The vernacular uses of Irish wood

Abstract

Ireland is famous for the fact that most of its native woodlands are long gone. By the second half of the seventeenth century, for a variety of reasons, most Irishwoodlands had disappeared, with the result that there is a lack of any tradition of good quality Irish vernacular furniture or woodwork surviving from earlier than the famine period. However, this does not imply that there is no vernacular tradition of using Irish timber. Smaller pieces of Irish wood were employed for a wide variety of uses, often in ingenious ways, and a detailed knowledge of the attributes of each kind of timber survived. There was also another source of timber that Irish people could access, namely bog timber, mostly bog oak and bog pine or fir.