At the back of our school there is an old oak and beech wood. Some of the trees are about 70 years old so they must have been planted when the school was built in 1920.

One tree is older than the rest. We measured it and estimated that it was about 130 years old. We put a bit of string around the tree, measured it, divided by 2.5 and got 130. That's how you estimate a tree's age!

Next door to our school there is an old Royal Irish Constabulary (R.I.C.) barracks built in 1850. Roxanne lives there now. Part of the school grounds once belonged to the R.I.C. barracks. We guessed that the oldest tree was planted when the barracks was built and we were right! A lady from Clonown called Rosaleen Fallon was doing research in the Office of Public Records in Belfast in 1997. She accidentally came across records of planting at the R.I.C. barracks in Clonown. Three local men worked for 5-9 days planting trees. They were called Bernard Kenny, Pat Shine and Lackey Shine. They were paid 10 pence a day and a total of 15 shillings and 10 pence for their work. There was no school in Clonown at that time so they signed their names with an "X" as they couldn't write.

This is a copy of the account showing expenditure on the planting. It reads as follows:

A Return of Expenditure planting at the Police Barracks

at Clonown in Spring 1852

At the time that the barracks was being built, the land was owned by Lady Johnston. Rosaleen Fallon saw this Receipt at the Office of Public Records in Belfast. It records the payment of £1.00 by Lady Johnson to Mary Gavin in exchange for her holding in Clonown.

The Receipt reads:

Since 1847, 36 families (totalling 205 people) had been evicted from Clonown.

Back to the present!

We decided to plant some trees to replace the old trees when they go. We won £80.00 worth of trees from Design by Nature in the "Design a Garden" Competition organised by the Office of Public Works for the European Year of the Environment. We ordered trees from Sandro Caffola of Design by Nature. These are the trees we ordered.

We needed to mulch the trees as the grass and weeds would grow up around them and strangle them. We needed cardboard and mushroom compost to mulch them. We rang a skip-hire company called Christy Slevin & Son and asked Christy if he would bring us up some cardboard that a local company called Malincrot was dumping. He didn't understand what we wanted the cardboard for. We told him we wanted to mulch the trees. He brought us the cardboard and we had great fun unloading it.

We stored it in the playhouse.

Next we rang Naughton's Mushroom Farm and ordered mushroom compost. When they were emptying their sheds they gave us the compost.

Peter helped us to carry them.

Mark and Mike helped us to spread the cardboard around the little trees that we had planted.

We spread the compost on top of the cardboard.

At last we had finished the planting and mulching. Sandro had given us a bag of woodland seeds so we spread the seeds on the mulch. We planted some bulbs too - Wood Anemones, Snowdrops, Aconites and Bluebells.

When Spring came we went out to see how our new oak wood was getting on. It looked lovely. A lot of the trees had grown big but some weren't getting on too well.

It was very windy up there. One tree that had a sleeve on had grown very big. We decided to get more sleeves from McIver Products in Donegal.

Our new trees will grow to replace the old oak and beech trees when they fall.

Here's a time line showing what has been happening while our old trees have been growing: