Northern Ireland’s vanishing rainforest is being restored — 30,000 trees at a time.
Northern Ireland has its own rainforest. Not the tropical kind — ancient, temperate, draped in moss and lichen, shaped by Atlantic rain and mild ocean air. Today, it covers just 0.04% of the land.
In early 2026, a team began planting nearly 30,000 native trees at Lenamore Wood, near Omagh, as part of a 100-year restoration programme. The people doing the planting already know they won’t live to see it finished. They’re doing it anyway.
A forest that almost disappeared
Temperate rainforests — sometimes called Atlantic or Celtic rainforests — aren’t relics of some distant, exotic landscape. They’re native to Ireland and Britain, shaped by the same Atlantic weather systems that drench the western coasts today. After the last ice age, as temperatures gradually rose, trees colonized the island until, roughly 8,000 to 9,000 years ago, most of Ireland lay beneath dense woodland dominated by oak, hazel, elm, birch, and pine.
That forest didn’t disappear overnight. Neolithic farmers began clearing land for crops and grazing somewhere between 6,000 and 3,000 years ago, and settlements followed — bringing with them the steady suppression of natural regeneration. The most severe losses, according to Woodland Trust director in Northern Ireland John Martin, came during the 16th to 19th centuries: a “critical collapse phase” that stripped the landscape of what little remained.
What survives today is defined by native tree species, high humidity, mosses, lichens, and complex structures of ravines, rivers, and rocky outcrops. These forests deliver measurable environmental value — biodiversity protection and carbon storage chief among them. Yet just 0.04% of Northern Ireland’s total land area qualifies as ancient woodland, making it one of the rarest habitats in the country.
Planting for a future no one alive will see
Rosemary Mulholland, Head of Nature Recovery at Ulster Wildlife, is leading the effort to change that — at least in one corner of County Tyrone. The 41-acre site at Lenamore Wood, near Gortin in Omagh, is the centrepiece of a 100-year restoration programme backed by a £38 million commitment from Aviva.
In February and March 2026, almost 30,000 native trees of Irish provenance — oak, alder, rowan, and others — were planted across the site. It’ll take roughly a year before the tips of those trees emerge from their protective tubes. The full canopy won’t arrive for at least a century.
Mulholland is clear-eyed about what that means personally. “It is sad,” she said, “but in a way it’s a great privilege, isn’t it, to just be able to take this land and turn it into a habitat that is now largely lost.” There’s something worth pausing on in that framing — choosing to read incompleteness not as a limitation, but as a form of inheritance passed forward.
One man’s private rewilding experiment on the Atlantic coast
The work at Lenamore Wood sits within a broader, if still fragmented, movement. Eoghan Daltun has been doing something similar on his own terms for 17 years, on a 73-acre farm on the Beara Peninsula in west Cork, overlooking the Atlantic and the Skellig Islands.
Originally from Dublin, Daltun sold his home in 2009 and relocated with his two sons, drawn by a desire to live closer to nature. What he found on arrival was land in poor ecological condition. Feral goats had consumed every tree seedling on the property for years, blocking any forest from establishing — and removing that pressure was the first step toward recovery.
“Whether we realise it or not, we depend totally on natural ecosystems for our very survival,” Daltun has said. “By removing them and repressing their return, we’re threatening our own future survival.” His farm now functions as a working demonstration: evidence of what temperate rainforest recovery looks like on the ground, and a reminder of what once covered much of Ireland’s surface.
Measuring change across generations
At Lenamore Wood, the restoration isn’t just being planted — it’s being documented. Ulster Wildlife plans to install fixed-point photography stations with QR codes, allowing visitors to place their phones in a cradle, capture an image, and contribute to an ongoing photographic archive of the site’s transformation. A low-tech approach, but one capable of building a visual record spanning decades.
More formal ecological monitoring will run alongside it: bird and butterfly surveys, moth trapping, and remote sensors to track bat activity after dark. As Mulholland puts it, understanding what moves through the site at night matters just as much as what’s visible by day. The site will open to the public in the near future, and Ulster Wildlife is already identifying additional land for future projects.
The environmental case is straightforward enough. Trees capture carbon, reduce flood risk, and support layered ecosystems that degraded land simply can’t sustain.
There’s a particular kind of humility required to plant a forest you’ll never stand inside at its fullest. The people working at Lenamore Wood are making a bet on behalf of people not yet born — trusting that the world they’re working to restore will be worth inheriting. Whether enough places like this one can be established in time is a question that outlasts any single programme, or any single generation.