In his column ‘Another Life’ in the Weekend Review of The Irish Times (Saturday, 5 November 2022), Michael Viney weaves a story around bog-deal (pine) in ancient & recent times in Ireland. The piece includes an iconic painting of pine stumps in west Mayo by Viney.

Research carried out on bog-pine and oak in the Palaeoenvironmental Research Unit, University of Galway, is featured as well as related research on bog-oak and tephra (volcanic shards) carried out by palaeoecologists in Queen’s University Belfast and elsewhere in Europe and USA.

See: Another Life: Connacht’s bog-deal - a gift of fierce fuel?https://www.irishtimes.com/environment/2022/11/05/another-life-connachts-bog-deal-a-gift-of-fierce-fuel/

The illustration used here shows a pine stump from Derryeighter bog, west of Oughterard, Co. Galway that was sampled for dendrochronology and radiocarbon dating. The ring-width pattern of this long-lived bog-pine, which started life over 5300 years ago and died about 360 years later, is shown (red curve). Further details regarding this and other fossil pine timbers in the region are available in: O’Connell, M., Jennings, E., Molloy, K. 2021. Holocene vegetation dynamics, landscape change and human impact in western Ireland as revealed by multidisciplinary, palaeoecological investigations of peat deposits and bog-pine in lowland Connemara. Geographies, 1 (3), 251–291. https://www.mdpi.com/2673-7086/1/3/15

‘The Other Clare’ that Viney refers to is the current volume (vol. 46, 2022). The article he refers to is available at: https://aran.library.nuigalway.ie/handle/10379/17199.