Wood that has lain buried in bogs for thousands of years is receiving a new lease of life at the hands of a Waterford artist.
Until two years ago Seamus Kelly from Butlerstown was a self-employed carpenter, making cabinets and other softwood kitchen furniture. It was a reasonable living but he "got no satisfaction from making the stuff", so he began using more interesting material, like salvaged oak and pitch pine to make Shaker-style pieces.
However, it was only when he moved on to bog wood that Seamus found his vocation. Now his house and adjoining workshop are adorned with extraordinary one-off pieces of furniture, many retaining the irregular shape in which they were retrieved from the bog.
He uses not only bog oak, examples of which are relatively easy to find, but rare bog hardwoods like elm, yew and pine. "Elm is particularly rare and is very hard to find," he says.
For the farmers whose land Seamus scours for his raw material, the wood is not only valueless, it can be a nuisance, getting in the way of ploughing or drainage works. "They just want to get rid of it, burn it, anything to get it out of there." For Seamus it is buried treasure.
"We don't appreciate our bog wood in this country," he adds. "The Germans are different. They're even coming to the west of Ireland and taking it back to Germany."
In using such material he is carrying on a tradition which is at least 300 years old. "In the 17th century they used bog wood for the roofs of houses, for all structural timbers and also for furniture, because the whole country was down to less than 1 per cent of standing timber. Only the big estates had any trees left, so they had to go out into bogs and dig up the wood."
"They went out on frosty mornings to fens and bogs, and they knew where the wood was buried by watching for where the frost or dew disappeared first, because the wood had a different temperature."
Seamus had one sample of bog elm carbon dated by Dr Eddie McGee of the physics department at UCD, who found it to be just over 3,000 years old. But Seamus believes some of the material he uses is at least twice as old again.
On the ground outside his workshop lies an assortment of odd-shaped pieces of wood, all of which, apparently, are capable of being transformed into distinctive items of furniture or decorative works of art. He gets his inspiration from wherever he can find it. "I don't copy stuff from books. I just stick to whatever the piece of wood tells me to do."
An exhibition of Seamus' work will be on view at Waterford Treasures from Sunday, November 28th, until Wednesday, December 8th.