There is a big bright silver bell hanging in the middle of the trees in Anke and John Moran’s native forest in Wicklow.
From a distance it’s showing no signs of rust. As the damp air furs everything with mosses, the bell will probably lose its shine. Anke and John like the idea of people in the future puzzling over the bell.
Less than nine years ago, this was a long fairway on the Glen of the Downs Golf Course. “When you were on the tee box, where you start, you wouldn’t be able to see people who were over on this side,” John explains. “So once you passed the safe point you rang the bell to let them know they could start.”
The course was a Celtic Tiger phenomenon. Designed by Peter McEvoy, it opened on a sunny Saturday in May 1998. Membership fees peaked at over €30,000 at the height of the boom. But the crash hit hard and a receiver was appointed in 2016.
Now, the once manicured greens up the steep Ballydonagh Road near Delgany are a patchwork of thriving trees, wild flowers and grasses with colours that range from golden to purple. Birds rather than golf balls fly around. Once snow white bunkers have been grabbed by grass and buddleia. Small frogs leap through the long grass.
It’s wild enough to attract one exciting winged visitor that we get an up-close glimpse of at the end of our walk, but first how did they end up buying a golf club to grow a forest?
John used to watch the greenskeepers out the bedroom window of their holiday home set in the hill on the road above, “and then one day I just saw that they weren’t greenskeeping and then they completely stopped and we were wondering what was happening, dreading that some developer would get it. Then we noticed a ‘for sale, for auction’ sign on the clubhouse and started inquiring into it.” That was in 2017.
“We’d chat about it,” John says. “I remember at one stage me saying ‘why don’t we bid for it?’ and Anke going: ‘We’re not buying a golf course’. And then as soon as I mentioned planting trees then she was like: ‘Oh yeah, that’d make sense’.”
They bid at the auction where the guide price was €1.25 million, but lost out to a higher bidder. When it was offered for sale again in the summer of 2018 they bought it. They sold the clubhouse, leaving them with just the land, around 100 acres.
Anke and John Moran in their rewilded native woodland near Glen of the Downs, Co Wicklow. Photograph: Dan Dennison 
The silver bell, once used by golfers, hangs in the middle of the trees. Photograph: Dan Dennison 
Anke and John Moran in their rewilded native woodland near Glen of the Downs, Co Wicklow. Photograph: Dan Dennison 
Anke says in just three or four weeks, the lands look ‘much lusher’. Photograph: Dan Dennison
It was a leap of faith; they bought the land with no certainty that they would get the planting licence from the Department of Agriculture under the Native Woodland Establishment scheme. This is a Government grant which covers all the costs of preparing, fencing and planting land with trees. Landowners then receive an annual premium for 15 years to grow their forest.
Today the grant pays a generous rate of €6,744 per hectare to establish the forest, with annual payments of €1,103 per hectare, but when they planted their woodland the rates were lower, €4,215 per hectare for establishment and an annual per-hectare of €680.
[ How Ireland’s forests are undergoing a revolution to boost biodiversityOpens in new window ]
“Part of the rationale at the time was the price [of the land] was below agricultural land price,” John says. “So if we didn’t get permission for planting, we could always sell it back to agricultural land.”
The absence of native forests in Ireland is striking for Anke, who grew up in southwestern Germany, near the French border, an area with plenty of established native woodland.
In Ireland, they had a view of a conifer plantation on a hill across from them “and then over that way you can see the Glen of the Downs,” John says. “Without knowing a whole lot about native versus non-native you could just see why the native woodland suited the landscape better, and then we learned more about what native means and why Sitka plantations were planted, as a crop.”
The forest was planted over two separate years, the first 33 acres in March 2020, right at the start of the first Covid lockdown. The second 30 acres was planted in early 2021. There are around 80,000 trees growing here now, with a further 30 or so acres being managed as grassland, with paths mown through it and a small orchard.
We haven’t put up any private property signs but as a nature reserve with all the ground nesting birds we don’t want dogs being walked there
— John Moran
Sixty per cent of the trees in the native woodland are sessile oaks, the remaining 40 per cent is made up of a mix of hazel, hawthorn, rowan, holly, scots pine and downy birch. Many of those birches have grown to more than four meters. The whole forest is now visible from the top of the Little Sugar Loaf.
It has been a heartening start. “Wow they did grow a lot,” Anke says, noticing a difference even in the three or four weeks since she was last here. “It looks much lusher.”
Wicklow can be a difficult place to grow a new forest. The deer population treats the tree planting efforts of humans as an open invitation to the buffet. A deer fence surrounds Anke and John’s forest and it has worked well.
The hotter drier weather of the sunny southeast is also a challenge. Between 30 and 40 per cent of the trees planted here in 2020 died of drought because of a hot spring and early summer that year. The trees were replaced under the Native Woodlands Establishment scheme and now they are well-enough rooted to weather drier times.
Even before they planted, the land began to regenerate itself. “There’s so many more birds and insects here,” Anke says.
There are more sounds, more sightings, more life. Not all of it easy to manage. In its first year the 100 acres turned into a sea of yellow as ragwort – which is toxic to livestock – grew in abundance. They got complaints from neighbouring farmers. So they paid three teenage nephews to spend a couple of weeks hand-pulling the toxic weed. “They were pretty traumatised,” Anke jokes. They have never been back. Neither has the sea of ragwort, which was piled into a bunker to mulch down.
Anke: ‘I think that’s kind of hopeful as well … how quickly it recovered.’ Photograph: Dan Dennison 
Eventually when the trees are fully established the couple could see it being opened to the public. Photograph: Dan Dennison 
A huge brown buzzard is spotted from the lands. Photograph: Dan Dennison
On the top part of the land some blackthorn has done its best to colonise a swathe of ground at the speed of the fairytale thicket in Sleeping Beauty. A pond that was part of the golf course landscaping is fed by a stream that runs off the Little Sugar Loaf. The stream had been piped underground, and John recently blocked the pipe and dug out a new stream bed to allow the water to run overground again. He loved hearing the burbling of the water and seeing small insects flying around the daylighted stream. “Most summers it dries up, but it didn’t this year.”
“We haven’t put up any private property signs but as a nature reserve with all the ground nesting birds we don’t want dogs being walked there,” John says.
Eventually when the trees are fully established they could see it being opened to the public, “and maybe connecting the Glen of the Downs to the Little Sugar Loaf with the help of the other surrounding landowners”.
Conversations with former golf club members who sometimes visit typically lead to the question: how do you make money? The answer is they don’t. “We haven’t done the numbers, but I don’t think it’s a disaster,” says Anke, who has a background in financial services. “Prices [of land] were lower [when we bought] than they are today and I think it washes its face somehow, and you get all the benefits for nature and we get all the joy of doing it.”
They are doing this for nature, carbon sequestration and their own enjoyment. With the system as it is now, once the grants finish in another decade the forest will do plenty for nature and climate but little or nothing for their income.
Along with the ragwort, nature bounded back in abundance, including “a lot of what seemed like unwanted wildlife at the start, the hares and the rabbits,” John says. “They were snipping the top off everything. It would be a sharp clean cut. There’s different theories about why they do that. Some say sharpening teeth, some say they want to keep the vegetation low enough so they can see over it.” But they damaged thousands of trees and again the foresters’ initial reaction was to eliminate the cause of it. They put a rabbit fence on the second plantation.
Every time I spend a little bit longer, to just be here, not just rush down to do a job but spend a bit of time, I get something from it
— John Moran
“We got a licence from the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) to shoot, and they did a bit but it made no difference. But then the great thing was the cuts made no difference to the trees either. They just grew out a different way. Instead of growing tall and straight they just grew more bushy.”
As the grass grew tall around the smaller trees, they were advised by the forestry company to spray off the grass with weed killer. “We didn’t do it,” Anke says. “Then they said we should trample the grass and we trampled maybe 20 scots pine and said: ‘Not going to do that either’.
“So we just left it and they turned out really well. I think that summer or the summer after was a drought and apparently a lot of scots pine which got sprayed and had bare soil were struggling much more because they didn’t have the protection, the moisture of the grass around them.”
The trees are well on their way now and the only job is to maintain the fence. John has learned to use a chainsaw to tackle large trees blown over in storms on to the fence.
Anke feels the project grounds her. And it has inspired her to co-found ReFarm, a project set up to find financial models that pay farmers to farm with nature-friendly practices. Through her work, Anke is learning the limits of the reforestation incentives, especially for native woodlands. Fellow co-founder Brendan Dunford talks about the “head, heart and pocket” considerations that farmers and landowners take into account. The pocket part is still not here in the long term; payments are generous but they stop after 15 years (20 years if you are a farmer).
Once the woodland is more mature they can think about taking twinnings and timber for craft and furniture making, but this is a market that needs to be created rather than an existing income stream that’s waiting for what native forests can supply.
Anke and John Moran in their rewilded native woodland near Glen of the Downs, Co Wicklow. Photograph: Dan Dennison 
A view from Anke and John Moran’s rewilded native woodland near Glen of the Downs, Co Wicklow. Photograph: Dan Dennison 
Even before Anke and John Moran planted, the land began to regenerate itself. Photograph: Dan Dennison
We look out for the more unusual bird sightings, following large birds as they fly slowly, hoping for a bird of prey. “It’s a gull … that’s a crow.” Somewhere in the sky there’s a sporadic high-pitched mewling sound that could be a buzzard.
How does it feel to spend time here? “The highlight of it was when I came down here with the three kids with notebooks and a picnic and we stayed for a good few hours and just wrote down everything we saw,” John says. “And there was quite a lot. Every time I spend a little bit longer, to just be here, not just rush down to do a job but spend a bit of time, I get something from it.”
As we round the last bend, walking down from the ringfort that sits at the top, we catch a beautiful glimpse of a huge brown buzzard. The bird takes off from the deer fence. “I never got that close before,” John says. “There he goes, he’s up straight out to the sea.” The buzzard settles on the top of a distant tall old ash tree, the lonely mewing sound carrying back to us.
[ Most farmers could earn more money by planting trees – why don’t they?Opens in new window ]
There is a dad joke to be made about different kinds of birdies here now. The golfing term comes from a “bird of a shot”, bird being American slang for something excellent, a soaring success. And that too seems apt.
“I do find that when I come here, relative to even going for hikes in Glendalough, or wherever, how much more birds and insects there are here,” Anke says. “So I think that’s kind of hopeful as well … how quickly it recovered.”