John Arnold: 'I thought I had money to burn, but €7,800 cheque was error!'
Walter Buter, of Kilcash Castle in Tipperary, lived the high life, spending a lot of his time ‘on the tare’ in London.
But mounting debts and little income - he wasn’t exactly a ‘model farmer’ - saw Butler forced to sell off much of his estate. In 1797, he advertised “To Be Sold... the timber now standing in Kilcash... remarkable fine Oak, Ash, Beech, and Elm”.
These were magnificent, mature trees, thousands of them. They were sold and felled and the castle itself was reduced to a ruin.
After this desecration, the famous sad lament Chill Chais was written
(Now what will we do for timber,
With the last of the woods laid low?)
Well, do you know last Saturday, as I was going across the Orchard Field on the tractor, those lines flashed across my mind. Don’t get me wrong, we’re not short of timber for the fire around here yet! Indeed not, what with about 1,500 35-year-old trees dead or dying from the awful ash die-back disease, we won’t be cold for a while yet!
We have a fireplace in one room and a stove in the other and we burn little only our own timber - with a few sods of turf just for old time’s sake.
You know, I’m all for the good and protection of the environment and the use of renewable energy, but I do worry a bit about the way things are going. No new house nowadays has a chimney of any kind. The air-to- water heating systems are all the go but I think they still need a modicum of electricity to work them.
If Storm Foxyjohn comes along and the power is out and you’ve no stove or fireplace, lad, you’d really be up the junction.
Then I says to myself, ‘Look, John, you failed Pass maths in the Leaving Cert in the last century so don’t be bothering yourself about things you can’t understand.’
Back in 1990, when we planted the steep glen with ash and oak trees, we never did it to make money. Yerra no, but the place was wet and steep and I love trees.
I know spruce, larch, fir and scots pine are grand and produce timber for construction purposes, but I don’t like the darkness and sameness and ‘boring’ look of them!
Each to his own, however, and our trees grew away grand with very little help from me.
In fairness, back in 1990 the Forestry Department paid us a premium each year for 20 years. So every year up until 2010 we used get a cheque for about £330 – about €378 after 1999.
The premiums went up dramatically after a few years - if we had planted, say, in 1998, we’d have got about €1,000 a year!
Well, when our last premium cheque came in 2010 we were over the moon, on the pig’s back, jumping with joy, yes, we were pure delighted. There it was before our very eyes, the cheque with the words ‘Pay; John Arnold €7,800’ - yes seven thousand and eight hundred euro - wow, absolutely the biggest cheque I had ever, ever got!
We sat down at the kitchen table and held the cheque up to the light -no fake news or forgery here. After the dinner we said we’d go to the bank in Fermoy to lodge the cheque.
Dressed to the nines, we were just going out the back door when the phone rang. I was going to leave it ringing, but I thought we mightn’t be back for hours so I answered the call.
It was the Forestry Department in Johnstown Castle - my heart sank! The nice girl on the line said there had been a clerical error, oh Lord.
But I said the cheque was in my name, so it must be for me. She was very, very sorry, as she explained. The cheque for €378, which I had been expecting, had been sent out to a namesake of mine, another John Arnold, in a different part of the country! He got my cheque and I got his. When he opened his envelope, he got on to the Department fairly lively!
For nearly three hours, we had been on cloud nine, and now our bubble of joy was deflated in a flash!
Anyhow, we got over it. I started pruning the ash trees a bit and taking out the crooked ones and a few that got canker -a non-contagious disease.
Then, seven or eight years ago we started selling some of the better ash trees for hurley butts - the butt is the bottom 4ft of the tree. Some of the hurley-makers got ten or 12 hurleys from each butt.
Things were looking up - ’twould be a nice little earner in the winter time and with plenty firewood from the remaining 30-40ft of the tree.
As Eamonn Kelly used to say, ‘Things rested so’, until this awful ash die-back arrived in the country via uncertified ash plants about ten years ago. It’s a sad-looking sight nowadays.
We still have a few hundred trees that are not diseased but we don’t know what’s the future for them.
When I was returning through the Orchard Field an hour later this week, I heard singer David Gray on the tractor ‘wireless’ being interviewed by Brendan O’Connor. Gray is a lovely lyrical and poetic artist - I saw him in Dublin in concert about 20 years ago.
On Saturday, he spoke at length with Brendan abut his life and times, his songs and his love of Ireland. He described this country as land covered with ‘a mist of myth and magic’ - what a lovely phrase!
Our Orchard Field, I presume, was once covered in apple trees or some other fruit-bearing trees. In the first Ordnance Survey map of the farm -from the 1830s - the orchard was gone. Back then a David Barry was the farmer here so maybe his family in the late 1700s planted or maybe uprooted the trees.
All that remains today on the ditch by the Boiler House Field are a few crab-apple trees- a reminder, I suppose, of the long-gone orchard. The Boiler House is long gone also, but the field still bears its name. Over beyond is the Well Field just above the Holy Well. From Ballinwilling Bridge nearby, the old Maas Path came along the glen, up behind the Well, up along the Double-ditch in the Well Field and High Field and through the Path Field out onto the road just below the church.
These fields, our Glen, the Mass Path, the Well, the Knoppogue River and the Orchard Field, are all in the townland of Garryantaggart. In Irish, this could be Garraí or Gáirdín an tSagairt – the small enclosure or garden of the priest.
Who was the priest - a druid? A penal times cleric? I don’t know, and maybe we’ll never know, but that’s why the mists of myth and magic linger around here - in the past, present, and into the future.
At least we still have timber to burn, and the proud oak trees will be growing for another 200 years.
App?
