Ray Ó Foghlú, head of partnerships and development at Hometree, a nature restoration charity in Ireland, says place names are not “instructions” to recreate the past: “Their real value is in showing us what a landscape has been capable of.” Ecologists can then test locations for their rewilding potential. Equally, somewhere with no hint of trees or woods in its name could actually be a perfect site, today, for a tree-planting project, for example. Nic Craith describes place names as “a starting point”.
