by Helen Shaw – Tóchar Stories curator
The sphagnum moss covering the earth at Scohaboy Bog (Móin na Scotha Buí) is soft and springy. Around the multi-coloured layers of moss there are beautiful tufts of snowy reindeer lichen and the promise of bog asphodel. It is a thankfully dry day in a wet month but all the rain has enriched the restored boglands of Scohaboy Bog, close to Cloughjordan in Co Tipperary and it’s a perfect day to witness what over ten years of community and collaborative environmental work has achieved.
Gearoid O’Foighil, Cloughjordan Community Development Association, takes out his phone to show me photos of what the landscape was like before restoration work began. “There’s a real sense we’re leaving something after us in what’s been happening here. Everyone around here, particularly the local landowners, feels a sense of pride in how Scohaboy has been transformed”, he says.
Scohaboy is a Special Area of Conservation , a legally protected habitat, where the degraded cut peatlands are judged as having the ability to regenerate. Turf cutting ceased in 2015 and cutover drains were blocked. It’s a vast bogland of about 1500 acres with ownership split roughly a third under National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS), a third with Coillte and a third with private landowners. It holds nearly 72 hectares of raised bog with over 62 hectares of high bog and less than 10 hectares of peatland cutover bog. Coillte work in partnership with NPWS on the restoration. The adjoining Sopwell and Laghile Woodlands with a further 500 acres, under Coillte, creates a local natural amenity of close to two thousand acres.
Where Gearoid and I are walking, in Scohaboy’s Northern end, was once a commercial forestry plantation but it was felled by Coillte last winter (you can see the lines of tree stumps with logs used to bridge a stream) and nature is returning with birdlife like snipe and lapwing present. Half the land has been left for natural regeneration, a middle belt planted with new native trees and the remaining peatland cutover area is being rewetted.
Scohaboy has seen three major peatland conservation works, beginning on the southern end with a Coillte EU-Life tree clearance project in 2015 and followed by two large scale NPWS funded rewetting efforts over the winters of 2021 and 2022 bringing close to 90% of Scohaboy’s land under conservation measures. The fourth phase this winter, with the Coillte northern tree felling, opens the potential to dramatically interconnecting this regenerating natural landscape.
Scohaboy is Tipperary’s leading peatland restoration project and seen as one of the most successful community supported initiatives for ‘climate, people and nature’ with close collaboration between the Cloughjordan Community Development Association (CCDA), NPWS, Coillte and 52 private landowners. The level of community engagement and private landowner participation here has been impressive.
The CCDA has installed boardwalks as part of the Loop of Laghile and Loughaun National Trail and are working with Coillte on new woodland amenities including native planting in Sopwell and Laghile Woodlands and a new ‘Close to Nature’ project’ at nearby Knockanacree Woodlands outside Cloughjordan. The environmental and climate action benefits of what’s happening are clear but it is also creating a unique, rich natural heritage for people to enjoy and experience everyday.
“In terms of values, Scohaboy has multiple offerings. As our oldest `near-nature` landscapes, these are sites of unique and irreplaceable ecological values, both on the national and international stages. As a repository for social and cultural tradition as well as history and heritage, Scohaboy offers windows into our shared human ecological past. It offers a place for much valued well-being and recreational pursuit”, Gearoid says.
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You can find out more about Cloughjordan Community Development Association – from the history of the village (and how Cloughjordan links to Jordan) to the local natural heritage on the website www.cloughjordan.ie