 A man behind a great new book and it'd be a fantastic collection to have in any library because it celebrates the native woodland diversity of Donegal and what it does is it gives us an insight into the history of our woodlands and also recent conservation developments and it profiles our woodland trees and also 28 woodland locations and all within the book a very colourful, very informative and I'm delighted now that Sean O'Geehan joins me in the studio. Sean. Good to be here. Good to talk to you about what is a great book. I'll hold it up to the camera there just so we can see it online as well. This didn't come together in a few days. No it was probably something that I was kind of had as an idea for a long time and then luckily I have a good working relationship with Joe Gallagher, the heritage officer in the county and it was really out as a result of a conversation with him that we came up with the means to put something like this together so that's great. So it's a kind of a collaboration between National Parks and Wildlife Service who are my employers and Donegal County Council so you know National Parks and Wildlife Service they run Glenvay National Park. That's the big thing in Donegal I suppose. Okay is that when you say that you're employers your role is? I'm the head gardener at Glenvay Castle. Okay. Yeah so plants is my thing. Yes obviously. Well there's more than plants because you put together a great book here. Now it looks to me like it's a labour of love and it looks to me like it's a sort of book just couldn't be put together if you didn't have the funding because there's a lot of photographs in here and there's a lot of information in here but it's done in a very accessible way so you know even as a flick through it's accessible. Yeah good that's really what I wanted to try and produce and I have to give credit to Monica in Brown Printers in Lettercanny who I worked with on the layout so really it's you know Brown Printers were fantastic and Monica who was doing the layout on the book they really did a fantastic job with the whole production side of things I just told them what I'd like to have and they put it together so that's also is a very important thing so I managed to get the time to go and visit a lot of these different woodlands there's so there's the my main motivation was to really raise people's awareness like that Donegal actually has some of the most beautiful native woodlands in the country like that's just a fact when we think about trees we tend to think about no trees yes yeah yeah not necessarily Donegal yes it is a strange anomaly nearly yeah so what we do yeah there was a survey done of ancient woodlands in the country back in 2006 and they discovered they documented all these tiny tiny little patches of woodland all over the country and then the larger ones the more significant ones were highlighted particularly as what they called Candidate ancient woodlands and that would be where there's evidence like map evidence for example that these woodlands existed in the 1600s for example so they've been around for 400 years so Glen Bay the ancient woodlands in Glen Bay is an example of that so that is the reason why they're so important to conserve you know because they're the originals they're the original inhabitants of the landscape you could say they're a very precious part of our biodiversity and they're also one of the rarest kinds of biodiversity we have because unfortunately we've cleared our native woodlands for agriculture and we did that a long long time ago so we can't really even blame the English although the English get blamed for cutting down our trees and all that kind of stuff most of the deforestation that happened in Ireland happened in Bronze Age times so like pre-Christian so for agriculture yeah so what survived are these tiny little fragments in remote locations and it just so happens that Donegal has some of the finest examples it could have something to do with the kind of rough terrain the inaccessibility of some of the places in Donegal like Glen Bay and they just left the trees there and said listen they survived they're too difficult to cut down that's all it's in such an awkward place that they just couldn't get at them and like all the anywhere where the ground was level enough that they could make into a field they did so it's really only on the very rough steep slopes in a few remote places do you find these ancient woodlands so they are you know it's it's I suppose the other thing you could say that has what's happened in the last 20 30 years since the 1980s so that's nearly more than 40 years and there's a growing awareness of the important of the importance of the conservation of these woodlands so a number of these woodlands that were under different kinds of management were taken on by National Parks and Wildlife and now their nature reserves so you have a really beautiful example just out the road here from Leverkenny at Ballyar towards Milford and that's a beautiful native woodlands that a lot of Leverkenny people discovered during Covid especially when there was nowhere else to go except locally and it's an absolutely shining example of a really really high quality native oak woodland so I wanted to kind of give as much information as I could about the kind of history on the one hand but also the biodiversity that you would experience if you go into these places so taking lots of images of the woods at different times of the year and just I wanted kind of maybe people to see that maybe they could do this themselves it's a great way of actually learning is going and just looking and seeing what's there well if anything gives you appreciation for our woodlands it'll be this book because there's the overviews of many of these woodland areas there's then pictures of the trees that you write about and up close pictures as well of you know the flora and the fauna and the trees and even shrubs and edging and yeah it was actually brilliant going around and looking at some of these woodlands there are included in the in the profiles there's are a couple of places where the native woodland scheme which is a recent program run by the Forest Service to encourage landowners to do conservation work on their woodlands to protect the native woodlands so for example it might be fencing them or removing rhododendrons there's a lot of problems like that with invasive species so there's a fantastic example just outside of Rathmullen a place called Glenala where about 20 years ago they they did the native woodland scheme there and they completely cleared their woodlands of laurel and rhododendron and now there's this fantastic regeneration going on so you can actually see the woodland starting to heal itself and recover so that's an amazing example of an old woodland that has been rewilded you could say but also it's been kind of healed and helped restore itself and then there's another profile of a woodland over near Riffau of a new woodland planted by Rayford and Shepard who are very well known naturalists in the county they planted some of their farm really good east Donegal land with a whole load of native trees and now they have this beautiful native woodland 20 years later and that's very interesting to see how native woodlands develop you know in places where they would have been cleared a long long time ago so there's a combination of profiles in the book of existing nature reserves lots of woodlands that are actually in private hands that are important native woodlands that are you could say you know we we don't really know how well they're going to fare out because they're maybe not necessarily protected by any particular legislation or any particular scheme so actually the majority of the native woodlands in the county are not protected it's only a small amount and the good news is that the good examples like Glen Bay like Balear and there's another fantastic woodland in South Donegal and Loch Esk called Ardenamona that's an absolutely beautiful native woodland probably the finest of the native woodlands would rate in the top 10 in the country easily. Is that above the turnoff for Harvey's Point? It's just after Harvey's Point yeah on the lake there yeah just go on past Harvey's Point it's there and it's got amazing things going on there because the woodpecker has returned and the red squirrel has returned so there's actually really good news happening in our native woodlands where nature is starting to recover and bounce back and that's a combination of all the conservation work that's been done to date and also changes in landscape use as well so like probably for example around Loch Esk it's much more forested than it was 50 years ago a lot of those plantations are conifer plantations which are not necessarily fantastic for native woodland but they're really good cover for ecology so they're really good for squirrels and woodpeckers so they benefit yeah from more woodland. You say that some of our woodland areas are in private ownership but there's plenty where we can go and wander and you know appreciate the trees around us and maybe in one example but do you know others as well? Yeah so there are woodlands all over the county some of them managed and run by Quiltia so up on the Inichon Peninsula there's a beautiful woodland called Listen the Gra just outside Moff and it's only really local people seem to know about it but it's an absolutely beautiful uh high stand of beach and and scott's pine it's planted yeah it was planted probably 300 years ago but it's full of biodiversity so that's that's a fantastic location there's also another amazing native oak woodland just outside the town of Cairndonna called Croc Nequilidara which translates as the hill of the oak wood so and then you know down the east of the county it's a little bit more difficult to find somewhere to go walking but people do there's a place called Convoy Woods just outside of Convoy another Quiltia Woodland and it's particularly good for bluebells in May which is coming up quite soon and then there's Drumbow Woods which is right outside the town of Bali Buffet and it's also profiled in the book so I've tried to cover the whole county and give good information about the ones that are actually accessible for people to go walking in like quite a few of our woodlands are privately owned and the private ownership needs to be respectable where it's very clear that it's got public access then you know people are free to go to see these places and I think that's important just so it's more of us can have a full appreciation of our woodlands and our native woodlands yeah yeah and it was I also gave like I did profiles of the actual trees that are the native trees of Dunigal so I've given some new information about that and there so there are trees that we do have and there are also trees that we don't have so it's kind of interesting just to compare Dunigal to say Kerry so Kerry has a slightly different range of native trees than we do and we would have a better representation in certain species than they would and they would have a better representation in other species so there's regional differences between the north and south of Ireland so that's kind of interesting out at Glen Bay we have two kinds of native tree that are so rare practically nobody knows anything about them so we have this beautiful little tree called a rock whitebeam in in Gaelic its name is Feunkel Krega so the white hazel of the rocks and the Irish names are also an amazing way we can get a different kind of take and insight into the native trees and the place names also in the county give us a huge amount of a special access to understanding the significance of trees in our culture for example so there's huge amounts of townlands and place names that have trees associated with them so I have a I've done a list of that kind of stuff in the book as well and the second tree added to Glen Bay is it is it there's two kinds of juniper that grow in in in Dunigal there's a flat one that you'll get on the mountains and on the bogs and sometimes on the coast in sand dune systems so like out on Critch Island for example some of those rocky places have juniper like spreading out like a carpus like flat yeah so that's the prostate prostrace juniper yeah and then in Glen Bay we have one that grows upright yeah so and we have an a specimen in Glen Bay that was maybe 15 meters tall that's a huge tree for a juniper and that's unheard of right so their examples like a lot of the why we have some of these plants are interesting stories in themselves and sometimes they represent a much earlier a period in history so they're kind of like relics of an earlier flora that once existed so that's a place like Glen Bay has like a representation of the all the changes that have happened in the landscape over a very long period of time so literally in the biodiversity of the place in the trees and shrubs and flowers so that's kind of an interesting way of interpreting what's actually out there so it's you're not just looking at plants but you're looking at the living history of the place the living story of this landscape is expressed in the vegetation and out at Glen Bay it's it's well outlined and there's you know plenty of booklets and guides and you know maps and labels and all the rest of it and if you want to take it a step further and go beyond Glen Bay then there's this book and it could take you right the way around the county if you want to go to the bother if you want to just dip in and out while outlined in the book there a very colorful very informative native woodlands of county Donegal would be an asset in anyone's library Sean thank you very much great can we mention yes if the people can guess us in bookmark and letter Kenny and four masters in Donegal town and it's in all the libraries in the county as well okay and I presume that you could go online and get a copy of feeling that we might do that we might put it up on our website as a download yeah yeah and it's available at Glen Bay too yeah we're doing our launch actually next week the official launch is next week okay yeah so I'm ahead of the curve but it is available at Glen Bay as well yeah okay right best look with it thanks very much Sean