45. Bog pine with turf

Bog pine with piece of turf

Walking on a track through the bog just down the road from the Garden I pick up a white, bone-like piece of wood. It's a fragment of an ancient pine tree that was buried and preserved in the peat, and then exposed by local people cutting turf for fuel.



On the nearby Connemara coast at Barna and Spiddal, ancient pine trees appeared after severe winter storms washed away layers of the beach last year. The trees are thought to be about 7,000 years old, part of a forest that stretched under what is now Galway Bay. 

Bog-pine roots exposed on the beach

It is like stumbling on the skeleton of a long-lost landscape, a bone here, a bone there, telling an old and fascinating story if only we knew how to listen to it. 

Bog-pine stump exposed by turf-cutting