Tomnafinogue Woods

Welcome to Tomnafinogue. You're about to walk through one of the last surviving fragments of an ancient Irish oak wood — a place that has been here, in recognisable form, for at least four hundred years, and probably much longer. To step into Tomnafinogue is to step into a landscape that pre-dates the Plantation of Ulster, the Reformation, and in some small sense, the Middle Ages themselves. Tread lightly, speak quietly, and take your litter with you. This place deserves it.

The name Tomnafinogue comes from the Irish Tom na Féinneogach — the knoll of the Fianna. The Fianna, in Irish mythology, were the warrior band of Fionn mac Cumhaill — hunters, poets, and bodyguards of the High King. Whether they ever trained here, hunted here, or feasted here is a matter of legend, not history. But the knoll is real enough. You'll walk up over it in the first part of the loop, and you'll feel why a pre-Christian people might have thought this was a place where the boundary between worlds grew thin.

Start at the small car park. There's a wooden information panel with a map — take a photograph of it; signal is patchy deeper in. The main trail is waymarked with a green oak-leaf symbol on wooden posts. The loop is three kilometres, mostly easy underfoot, with one short steeper section over the knoll. Give yourself an hour, or two if you're a photographer, or three if you're the sort of person who needs to touch every interesting bark.

The wood you're walking into was once part of a far larger forest that covered most of south Wicklow and north Wexford — the Great Wood of Shillelagh, one of the most celebrated oak forests in medieval Europe. Its timber was exported across the Irish Sea for centuries. Local tradition holds that oak from these hills was used in the roof of Westminster Hall in London, constructed in the 1390s under Richard II. Similar claims attach to Kings College Chapel in Cambridge and the timbers of certain Royal Navy warships. These are stories widely repeated locally — not all of them are firmly documented, but the Great Wood certainly supplied oak to the shipyards and the great building projects of Britain and Ireland for centuries. The forest was a resource. It was systematically, ruthlessly cut down over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with much of the land afterwards cleared for cattle grazing and sheep-walks.

What you're walking through now is the tiny remnant that escaped the axe. It survived because the landowners of the time — the Fitzwilliam family, whose seat at Coollattin is just over the border in Wexford — were unusual among their peers in taking a long view of woodland. They managed rather than liquidated. By the time the modern state took over, in the 1930s, Tomnafinogue was one of only a handful of genuine ancient oak fragments left in the whole of eastern Ireland. In 1999, it was formally protected, and today it is managed by Coillte as a nature reserve.

Take your first thirty paces slowly. Look down. The forest floor here is a library of moss — at least a dozen species, with names most of us will never learn. In the spring, the whole of this ground is covered in bluebell, wood sorrel, wood anemone, and ramsons — wild garlic — whose scent you'll pick up on the slightest breeze in May. In autumn, the same ground is a mushroom-hunter's paradise, though if you're not an expert, do not pick anything. Several species here are fatal. Admire them, photograph them, and walk on.

The first oaks appear on your right. They are not the biggest in the wood, but they are genuine pedunculate oaks — Quercus robur — the slow-growing native species that can live for a thousand years. The ones around you here are mostly between two hundred and four hundred years old, meaning they were acorns when the Stuart kings sat on the English throne. Run your hand along the bark — just once — and feel the ridged, fissured surface. Every line you feel is a response to a century of weather and wind.

At about six hundred metres in, you come to the first big tree. It's marked with a small brass plaque. This is known locally as the Constable Oak — a nickname given to it in the nineteenth century by a local schoolmaster who thought it resembled the oaks painted by the English artist John Constable. Its girth at shoulder height is over six metres. Its age is estimated at around five hundred years, meaning it has lived through the Reformation, the Cromwellian wars, the 1798 Rebellion which burned much of Wicklow, the Great Famine, two World Wars, and — perhaps — the coming climate emergency. Put your back against it for a moment. Breathe.

The path climbs the knoll — this is the Tomnafinogue itself. At the top, there's a small opening in the canopy where you can see south across the Derry valley towards the Blackstairs Mountains. On a clear day you can see for thirty miles. This clearing is not natural. It was made about forty years ago by the storm known as Hurricane Charley, in August 1986, which took down perhaps a dozen old oaks across this section of the wood. The fallen trunks were deliberately left in place — you'll pass several on the path down, now slowly returning to the soil. Decomposition, in an ancient wood, is not waste. It's food.

Descending, you enter the hazel understory. Hazel is the second-most important tree in any ancient Irish oak wood, and here it is coppiced in places — meaning the trees have been cut close to the ground in rotation, and allowed to regrow from the stump. The practice dates to at least the Bronze Age. The thin poles produced were used for everything from fencing to hurdles to the wattle in wattle-and-daub walls.

Listen for birdsong. Tomnafinogue is home to a rare combination — a resident pair of long-eared owls, several pairs of treecreepers, redstarts in summer, and an unusually high density of jays, whose harsh call you will almost certainly hear. Pine marten were reintroduced to the east of Ireland in the late twentieth century, and they have been photographed here on a camera trap several times in the last five years. You're unlikely to see one — they're nocturnal and shy — but they're here, and they matter, because they predate grey squirrels and thus protect the red squirrel population that still, against the odds, lives in this wood.

As you approach the far side of the loop, the path widens and you reach a small clearing with a bench and a stone plinth. The plinth bears a short Irish poem — a fragment from the eighth-century Irish classic Buile Shuibhne, the story of the mad king Sweeney who was cursed to wander the forests of Ireland for the rest of his days, eating watercress, talking to trees, composing poetry. The fragment here, in English translation, runs: The branch of the apple tree, the branch of the rowan, the branch of the yew — these are my three companions. Sit on the bench. Read it twice. Then get up and finish the walk.

The last kilometre brings you back to the car park. On the way, you pass a small stone set into the ground with the date 1999 carved into it — the year the wood was formally protected. It is there as a small monument to the people, mostly local and mostly unnamed, who fought for decades to keep this place alive. You owe them. So do we.

Thank you for walking with us. Tomnafinogue is a quiet wood. Please help it stay that way.