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Almost 30,000 young native trees have been planted at Lenamore Wood in Northern Ireland, marking the beginning of a restoration project that could take a century to mature. Oak, alder and rowan now cover parts of the 41-acre site near Gortin, though the future woodland is still difficult to picture.
The trees remain small, sheltered inside protective tubes and surrounded by open ground. They are being planted to recreate a fragment of the Atlantic rainforest that once spread widely across Ireland. Northern Ireland now has only a tiny share of ancient woodland remaining, with the Woodland Trust estimating it covers just 0.04% of the land. The project is intended to restore habitat, support wildlife and bring back a rare ecosystem.The trees planted will pass through several generations of people before they can be considered mature forest. That makes the project less about reaching a final appearance and more about setting a process in motion. Ulster Wildlife intends to keep tracking what happens as the site develops, while looking for opportunities to restore other areas of suitable land. The Lenamore site is also expected to open to the public, allowing people to walk through it while it is still at the very beginning of its transformation.
30,000 trees planted to bring a lost rainforest back to Northern Ireland
As reported by the BBC, the first planting at Lenamore Wood took place in February and March 2026. Nearly 30,000 trees of Irish provenance were planted across the site, including oak, alder and rowan. They are tiny compared with the woodland they are meant to create. For a while, the changes will be easy to miss. The young trees are protected by plastic tubes, and it could be around a year before their growing tips begin to appear above them.A mature forest is a different proposition altogether. The people planting these trees know they will not be around to see the site reach its full potential. It could take a century before the woodland has developed into anything resembling the ancient forests that once covered large parts of Ireland.For Rosemary Mulholland, Head of Nature Recovery at Ulster Wildlife, that long wait is part of the point. Restoration on this scale is not designed around a single lifetime.
The project is backed by Aviva, which has pledged about £38 million towards restoring lost temperate rainforests across the UK. The work at Lenamore is one part of that wider effort.Northern Ireland has very little ancient woodland left. According to the Woodland Trust, only about 0.04% of its land area falls into that category.
What makes a rainforest when there are no tropics in sight
The word rainforest can make people picture dense tropical vegetation, heavy heat and broad-leaved plants unfamiliar to Britain and Ireland.
The Atlantic rainforest is much less exotic in appearance. Its trees are native species such as oak, birch, alder and hazel. What gives these woods their rainforest character is the combination around them: persistent moisture, abundant rainfall, mild conditions and the influence of the Atlantic.The ground and trees can become rich with mosses and lichens. Ravines, streams and rocky areas add further layers to the habitat, creating places for different plants and animals to live.Reportedly, John Martin, the Woodland Trust's director in Northern Ireland, describes these forests as ecosystems that provide benefits beyond the trees themselves. They hold carbon, support wildlife and form part of the natural systems that help landscapes function.
How Ireland’s ancient forests disappeared over thousands of years
The landscape would have looked very different thousands of years ago. As the climate warmed after the last ice age, trees gradually spread across Ireland.
Reportedly, by roughly 8,000 to 9,000 years ago, much of the island is thought to have been covered by woodland.Oak, hazel, elm, birch and pine were among the trees growing across the country. In the wetter western areas, the conditions would have supported the kind of lush woodland now described as temperate rainforest. The retreat of those forests was not the result of a single event. Human settlement changed the landscape gradually.
From several thousand years ago, farming communities cleared woodland to make room for crops and grazing.As settlements expanded, there was less opportunity for forests to return naturally. Later centuries brought much larger losses. Martin points to the period between the 16th and 19th centuries as an especially important stage in the decline of Ireland's remaining rainforest.What survived became increasingly fragmented, leaving small remnants separated from one another rather than a continuous woodland landscape.
How one Cork farm is being transformed back into native woodland
There is already an example of long-term rainforest recovery further south. On the Beara Peninsula in west Cork, Eoghan Daltun has spent 17 years allowing a heavily damaged farm to move back towards woodland. His 73-acre property looks out across the Atlantic towards the Skellig Islands.Daltun bought the land after selling his home in Dublin in 2009. His decision to rewild it was partly personal, but the condition of the farm made the ecological challenge particularly clear.
Feral goats had been eating young tree seedlings, leaving little chance for new woodland to establish itself. Once that pressure was removed, the possibility of regeneration returned.The process has been slow. That is unavoidable when the objective is a functioning forest rather than a collection of planted trees.Daltun regards the work as an attempt to demonstrate what a landscape can become when natural processes are allowed to operate again.
His farm is also a reminder that restoring a rainforest does not mean recreating an untouched prehistoric scene. It means giving native ecosystems enough space and time to develop.
Scientists will track how the new rainforest changes over the years
At Lenamore Wood, the planting is being accompanied by a long-term programme of observation. Ulster Wildlife plans to use fixed photography to record how the site changes. Visitors will eventually be able to take photographs from designated points and submit them using QR codes, creating a visual record that can be compared over many years.
Other surveys will look for changes that may be much harder to see.Birds and butterflies will be monitored. Moths will be trapped and recorded. Remote sensors will be used to detect bats, including animals that may be active after visitors have left the site. That monitoring matters because the success of a rainforest restoration project cannot be judged simply by counting how many planted trees survive.A forest begins to become something more when other species start using it.
Insects arrive. Birds feed and nest. Fungi and lichens occupy new surfaces. Plants spread into gaps. Water moves through the landscape differently as vegetation becomes established.Those changes can take years to become obvious and much longer to mature.
Why the Atlantic rainforest matters beyond its trees
The woodland being recreated at Lenamore is expected to provide several environmental functions as it develops. Growing trees remove carbon from the atmosphere and store some of it in their biomass and soils.
Vegetation can also affect how quickly rainwater moves through a landscape, helping reduce the pressure created by heavy rainfall and surface water. But the ecological value is broader than carbon or flood management.The damp conditions found in Atlantic rainforests support species that depend on wet, shaded habitats. Mosses and lichens can thrive on trees and rocks, while the layered structure of woodland creates different conditions at ground level, among shrubs and higher in the canopy.The result is a habitat made up of countless small relationships rather than one simple benefit.
