History

About ten thousand years ago, the last of the ice fields retreated from Ireland leaving behind a land upon which lichen, then birch and willow slowly began to grow. After a lapse of some thousand years a thick, mixed forest of pine, yew and oak formed a blanket over most of the country. These great forests lasted over four and a half thousand years before gradually being outgrown by a vigorous growth of peat-forming plants.

This marked the beginning of the bogs, which have grown to a depth of some ten metres over the past three to four thousand years, preserving the once great wood it covered. The bogs of Ireland are considered to be an emotional as well as an economic resource. They preserve layer upon layer of history. Various artefacts discovered there over time are indicative of who and what the Irish people are.

The majority of our pieces are inspired by the natural form of the wood when it is retrieved from the high (or blanket) bog. The pieces that suggest a unique aesthetic are usually worked as standalone ornamental pieces. The functional and decorative pieces are generally of a smaller size and more uniform in design.

The oak becomes a fine black, self-lubricating wood, the yew, a rich auburn and the pine takes on a golden hue. For to all who worked the land the relics of the subfossil timber were generally seen as a nuisance, cluttering the bogs and obstructing the business of turf-cutting. I say -generally-, and I should add -in our time-, for these roots and trunks and fallen branches - tough and, one would say, intractable survivors of vast stretches of geological and paleo-botanical time - had served generations of our people well. Harvested and conditioned by generations of rural expertise, bogwoods were once a very important part of their domestic and communal economy. Important over an incredible wide range of activities.