People of Galway: Plant Trees next Sunday & Help in the war against Climate Change

As part of the Galway Science and Technology Festival, people of all ages are invited to plant thousands of native Irish trees next Sunday (Nov 17th) morning (9.30am-12.30pm), on the Dyke Road side of the Terryland Forest Park, which will be undertaken under the auspices of Conservation Volunteers Galway.

Rendezvous: at Dyke Road car park in front of Black Box.

This ‘Plantathon’ will help ensure Galway is at the forefront of the Irish government’s key commitment, as presented in its recent Climate Action Strategy, to plant 22 million trees every year for the next twenty years.

To take part you can register at https://bit.ly/2pVKqMV. Please bring along a spade and wear suitable footwear.

So why are trees being planted in such large numbers not just in Ireland but all across the world? As well as providing homes and food to a unprecedented amount of flora and fauna species, protecting human health by filtering out toxic car emissions, beautifying our rural landscapes and cities, trees are the most natural, economical and sustainable way in sequestering the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere that is the primary cause of man-made Climate Chaos.

Many of the trees planted on Sunday will hopefully still there for decades even centuries to into the future, still helping to regulate the climate, still giving life to humanity and to so many other species.

This month’s Galway Science and Technology Festival, with its theme of Climate Action, has secured funding from Galway medical company Aerogen to offer every one of Galway’s city and county three hundred schools a bundle of four different species of native trees for planting in their school grounds or locality.

Has your school applied for these trees. If not, get your school to register at https://www.galwayscience.ie/for-primary-schools/

The Festival was also granted 2000 trees (willow, birch, oak etc) from Science Foundation Ireland/SFI (donated by Coillte) to allow the people of Galway to create a new woodland along the Dyke Road in Terryland Forest Park.

Terryland was Ireland’s largest urban forest project when it was initiated twenty years ago. Over three thousand people turned on a glorious Sunday in March 2000 to take part in Galway’s first ever mass plantathon. Today there are c90,000 trees in this natural heritage zone (‘Lungs of the City’) that stretches from Terryland Castle to the farmlands of Castlegar. So will you, your family and friends join us on Sunday to ensure that our city is once again at the forefront in the battle to tackle Climate Change, protect our previous biodiversity and save so many lifeforms on planet Earth?

Please note that next Sunday, volunteers can park their cars in the Dyke Road car park (free parking until 12.50pm) or even better walk or cycle to the rendezvous point in front of the Black Box.

p.s. Photo is from a Terryland Plantation from 2012 adjacent to the area being planted on next Sunday

Table Mountain: Looking down across a Sea of Clouds

A photograph I took a few days ago from the top of Table Mountain (Hoerikwaggo = Mountain of the Sea) reinforced my sense of wonder at the beauty and power of Nature as well as on how different regions and peoples of the world have been connected for far longer than we sometimes realise.
Six times older than the Himalayas, this 1085 metres high rock formation that towers above Capetown includes volcanic and glacial elements but most interestingly sandstone. To realise that this mountain was formed out of sediment that settled at the bottom of deep waters millions of years ago is truly astonishing.

Looking down across a never-ending sea of clouds (part of Capetown appears at bottom of photo) I could in the aerial gaps catch glimpses of Robben (‘seal’: Dutch) Island, where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 18 years, and surviving architectural heritage from Dutch, English and Asian urban settlements, evidence of its colonial past and rich diverse ethnicity that makes it still one of Africa’s most vibrant and cosmopolitan cities. Both the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean are visible; hence the reason why it was initially developed by the Dutch in the seventeenth century as a strategic stop-off refuelling port along the European-Oriental spice trade route. 

But even more interestingly I could gaze from possibly the world’s oldest mountain (240million years) towards the location of the world’s oldest evidence of the human species (‘homo sapiens sapiens’) that dates back 100,000 years old. Is this place the cradle of humanity?
Traveling to nearby beaches to witness colonies of Africa’s only penguin species should not come as a surprise when one realises that this region was once joined to Antarctica. 

Table Mountain also looks onto landmarks and localities of Capetown that are from my own country. Bantry Bay, Athlone and Clifton beach are reminders that both Ireland and South Africa were once colonies of a British global empire whose rulers often transplanted the names from one region to the next.
I am presently in South Africa to take part in an amazing life-changing project initiated by renowned philanthropist Sabine Plattner that aims to develop a conservation educational curriculum for schools across Africa. Spearheaded by Claire Gillissen supported by an expert team of Ibrahim Khafagy, Bernard Kirk and Julie Cleverdon amongst others, it is another pioneering project to replicate in environmental learning what Africa Code Week did for coding learning across a whole continent.
But that is another story (to follow shortly!).

Save Galway City's Green Spaces from the Bulldozer

A leading community activist has condemned as ‘environmental and health vandalism’ the proposals by Galway city council to advocate the construction of buildings and a road through the main urban parks as a betrayal of the hundreds of dedicated residents, scientists, teachers and youth who regularly give their time, energies and ideas to developing and maintaining the local authority’s woods, parks and green spaces for the benefit of the general public.  

According to Brendan Smith of the Terryland Forest Alliance, “There is a deep sense of shock and a feeling of betrayal amongst Galway’s army of environmental volunteers as we witness council officials undertaking a complete U-turn on long standing environmental policies, which will have serious negative consequences on people’s health, on air quality, on the education of our children, on the county’s commitment to combat global climate change and which will led to the destruction of sensitive wildlife corridors that have taken decades to nurture. We are calling on citizens and their elected representatives to save our city from what can only be described as institutional environmental and health vandalism and are hosting a public meeting on this issue at 7.30pm on Thursday November 24^th in the Maldron Hotel near the Kirwan Roundabout on the Headford Road.”

Community made wildflower meadow in Terryland Forest Park, Summer 2916

In the last few weeks, we have been informed by City Hall that the Terryland Forest Park multi-sectoral steering committee that includes NUI Galway, GMIT, An Taisce, HSE, schools and communities can no longer met due to budgetary restrictions; that a road will be built through the same forest park; that an ancient meadow in Merlin Woods will be bulldozed to make way for a hospice in spite of suitable alterative sites existing nearby; that the council propose to make it illegal for children to climb trees and that the number of workers in park maintenance are being reduced. 

2008: 10,000+ people sign petition which successfully stopped a road being built through Terryland Forest Park

It is only a few years ago that a petition signed by over 10,000 Galwegians stopped a road being built through Terryland Forest Park, a park referred too as the “People’s Park” as most of its 100,000 trees were planted by the people of the city from March 2000 onwards. The council are ignoring the reasons why people did so. For the latest scientific research shows the fundamental importance of trees and nature to people’s well being, which is why the next generation of cities across the world are integrating parks, food gardens and forests into their urban infrastructures. Ireland has the highest rate of obesity and weight excess in Europe whilst over 20% of our young people suffer from some form of mental health disorder, much of which can stem from what is known as Nature Deficit Disorder(NDD).  Experiencing the clean air as well as the calming and stimulation effect of the ‘Great Outdoors’ is now being promoted by the medical profession worldwide as an alternative to the costly drugs and pill culture.

Hence for the sake of our citizens, our future generations and our planet the council’s retrograde steps to design out biodiversity must be halted.

These brutal actions make a mockery of the city being declared a green capital of Europe as the EU Green Leaf City 2017. Projects involving community volunteers played a key role in securing this international accolade. Activists were therefore hoping that the city’s new found international eco-status would led to significant investment and progress being made in promoting greater public access to parks; in overcoming anti-social activity such as illegal dumping and bush drinking in bogs, parks and woodlands; in finally moving forward on the Galway city-Clifden Greenway and in supporting park-based nature learning initiatives for children.  

The Outdoor Classroom

Over the last year, scientists, technologists, teachers, health experts and environmentalists have begun working together to commence the process of transforming Terryland into a huge Outdoor Classroom and Outdoor Laboratory for our educational institutions that could also provide major tourist benefit. 

Traditional Mowing of widlflower meadow in Terryland Forest Park

Heritage enthusiasts have started to use it as a learning hub for traditional rural skills and crafts including the creation of native wildflower meadows where the grass is mowed by using hand held scythes, scarecrow-making events for children, and the introduction of horse drawn ploughing into the park’s organic garden.

Yet we are now faced with the extraordinary situation that the council has decided that Galway’s communities can no longer be involved in developing a park that they actually founded. This decision is the antithesis of civic engagement, a cornerstone of the city’s development strategy. 

Community Tree Planting

Hence there is a genuine fear that the Green Leaf award could become nothing more than mere window dressing, a title without substance, a Greenwash. The council authorities are it seems treating forests and parks as a reserve land bank to be chipped away when land is needed to be cemented and tarmaced over. Not for nothing is Terryland officially recognised as the ‘Lungs of the City’; its nearly 100,000 trees that were mostly planted by the people of Galway since 2000 provide the oxygen needs of up to 400,000 people, absorb over a decade 3,800 metric tons of the carbon dioxide gas that is contributing to global warming and provide  €4.64 billion worth of air pollution control over 50 years. This park, stretching from the wetlands of the Corrib along the Dyke Road to the farmlands of Castlegar, has the potential to be even important to Galway than the Phoenix Park is to Dublin. But it is been denied the public resources that it so urgently needs whilst funds and support from steering committee members are being ignored.

We as concerned citizens see ourselves as the defenders of the council’s own recreational, health, community and environmental policies. We are not going to let officialdom destroy our precious life-giving wildlife habitats and green spaces. 

The community and environmental sector should once again be viewed as equal partners whose actions over the years have brought many benefits to the quality of life in the city, including stopping the construction of a giant municipal incinerator and its replacement by the first three bin waste recycling system in Ireland as well as the introduction of the country’s first cash-for-cans scheme.”

Traditional Mowing of a Meadow- the Return of the Scythe.

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After an absence of many decades, next Saturday (August 20th) will see the return to Galway city of the mowing of a wildflower meadow using traditional hand-held implements. Starting at 10.30am members of Cumann na bhFear, also known as Men’s Shed Ballinfoile, will use scythes to cut the long grass in a meadow in Terryland Forest Park near the Quincentenary Bridge. 
The event is part of Heritage Week and organised with Galway Civic Trust. 

Last autumn, dozens of volunteers from Conservation Volunteers planted over one thousand native wildflowers in what was up until then a sterile lawn in Terryland. Their actions transformed it into a rainbow mosaic of yellow cowslip, red poppy, purple clover, pink ragged robin, white daisy oxeyes and many other flowers. In times gone by, a 'meadow' was defined as a field set aside by farmers for the growing of long grass which was cut during the summer and autumn months to produce one or two crops of hay to serve as winter food for livestock. Because no chemical fertilizers were used, these meadows became important habitats for an array of colourful native wildflowers and would be alive with the sights and sounds of many varieties of bees, moths, butterflies and other pollinators. 

 Our aim is to re-introduce meadows back unto the city and provide nectar-rich feeding havens for bees in particular which are in a serious decline worldwide due to industrialised monoculture farming, pesticides, habitat loss, pollution and climate change. Bees and other pollinators are essential to the survival of humanity as the plants that they help to reproduce are responsible for one-third of all foods and beverages that we consume. 

The Cumann is also committed to preserving and re-educating the public in traditional Irish rural skills and crafts that still have an essential role to play in today’s farming because of their social, health, economic and environmental aspects.

So we are asking people to come along next Saturday to witness this ancient rural hay-cutting in action and to take part in planting nearly a thousand more wildflowers with Conversation Volunteers Galway city. Light refreshments will be provided to all volunteers. 

An Urban Forest's Weird & Wonderful Arthropods at Galway Science Fair

4th year science students Paul Brett and Lauren Browne showed visitors to the Terryland Forest Park stand at the Galway Science & Technology Festival Fair, samples of the dozens of species of arthropods that they discovered in the Terryland Forest Park. 

Paul's research provides ample proof that the man-made woodlands of this urban natural heritage area is a vibrant treasure chest of invertebrate animals that include spiders, beetles and millipedes whilst Lauren uncovered nymphs, water beetles and crustaceans in the Terryland River. 

Both students are working under the supervision of Dr. Michel Dugon aka 'The Bug Doctor'. 
The completed report of their findings should be available for viewing to Terryland volunteers and supporters early in 2015. 

We thank all three university personnel for their invaluable research that will contribute so much in helping to make Terryland Forest Park a major Outdoor Classroom and Outdoor Laboratory for the schools and colleges of Galway.

An Insight into an Urban Wildlife paradise.

Heritage expert Tom Cuffe will give a talk on his wildlife research findings of the Terryland Forest Park at 7.30pm on Tuesday July 1st in the Menlo Park Hotel.
All are welcome to attend.

With its diverse range of habitats including meadow, river, wetland, pasture and woodland, this unique man-made wildlife sanctuary of 180 acres boosts an impressive array of insects, birds, mammal and aquatic species that would be the envy of any urbanized environment in the world. 

In both the spring of 2013 and of 2014, Mr. Cuffe used transect surveys to scientifically estimate the density of the bird as well as the butterfly and moth populations. His research identified forty eight bird species in one defined area alone thus highlighting the importance of the park to the biodiversity and ecology of the city.
The presentation will include a wide selection of the beautiful photographs taken by Tom of the varied wildlife that live in this unique forest park created by the people of Galway in conjunction with Galway City Council.

The event hosted by the Conservation Volunteers Terryland Forest Park group will also include presentations on native wildflower maintenance by horticulturalist Padraic Kerins and proposals for a major ‘Outdoor Classroom’ in the locality by Brendan Smith.

Seven Galway Castles' Heritage Bike Trail - June 22nd

Cloonacauneen Castle

Slí na gCaisleán (‘The Way of the Castles’) is a heritage cycle trail along a picturesque route of lakes, bogs, farmland, meadows, botharíns, castles and woods on the north and eastern side of Galway city and into Galway county. 
The trail is organised by Cumann na bhFear (Men's Shed) in association with Conservation Volunteers' Terryland Forest Park, Galway Bike Festival and National Bike Week.

Carrowbrowne Bog

Next guided tour: Sunday June 22nd. Starts at 9.45am from The Plots, Dyke Road, Galway city. 
For further information, contact Brendan Smith at speediecelt@gmail.com

Terryland Castle

This 'Off the Beaten'  route starts from and finishes at Terryland Castle in a circa 25  mile looped trail that includes the castles of Menlo, Castlegar, Cloonacauneen, Killeen, Ballybrit and Ballindooley. 

Approaching Cloonacauneen Castle

Killoughter, overlooking the Curraghline

Participants on this guided tours are required to bring along their own bicycle, suitable clothing and packed lunch.There will be an opportunity to have a picnic at Menlo. There will also be a stop over at Cloonacauneen Castle where participants can purchase food and beverages. Any children twelve years or under must be accompanied by an adult. 
All participants must sign a form agreeing to abide by the rules of the tour.
 

Click here for an online map of the route.

Note: Please note that  to get a full screen version of the map, click on the four diagonal arrow icon

on the bottom left hand corner of the screen map.

In front of the old gate entrance to the Menlo demesne

Ballindooley Lough

Killeen Castle

Botharín, Castlegar

Ballybrit Castle

St. Peter & St. Paul's Catholic Church Coolagh

Menlo Castle

IRA Monument, Castlegar

In front of Castlegar Castle and old Ball Alley

The 3 Castles Athenry & environs Heritage Cycle Trail

A delightful journey of discovery through a beautiful hidden landscape

of east Galway.

August Country Fair Day, Monivea

Tour Times/Dates: 9.45am, Sunday June 15th

9.45am. Duration: circa. 6-7hrs

Start location and route: Athenry Castle, continue onto Monivea Bog, to Monivea village, then onto Castle Ellen and finish up at Athenry Castle. 

Organiser: Cumann na bhFear (Men's Shed, Ballinfoile).
Contact: Brendan Smith, speediecelt@gmail.com 
The event is being organised in association with Galway Bike Festival and the national Bike Week.

With its largely unspoilt landscape of small farms, hedgerows, stone walls, lakes, bogs, rivers, castles, Gerogian mansions, network of botharíns and villages, east Galway is a largely unknown landscape waiting to be discovered by walkers and cyclists. 

The aim of this pioneering heritage tour Is to open up a new heritage route that will allow visitors to experience these wonderful timeless features and environment by way of a leisurely cycle through a representative section of east Galway that could  act as a catalyst in the development of  a network of Greenways.

The circa 30km looped cycle tour will start at Athenry Castle (above) and then travel on to the Monivea Road before turning right approximately a mile outside Athenry in the direction of Graigabbey. 

The participants will then cycle through the farmlands and bogs of Bengarra, (above) on into the village of Newcastle, along a botharín through the Monivea Bog with its fascinating flora and fauna; to the Monivea demesne with its collection of historical sites that was for centuries the home of the renowned Anglo-Norman fFrench family, one of the famous merchant tribes of Galway. 

 

fFrench Mausoleum

This will be followed by a stopover in the quaint plantation village of Monivea. 

From there the tour will continue onto Castle Ellen (above) for a picnic on the lawns of the famed Georgian mansion that was formerly the residency of the Anglo-Irish Lambert family. After a guided tour of the demesne by Its owner Michael Keaney, participants will cycle onto towards the town of Athenry to finish up at Athenry Castle. 

Abaondoned farm, Currantarmuid

Monivea Wood