Working Forests

On the first day of our walk, we hike through a forest of Sitka spruce. It's strange to see the Alaskan tree all the way in Ireland, but May is spruce tip harvesting season, so I snack on the new growth as we walk.

Later, I see strange white posts on the opposite hill.

"What do you think those are?" I ask Eileen.

She correctly identifies them as sapling plantings; our trail winds over to them. The white posts are hollow plastic up to my head height, with a tiny spray of deciduous leaves poking out the top.

On the second day, we walk through dense plantations of Scotch pine. Trees are eerie planted in rows: you can move through them only in one direction. The branches crowd together, and the tree canopies filter out most of the light.

By the time we're three days' walk south of Dublin, we're passing through patchwork softwood forests in their varied phases: a clear cut hillside, a perfect rectangle of teenaged trees, a gridded pattern of three-foot saplings.

When we catch the cab from Glendalough to Glenmalure, our driver John is a font of local knowledge.

"See these?" He points out a line of hardwood plantings in their plastic tubes by the road. "We're bringing the hardwoods back to Ireland."

"People ask why we're cutting all the trees down, but these were all planted for it. When the English came, they took all our trees and turned them into boats and houses and things, so then they planted these. They harvest in twenty-five years."

He shakes his head.

"Ireland used to be all oaks and beeches. And we're bringing them back now."

Most of the next day's seven hour walk is through continuous conifer plantations. There are some hills of peat and heather, but mostly, they are the working forests.

I hear heavy machinery as we walk, but it has gone quiet by the time we approach, leaving only the heady scent of fresh-cut spruce to mark the timber piles beside the road as today's work. An enormous logging machine sits motionless in the woods.

On today's walk into Shillelagh, we're out of the mountains. The terrain has flattened out, and the logging activity is less intense. While most of the hardwood plantings we've seen so far have been just a line or two of trees on the edge of the plantations, for the first time I see a whole field of hardwood on a faraway hill.

The word "Derry," a common place name here and the name of a river we've crossed today, comes from the Gaelic "dair," meaning "oak". Underfoot, we step on spiny nut casings. Eileen uses an app to identify them as beech: the spring silver-green leaves rustle overhead.

I don't know what trees would grow wild on the slopes of the Wicklow Mountains, but it's clear a change is coming: for all the hardwood plantings we've seen, there have been very few old enough yet to split their plastic casings. The softwoods here have put me much in mind of home, strange in a place so far away.

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