage and hunt too.

Permit activities in our forests and woodlands have hardly been as diverse as they are right now.

Example? A world championship cycling event (single-speed/gear, for tough slogging, and the prize is for life: a tattoo, or body branding, not a wimpy T-shirt and trophy) just wrapped up yesterday on the remarkable Ballyhoura Coillte mountain-bike trail on the Cork-Limerick border.

Hundreds took to the trails for three days of spills and thrills. It makes the international (Great Britain and Ireland) field archery competition the same weekend in Coillte’s Tintern Abbey forest, Wicklow, look safe and tame by comparison.

The spread, and diversification, of Ireland’s forestry means better public access to a bigger choice of places.

We’ve got six national parks, for example, with two in Munster at Killarney and the Burren (the others are Glenveagh, Connemara, Wicklow, and the latest, Ballycroy in Mayo in the west, but like the Burren, that’s far from wooded) along with dozens of nature reserves (see, www.npws.ie), and the National Parks and Wildlife Service also oversees a host of more protected/conserved areas under various designations.

With Coillte, we might not have access to their circa 1m acres (445,000 hectares, about 7% of the country’s landmass) of land, which it controls and puts to commercial, custodian and entrepreneurial uses, but we do get to visit some of the best of it in their 162 sites nationwide (Ireland’s share of privately-run and owned forestry is 45% of the growing total, so access there is more restricted).

Walking routes are being enlarged all the time by Coillte, with about 2,000 kilometres of trails and loops to walk, graded according to ease or difficulty, giving distances and points of interest along the way.

A subset of these have been designated as suitable for cyclists, and permit restrictions for horse riders are about to be made more open, because 50,000 riders use Coillte land and trails — so a sort of courses for horses is on the way. Inclusivity for motorised vehicles, quads, etc, is also being looked at in a more restricted way, with limited options being made available soon, in the Dublin mountains first off.

Mountain-biking is continuing to grow in international popularity, and as an important tourism and sporting draw here too, and new cycle trails in the Dublin mountains are now seeing 600 riders a week on track and trek, with numbers ratcheting up.

The just-concluded Ballyhoura international single-speed event saw 800 riders from 21 countries happily and competitively mud-plugging away.

Recreational use of Coillte’s facilities “has really rocketed in the past few years,” says Carol Ryan of Coillte.

Ryan says that in the four years since their dedicated website, www.coillteoutdoors.ie, went live, hits on it have risen from an initial 10,000 to 180,000, with a target in the next year or two of web traffic of 250,000 per annum. And, the really good news is that finger-walking, web-browsing figure pales into insignificance when compared to the 18m visits made to Coillte’s physical, on-the-ground and tree-up sites each year.