Amateur Naturalist Ramblings

SleepAtNight

Re-inspired by reading Roger Deakin's Wildwood I started taking better note again of the flora and fauna when out walking anywhere I go. Thought this might be a good place for people to summarise what ye've seen when exploring the outdoors or recommending good spots for nature walking. The seemingly abundance of native oak woods in Deakins book makes me kind of jealous because they seem to be very thin on the ground in Connacht apart from in the extreme west.

Anyways I heard a while back that hedgerows that are also townland boundaries can be great refuges for plant species that would have once been in the surrounding woodland. Seeing as townland boundaries are so ancient, these hedgerows are least likely to have been disturbed and would have remained in some shape or form since the clearing of the old forests...possibly a couple thousand years ago in some parts of the country. Most of the hedgerows in the fields near where I live haven't a great variety of species and when I looked on the historic Ordnance Survey maps...available online http://maps.osi.ie/publicviewer/#V1,591271,743300,0,10. ...they are less than 100 years old. So I checked out one that was on the map and was also a townland boundary and was pleasantly surprised to find a much greater number of species like wild and barren strawberry and wood avens...along with elms in the hedgerow, though only of hedge size I don't know of anywhere around where elms are found.:) Great to think that the townland, our ancient land division, survived even Norman and later colonial invasions and those boundaries so respected that pieces of our natural history have been able to survive there.

thedarkroom

The Ordinance Survey map facility is a great resource as well as being somewhat depressing when you compare how the landscape has changed over the years and you realise how much of the heritage, forestry, hedgerows and so on have been removed, destroyed and built over.
It's well worth checking out and browsing. I often do for North Wexford and sometimes come across hidden features that you would never chance upon, even with local knowledge.

SleepAtNight

thedarkroom wrote: »

The Ordinance Survey map facility is a great resource as well as being somewhat depressing when you compare how the landscape has changed over the years and you realise how much of the heritage, forestry, hedgerows and so on have been removed, destroyed and built over.
It's well worth checking out and browsing. I often do for North Wexford and sometimes come across hidden features that you would never chance upon, even with local knowledge.

Yea, they are a mighty resource and all for free on the net too! I'm amazed at the unbelievable detail those map makers went to back then, I tell ya I'm the first man to criticise the British Army normally but that effort is something I do admire them for.

Great books related to the mapping are the Ordnance Survey Letters by a man called John O'Donovan. He basically went around the country parish by parish finding out the local history of monuments on the maps and of local place names. An amazing piece of work but unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a book for Wexford...or a lot of other counties. I don't know if they just weren't done or have they not been published yet. Kilkenny seems to be the only county covered in the south east:(

recedite

SleepAtNight wrote: »

http://maps.osi.ie/publicviewer/#V1,591271,743300,0,10.

For anyone not familiar..... zoom in on your local area, then click on historic 6 inch, then move the overlay slider back and forth to compare the old and new maps.

artieanna

Those maps are a smashing resource, I have spent hours looking at them..

I remember a neighbour who was an old man telling us the place where we live (now just our house and some barns) consisted of a group of up to ten houses/huts .. To see these marked on the oldest map was fabulous...was a completly different country then...

Really wonderful that they were created and preserved, totally priceless...

Alot of hedges and trees stone walls were rooted up to make larger fields for farming purposes, in this area it happened from the early 1980s onwards and I have to say I was sorry in alot of ways to see the small fields go. Alot of our history vanished to But machinery could not work in these fields as they were too small and made for the sythe and carts.
but the main boundarys around these new fields remain in most cases original and I do see alot of the wild plants you have mentioned are growing there. The boundary along small rivers also has not changed in many cases also.