Where The Wild Things Were

It won’t come as much of a surprise to out-of-towners, but, bejiggers, we sure do love our trees around here.

Which is why, when a whole bunch of them suddenly go missing from the skyline, GG starts getting emails.

Written in red ink. And some, fittingly enough, in green.

The latest natural beauty spot to get a sudden short, back and no sides is Kindlestown Wood, with a whole lotta trees getting the full chainsaw massacre over the past week.

It had happened before, on a smaller scale, in January 2018, and then, by December of that year, there was confirmation that a section of Kindlestown being up for sale.

So, naturally, Y-fronts suddenly get in a twist around here whenever the heavy machinery comes trundling over the horizon.

Turns out the latest Transformer invasion is all for the good, as we discovered on our walk up through the woods this afternoon.

There’s even a handy and well-illustrated sign to explain, reading…

Coillte’s forest at Kindlestown Wood originally formed part of the old Bellevue Estate. Today, it contains a mixture of conifer trees, Scots and Corsican pine, Douglas fir, Sitka spruce and broadleaf trees, oak, ash, birch, holly, rowan and beech, along with some old specimen trees from the estate days.

It is managed by Coillte as a commercial forest but forest operations such as harvesting and replanting are combined with other objectives, including recreation and biodiversity management The wood is also an area of archaeological interest, as Kindlestown Hill is believed to be the location of a hill fort dating back to the Iron Age.

Many of the trees were planted in the 1930s and 1960s, and are now due for felling before being replanted to begin the forest cycle again. The felling is generally carried out by machines, which safely cut the trees and take the logs to the roadside to be brought onwards to the sawmills. 

Trees are felled in planned blocks across a forest over a number of years. Kindlestown is a working forest, and after trees are felled, young sapling trees are planted to grown a new forest again. Replanting will be largely with commercial conifer trees like Sitka spruce, but after felling, forest diversity is improved by planting other tree species, such as Scots pine and oak.

So, boom, now you know. Tree huggers of the world, untie those knickers.

You can find out more about Kindlestown Wood on the Coillte website here.