\foi. lii. No. do. 



AUGUST 1906. 



IRISH GARDENIMG 



A Monthly Educational Journal devoted to 

 the Advancement of Horticulture in Ireland 



Bog Deal. 



By ARCHIBALD E. MOERAN, Portumna. 



BOGS and their mystery and history have 

 J always had a gfreat fascination for 

 "^ me, and I have often wondered why I 

 covdd never find any book that would explain 

 the story of those far-stretching- inland seas of 

 brown grass and purple heather that hold 

 such curious relics of past people and thing-s 



nowadays, they are to be found wherever there 

 is a coverings of peat, and down ag-ain on the 

 western coast line to the very hig-h water mark. 

 I have even seen their roots on a calm day deep 

 down under the Atlantic where it has eaten its 

 way into parts of the Dingle peninsula. 



The destruction of our great pine woods was 



P/wfO /','] 



View in Crumkill Bog, Ballymena, 



With Stumps oi Pinus Sylvestris in situation. 



[Dr. G. H. Pethybridge. 



in their sombre depths. Quaint little human 

 habitations, before whose doors young bar- 

 barians contentedly made mud pies — how 

 many centuries ago ? Crude utensils and 

 canoes, and weapons, the very arrow 

 intact that was shot by whose hand ? and 

 at what mark ? how long ago ? Stone cause- 

 ways and wooden "corduroy" roads that were 

 never "on the county." The bones of men 

 and women here and there, and here and 

 there the bones of great beasts, but every- 

 where the bones of the great forests of the 

 past. Down in the lowland bogs countless 

 thousands of stumps of oak and yew and of the 

 old Irish pine, the " bog deal " as it is called ; 

 and up on the hill-sides miles upon miles of 

 pure bog deal. Up on bleak, exposed heights, 

 where few foresters would venture to plant 



inevitable unless some strong hand could have 

 been stretched out to save them. Every Euro- 

 pean country has gone through this phase in its 

 history, as they in turn emerged from the period 

 in which woods were regarded as fit only to be 

 burned as harmful encumbrances of the ground, 

 to the time when the remnants of these woods 

 began to have a commercial value, and were cut 

 and sold, until people began to be alarmed for 

 their future supplies of wood, when, sooner or 

 later, the Government of that country stepped in, 

 and in many cases has succeeded in building up 

 out of the wreck they took in hand the highly 

 profitable forests we see and admire abroad. 



Unfortunately in Ireland no one interfered, 

 and the result has been the most striking 

 example I know of the complete subversion of 

 Nature's proposals by man's disposals. One 



