The Devils Chimney is on the Sligo Leitrim border. It’s the highest waterfall in Ireland, it carves a jumbled channel down through the rocks. It’s set into the sheer side of the Glencar Valley, hedged in close against Glencar Lough. The waterfall takes a solid vertical slice from the hill. It’s home to something beautiful and unique.
Mark and Fiona Magennis have taken this acreage beneath the Devil’s Chimney, planted it with broadleaf trees. By the thousand. Tended it, cared for and curated it. And then opened it up. They have taken their land, their work, and their idea, and made it open, public, communal space. The site is criss crossed with paths that climb around the hill, all framed by the view of the largest waterfall in Ireland that comes spilling down the cliffside and into the boulder strewn stream bed that cuts a wedge shaped shaft down through the holding. There is a forest, slender and clean limbed beech, sycamore and hazel, hidden here and there a knotted and happy holly, with space enough under the trees for a wildflower understory, and the impossibly variegated green of mossy banks. Above us are ancient yew with more than a milleniums tale held in their rooting.
The path wends its way through the forest. This was once a farm. Now it’s newly planted broadleaf forest. Even still in amongst hazel and the wildflowers a half wild ewe with her straggly surefooted lamb peep out. She’s a fugitive from another holding. This is no longer a farm. It’s something else. Something special. Something inspiring.
We spent the day climbing around the Devils Chimney. The waterfall that grapples its way down the side of Glencar valley. There, cut into the sides of the hills are a warren of paths through the newly planted forest. We drifted on up the paths through groves of hazel, beech and sycamore. Through blowsy colonies of flowering bluebells and primroses.
It’s beautiful here. The expanse of lake that draws your eye across itself and onto the bare hills that scribe the sky on the opposite shoulder of the valley. There is peace in among the still and leafy green, the kind of peace that Yeats said came dropping slowly. Hidden in amongst the trees and paths are primroses, soft banks of impossibly green moss, bowsy droves of sycamores in their hundreds, aged willow and hawthorn trees that are as twisted as the decades they must have stood. Knotted stubborn and fairytale trees that look like living moving things from a Guillermo Del Toro film. It’s still a work in progress. Some of the paths are being built. The forest is still young. But there are rest places aplenty, the views are amazing, and the feeling of being in amongst somewhere so happily and generously rewilded is something special.
It’s an inspiring place. A work of labour and of love. A work of care and generosity. It’s a wonderful place in which to spend time, and, for the moment at least, away from the crowds that flock to more well known beauty spots.
As a farmer, it speaks to me of what we aspire our green places to be. I cultivate. I grow things. I harvest grass
