On a 41-acre hillside near Gortin in Omagh, Rosemary Mulholland walks among thousands of young native trees — oaks, rowans, alders — each one barely visible above the plastic tube protecting it. The site is called Lenamore Wood, and she is overseeing its transformation into something that won’t fully exist for another hundred years.
What’s being restored here is not a familiar woodland. Northern Ireland has its own ancient rainforest — temperate, moss-draped, shaped by Atlantic rain and mild ocean air. And almost none of it remains.
A rainforest hiding in plain sight
When most people hear “rainforest,” they picture the tropics. But the temperate version is quieter and considerably closer to home. John Martin, director of the Woodland Trust in Northern Ireland, describes it as woodland “usually characterised by native tree species such as oak, birch, alder and hazel,” with high humidity supporting dense mats of mosses and lichens, and complex structures of ravines, rivers, and rocky outcrops. High rainfall, mild temperatures, and the steady pull of the Atlantic have shaped it over millennia.
This habitat is extraordinarily rare. According to the Woodland Trust, just 0.04% of Northern Ireland’s total land area qualifies as ancient woodland — and what little survives is not a curiosity but a critical ecological asset. Martin notes that these forests “deliver critical environmental services, including biodiversity protection and carbon storage.” In a period of accelerating climate change, that matters considerably.
How 9,000 years of forest became a footnote
The loss didn’t happen overnight. After the last ice age, as temperatures rose, trees gradually spread across Ireland. By around 8,000 to 9,000 years ago, Martin says, “most of the island was probably covered in dense woodland” — oak, hazel, elm, birch, and pine, functioning in the wetter west as what we now recognize as temperate rainforest.
Clearing began slowly, then accelerated. Between roughly 6,000 and 3,000 years ago, Neolithic farmers started removing trees for crops and grazing, and as settlements expanded, natural regeneration became increasingly impossible. “Most likely, the largest scale losses were probably in the 16th to 19th century,” Martin explains, “which saw the kind of critical collapse phase of Ireland’s rainforest.”
A landscape that once stretched across nearly the entire island has since been reduced to scattered fragments. The forest that shaped Ireland’s ecology for millennia now barely registers on a map.
One man, 73 acres, and 17 years of rewilding
Not everyone is waiting for institutions to act. Eoghan Daltun left Dublin in 2009, sold his house, and moved to a 73-acre farm on the Beara Peninsula in west Cork, overlooking the Atlantic and the Skellig Islands. His motivation was personal. “I just wanted a life that was closer to nature for myself and my two sons,” he says.
What he found was a farm in ecological collapse — feral goats had eaten every tree seedling, blocking the forest’s return entirely. Over the past 17 years, Daltun has been rewilding the land, and the effort has grown well beyond what he originally anticipated.
He now frames his work in global terms. “Whether we realise it or not, we depend totally on natural ecosystems for our very survival,” he says. “By removing them and repressing their return, we’re threatening our own future survival.” He describes catastrophic global nature loss as “one of the worst things happening right now globally” — a statement that reframes a west Cork hillside as part of a much larger story.
30,000 trees and a £38 million bet on the future
Back in Omagh, Ulster Wildlife’s Lenamore Wood project represents restoration at institutional scale. Nearly 30,000 native trees of Irish provenance — oak, alder, rowan — were planted on the 41-acre site in February and March 2026. The financial commitment behind it is substantial: insurance partner Aviva has committed approximately £38 million to the effort.
Restoring a temperate rainforest is not a matter of planting trees and walking away. Mulholland describes a detailed monitoring program: fixed-point photography with QR codes that visitors can use to submit images, building a long-term photographic record of change. Bird and butterfly surveys will run alongside moth trapping and remote bat sensors, tracking which species arrive as the habitat develops. The site will open to the public soon, with a car park planned, so communities can return across years and decades to witness the transformation firsthand.
A privilege measured in centuries
Mulholland knows she won’t see Lenamore Wood reach full maturity. When asked how that feels, her answer is disarming. “It is sad, 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.”
The motivations are practical as well as personal. The trees will capture carbon, reduce flood risk, and allow ecosystems to rebuild. Ulster Wildlife is already identifying additional land to expand similar projects across Northern Ireland.
The deeper logic here is generational. Oaks planted now won’t form a true canopy within any living person’s lifetime — they are, in effect, a gift addressed to people not yet born. In a culture that measures success in quarters and election cycles, that represents a genuinely different way of thinking about responsibility. The forest that once covered nearly an entire island was lost incrementally, decision by decision. It may be rebuilt the same way — one hillside, one generation at a time.