Larches struck down

First chance we have had to get away this autumn and it seems our usual haunt at this time of year is Glenariff. Weather on Friday was appalling but by morning had cleared for a wonderous dawn; temperature was decidedly chilly but the air was crystal clear and the silence in our part of the forest was enormous. This was definitely a day to get out and enjoy the world.

On wer bikes and down the lane to the main road. Coming up here last night, in the dark, the road felt treacherous, slipping and sliding. In daylight the reason was clear - a carpet of red pine needles covered the road and given yesterday's rain it not only looked like a single item rather than hundreds of parts but felt and behaved like a greased plastic sheet.There was an odd stillness about the place too; barely a breath of air moved the trees and the few deciduous ones stood starkly naked against the winter blue sky.

On the other side of the main road, the public forest park road was well littered too. The entrance road skirts the top of the deep gulley where the main river of the glen flows. As the valley deepens a couple of impressive waterfalls appear as the river cuts its way through the valley floor. Unusually today we can see right down to the flowing water from the road above. Either there are more deciduous trees than I imagined here or there has been some wide-spread tree felling in progress.

Arriving in the car park we leave the bikes to walk down to the waterfalls and on to Laragh Lodge for a morning coffee. We don't get far - the path is blocked by tape and wooden barriers with large warning signs.Evidently tree felling is in progress then and that's why the valley looked so bare. One of the signs has lots of multi-coloured text and the story it tells is not good. Giving up on that path we head for the reverse route.

Passing the viewpoint looking down the valley toward Waterfoot and the sea. The quality of light is typical for a chilly November day; bright sunshine catching the shadows along the higher edges of the great U-shaped valley. The exhibition centre describes the ancient sharing of the farmland and its easy to imagine long narrow family plots rising up from the valley floor to the grasslands at the top likely still holding treasures of buried hoards of butter from summer grazing. Nowadays many of these fields have merged into single farms or tracts of forest and its easy to see the pockets of larch brown against the evergreen of the other conifers. This might be the last time we see these woods in our life-time.

The reason for blocked paths and extensive tree felling becomes clear as we walk further on and are blocked again. There is no access to the forest. A stack of red, freshly harvested timber - the result of devastation of the nearby hill-side. A sign proclaims "Phytophthora Ramorum".

In one of those odd - and it seems all too frequent - coincidences, a Radio 4 program a couple of days before, possibly "Gardener's Question Time", had described the disaster that was affecting much or rural Cornwall with vast tracts of mature woodland being chopped down; forcibly (by law) left fallow for up to seven years before replanting could begin again. All because an insidious pathogen infecting most of the Larch trees in the area. It seems, the disease had taken a turn for the worse in 2009 and had mutated into a very virulent and infectious form that was rapidly spreading throughout the country wrecking havoc wherever Japanese larch were growing. It was also jumping species and attacking other trees and shrubs as it went, taking out Rhododendrons and decimating some of the long established formal gardens.

It had been known in Northern Ireland since 2009 but evidently a major incident had occurred here with the result that many, if not all, larch trees in the forest had been taken down after evidence of the disease had been found. According to an official report in August (http://www.forestry.gov.uk/pramorum), infections have been found in Sitka Spruce in Irish forests - this is the most widely planted tree species in the British Isles. Things do not look good; all the conifer forests may be under threat and if they have to be removed, it will take 30 or 40 years for forests to recover to their current population. We will be long gone.

On Sunday, we headed in the other direction intending to perhaps wander down the stream nearby that fed the main river in the larger park across the road. As we moved out of the shelter of the evergreens in the camp site, this part of the forest had been devastated too. Vast swathes of larch trees had been removed leaving barren fields of stumps, broken branches and piles of sawdust. On this scale, it was depressing to see and we just retreated back to the fantasy world of audio-book storytelling. On a better day a discourse on Caravaggio might have been in order to echo the subject of the storybook but for now it will have to wait.