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I had been carving a tree, a "Shrine to the Rainforest" at the   Treepeople Park in the Santa Monica Mountains above Beverly Hills for over a year and wanted to see if I could go somewhere overseas to carve.  I didn’t have a particular destination in mind until I received a fax from Crystia Sonevetski, the international coordinator at American Forests in Washington D.C. that set everything in motion.  In response  to my inquiry where I could go to carve she sent several pages of names and addresses of forestry councils around the world but at the bottom  of  first page she had written, "I highly recommend Ireland!"  It made me realise that with all my travels I had never been to Ireland yet everyone I had ever known who had gone there had come back raving about how wonderful the people were, how beautiful the country was, how much fun they’d had, etc.  I also remembered that Ireland liked its artists so much that they exempted them from paying income taxes.  That was it. I decided I was going to go to Ireland.  I sent a letter and photos of my work to the Irish Forestry Council asking them if they had any dead trees that they would like to have recycled into a second "Shrine to the  Rainforest"   Two weeks later

Barbara Yates is a sculptor who has the good fortune of being able to wander the world and sculpt trees.

Early the next morning I arrived at Avondale before anyone was around and sat on a bench admiring the beautiful mansion surrounded with sweeping lawns and thick forests of huge old trees.  I later learned that Avondale had been the home of Charles Stewart Parnell, the father of Irish political independence.  He had inherited the estate from an ancestor, Samuel Hayes, who had planted many trees on the property.  The park is managed by the Coillte who had previously operated a forestry school there for many years, but now run it as a tourist attraction.

When Pat Drea, showed up I asked him if he had a dead tree in mind for my carving project and he told me to follow him.  We went to a path about 100 yards past the large house and entered the woods.  About thirty feet inside we went off the path and around some thick bushes where I was confronted with the largest tree trunk I had ever seen, except for some giant Sequoias in California.  I probably should have been overwhelmed but instead I was very excited.  Pat told me that it  was a 42 ton beech tree that had been planted 250 years ago by Samuel Hayes.  It had died of old age and, afraid that it might fall over on someone, he had ordered the trunk to be cut down four years previously. Standing next to the moss covered trunk which lay on it side, it was still almost four feet taller than me and all I had brought with me was my little hand chisels.   I spent three days just looking at her, wondering where to start.  One side was filled with large holes and convolutions that reminded me of creatures, while the other side was flat.  Large fungi filled many of the crevices and thick clouds of spore constantly smoked out of them.  She was so beautiful.  Before leaving me to my task Pat invited me to help myself to meals in the cafeteria while I worked in the park.

Not wanting to pay the high rates of a bed and breakfast all summer I made arrangements to stay at the local hostel for a very low rate but they couldn’t let me move in until a large group left in several days. Jean Costelloe, who ran Avondale house, let me move into the annexe which had once been the student quarters for the forestry school until I could move into the hostel.  It was booked for most of the summer but whenever I needed a place to stay she let me stay in the annexe when it was empty.   Throughout my visit she was a great help sorting out problems and introducing me to people.   Jean would stop  whenever she saw me walking to  Avondale and give me a lift.  During my first week she went to Dublin for a meeting with her bosses from Coillte and had  been told that when I finished the tree they wanted to notify the  press.  This made me feel a little pressured but also made me more determined to create something beautiful for the park.

On my third morning one of the girls in the kitchen, Naomi, loaned me a few books on Celtic mythology and art.  Over breakfast I opened the book on mythology and there was a picture of a Green Man, the ancient Celtic symbol for trees.  With leaves for hair, mustache and beard he looks like the sun god and is often mistaken for him.  What a perfect symbol to carve into a tree dedicated to being a "Shrine to the Rainforest". That morning I spent 3 hours carving the Green Man out of a prominent bump in the convoluted side of the tree and never had time to go back and work on it again.

I met Maggie my first Friday when Jean invited me to an art opening at Avondale House.  Maggie and another painter, Phillip had an annual exhibition in one of the upstairs rooms.  A large crowd turned out.  I  was standing with Jean and Phillip when Jim Sheridan, the director of the movie "My Left Foot" came running in, apologising for being late. He gave the opening speech, an interesting custom at art openings in Ireland where an exhibition is not officially open until someone well known gives a speech.  The art, mostly figurative paintings by Phillip and landscapes by Maggie, sold briskly.   Every time I came to visit Maggie when she watched the gallery that week, or even when we went out together, someone bought at least one of her paintings.  She came to think of me as a good luck charm.  The day she came to take down her work she invited me to have a drink at a pub with her before she drove home.  We sat at the bar and the man sitting next to us insisted on buying our drinks.  He turned out to be Keiron Brennan, the lead singer in an Irish band called Clannad.  One of his brothers’ (Pol Brennan) gold records for their album "Past, Present" was hanging on a wall of the pub.  He talked about his upcoming world tour and his sister, the singer Enya.  When he learned that Maggie had some paintings in her car he went out to look at them and bought one.  He insisted that I play pool with him against two guys sitting at a nearby table and although we  lost and I was totally out of practice I did manage to sink more balls than he did.  Later, Phillip gave me a tape of "Past, Present" and it was my inspiration as I carved the tree.

Avondale House had originally been built by Samuel Hayes in 1777 but after being acquired by the Irish government was used as a forestry training school until it had been recently refurbished and furnished with antiques from that period and turned into a tourist attraction. Bus loads of tourists came regularly and Elaine, Aoife and Sophia, the three students Jean had hired for the summer to be tour guides, were always leading some group around the house.  Although I was older than the girls, their enthusiasm for my carving project caused them to befriend me and invite me into their lives during my stay.

Elaine, an art student, invited me to go with her to Dublin on her day off.  We spent the day visiting the National Gallery, a photography gallery, and a bead store so we could make necklaces.   She took me to Trinity College to see if I could locate a friend and  we had lunch at an Indian restaurant, something she had never tried before.  When we finally went to catch the train back to Rathdrum her brother, Brian, was also waiting to ride home so we all rode together and worked on crossword puzzles.  It was a tiring but fun day.

I only had two months in which to carve my newest Shrine to the Rainforest so instead of angsting over what to do I finally just started carving a Celtic braided wreath in the center of the flat side of the tree.  On each curve of the braid I carved a name of something we receive from trees: OXYGEN, FOOD, FUEL, SHADE, LUMBER, MEDICINE. CLEAN AIR, PAPER.  When I finished that I began carving the goddess Tara to  the right of the wreath, to represent the things that come naturally from trees.  I positioned her next to a bump that became a basket of fruit.

During the last week in June Aoife mentioned to me that the United States aircraft carrier JFK was visiting Dun Loaghaire the week of July 4th and she was planning on visiting a friend for several days because the town would be filled with American sailors.  I remembered that an Irish guy, Marttin, whom I’d made friends with several years earlier in Guatemala came from Dun Loaghaire (pronounced "Dun Leary") and that I  had written to him telling I was going to Ireland but had received no answer.  When I told Aoife about him she invited me to come up for the Fourth of July and said we would go look for him.  I didn’t have much hope of finding Martin as he was a traveller and most likely wasn’t at home, but I thought it would be nice to spend Independence Day partying.  Aoife met me at the train station and we walked to her friend Lizzy’s house.  After a brief visit Aoife suggested we look for my friend Martin.  We hopped a bus that dropped us a block from his house.   I felt a bit shy when I knocked at his door but was totally shocked when he opened it.  At first I wasn’t sure if it was him because his bright red hair was so long.  I had only known him for a few weeks when he stayed in the room next to mine in Antigua, Guatemala several years previously.  We had spent days sightseeing together and had written to each other for a short while.  Martin invited us inside and we had a long talk.  When I had written to him he had been visiting his brother in Sweden for several months and hadn’t gotten my letter until he returned home.  He thought he had missed me so never answered.  We decided to pick up Lizzy and go to a pub so the girls could check out all the sailors.  We had a great day reminiscing about Guatemala and other travels.  Although the pubs were filled with sailors no one tried to pick up the girls, much to their disappointment.   We walked out to the port to look at the JFK  but didn’t take the ferry boat to the ship like many others.  When the last train back to Rathdrum was due, Martin and Aoife walked me to the station.

I wanted to get to meet some of the local people in Rathdrum and was curious about the Catholic Church so I joined the choir in the church nearest the hostel.  Made up of only handful of young and not particularly enthusiastic teenagers and a woman who played the guitar, it was only the good acoustics that allowed our voices to carry over the congregation.  Wanting to learn the songs better I went to a mid-week practice at one of the girls houses.   Her family came to visit me one day while I was carving and  last time I sang in choir before I left this young girl told me that her father, a carpenter, had given her a piece of wood and a chisel and was showing her how to carve.  This made me feel wonderful.  Maybe some day when I return to Rathdrum there will other woodcarvers around.

Except for the two days I had gone with Elaine and Aoife, I  had worked every day on the tree.  It rained very little during my first few weeks so I took advantage of the situation.  To compliment the earth goddess I decided to represent the things that are manufactured from tree so on the left side of the wreath I carved a man building furniture.  Then I went back and carved trees behind the goddess.  Slowly but surely I filled in a large rectangle approximately four feet high and 15 feet  wide.  Whenever I needed to remove a lot of wood, Pat sent Eddy, one of the workmen, over with a chain saw to cut slices into the wood so I could chisel the wood out more easily.   Hikers began to notice me and come to visit.  The young people all said they thought it was brilliant,  a word I learned was the latest fad in Ireland.

One day Elaine invited me over to her house to watch a video and that evening she and her sisters picked me up and took me to their house in the tiny village of Ballinaclash.  At the entrance of their driveway was an old stone ruin, a small building that had fallen into disrepair.  When I questioned Elaine about it I learned that it was the gate house  to an ancient abbey, Whaley’s Abbey, built by the brother of St. Kevin  and over one thousand years old.  She went on to tell me about some of the interesting historical features of the neighborhood which included the old cemetery to the abbey, an old pagan fairy ring, and the remains of a monument to William of Orange that had been erected to commemorate where he had met with his troops before leaving Ireland.  I wanted to see the fairy ring immediately but Elaine persuaded me to come back another time because the field, once owned by her father, had been sold to a neighbor who didn’t like people going in it.  A week later, on a new moon, I called Elaine and asked if she would take me and some friends I’d met at the hostel to see the fairy ring and she invited us over.  We crawled over the fence surrounding the field and hiked to the fairy ring, a circle of very old stones with two trees standing inside.   One tree, a beech, looked as if it had been blasted with lightening it was so contorted and filled with holes.  The other tree was a young oak.   I had a manifestation ritual and when I was finished Elaine, knowing that I had been collecting white stones as souvenirs and piling them up under the tree I was carving found a small white quartz pebble and handed it to me just before we left.  As she stepped out of  the circle she tripped and almost fell.  I thought to myself, "that won’t happen to me", but when I stepped outside of the ring I also tripped and cut my hand so that it bled steadily the rest of the evening.  As soon as it happened I had the feeling that I had given a blood sacrifice of some kind.  Later, after we had visited the ruins of the abbey and graveyard and returned to Elaine’s house for tea and cookies we told her parents, very well educated people, that we had taken a stone from the ring and they reacted in horror.  They proceeded to tell us that it was forbidden to take anything from a fairy ring and that terrible bad fortune came to any that did.  They told us that the ring originally had twelve oaks inside it but the man who had owned the field before them had decided to cut them down but had died before cutting the last oak.  They went on to tell us several more horror stories that had Elaine and I terrified.  Right then I decided to return the stone, but better than when I received it.  The next day I found a piece of wood from my carving that looked like a pyramid.  I cut a hole in it and glued the white stone inside.  Then I glued numerous good luck amulets on the wood that were carved out of jade, crystal, rose quartz and other stones.  When there was a  full moon I returned to the fairy ring and had a little ritual before reaching deep into a hole under the  tree and leaving the pyramid inside.   We left feeling much relieved.

I was visited by Donal Magnar whose dream is to create Sculpture in the Woodland, a sculpture pare in a place called Devil’s Glen.  Although his committee had already chosen the artists for the project he had heard about my carving and come to see it.  His visit made me very curious to see Devil’s Glen and when I told Elaine, Aoife and Sophia about it they immediately planned a picnic.  Sophia was the only one of the girls to have a driver’s license and access to a car so she offered to drive.  She had started working at Avondale later than the others because of her  graduation from Oxford.  Her father was head of the English Department at Trinity College and they lived in a beautiful old house on a farm near Elaine’s family.   One evening after work the four of us stopped to pick up Elaine’s boyfriend, Jim, at the train station we headed to Devil’s Glen.  It got it’s name from the water falls that crash down on rocks with a loud roar.  We parked near a pleasant looking picnic area and were in the middle of eating dinner when a man came leaping over a hedge on a large horse.   He got off nearby to cool down the steaming  horse and Sophia invited him to join us.  We had an enjoyable time talking with him.  He introduced himself as Peter Fortune and although young looking he said he was a retired solicitor who owned a chain of up-scale fast food restaurants called Eddie’s Rockets.   He seemed very interested in all of us and we talked for quite a while.   He finally rode off and we went for a long hike to the falls.  Sophia and Aoife decided to go skinny dipping but the rest of us were happy just relaxing on the rocks sticking out of the water.   Later when we reached Sophia’s house she invited us in for hot chocolate before taking us home.  I told the girls that I thought the evening had been magical and that I had a feeling they would see Mr. Fortune again.

I had read for many years about the famous Irish second sight so I asked Jean if she knew of a good psychic. She highly recommended one she had been going to for years who had told her sister all sorts of things that had come true.  Finally, one day Jean said she was going to see Rosemary, her psychic, and invited me to come along.  We drove to Dublin and parked on a pleasant suburbian street.  Rosemary turned out to be a young looking grandma who is an excellent painter.  She makes her living between her psychic readings and selling her art.  I had my reading first and as she laid out her tarot cards she told me I was going to eventually live in Ireland but first I was going to meet someone from America and get married.  It all sounded wonderful but I’m still waiting for it to happen.

Later that week as I was turning up the street to the hostel I ran into  Les Armstrong a local contractor who is a close friend of Jeans that I often saw at Avondale.  He hailed me to tell me that he’d had a friend, Alan O’Keefe, a newspaper man  who had visited him the previous weekend and they’d gone over to see my tree.  Alan had so enjoyed seeing the tree that he wanted to write an article about it for the Evening Herald, a national paper.   Several days later he interviewed me over the phone followed by a visit from a photographer.  After the article appeared more people began to come see the tree.  People began to bless me for what I was doing, asking me to autograph pieces of wood from the tree. One woman blessed my hands.  It was kind of embarrassing but also rewarding to feel that all my hard work was appreciated.

The weather had been exceptionally good during my stay but near the end it rained more and more.  Because it was too difficult to carry a ladder to the tree so I used a folding chair with thin legs.  Two weeks before I left I was standing on the chair in a light drizzle carving away when one of the legs suddenly sank all the way into the mud throwing me onto the back of the chair then onto the ground, knocking the air out of me. I had badly bruised a couple of ribs which caused intense pain for several weeks afterwards.   Still, I made my deadline and seven weeks from my arrival I finished carving the last detail.

Two days before I left Sophia invited me to go with her to a pub to meet with Aoife and Elaine.   She and Aoife picked me up and we drove for quite a long ways while being very mysterious about Elaine’s whereabouts.  Sophia finally stopped at a fancy restaurant where she said she had to drop something off for a friend.  I asked if I should wait in the car but she said I should come in and see the place.  I walked in totally unsuspecting and there were Elaine and Jim waiting in an anteroom with ten bottles of wine.  I was totally surprised and touched at their kindness.  We waited for two mystery guests whom they said I had predicted would come.   All my guesses produced laughs and  wait and sees.   I was totally shocked when I saw Mr. Fortune and his beautiful Dutch wife walk in the door.   We ate a gourmet meal at the  very expensive restaurant and I was very touched by my friend’s kindness.

Before I left Jean arranged for the Coillte to reimburse me for all my hostel expenses.  Maggie had called and offered to take me to the airport and picked me up to spend my last night at her house so we could leave early the following morning.   It was with a sense of sadness that I left Ireland and all my wonderful new friends but I vowed to return someday and hoped that Rosemary’s predictions will come true.

I want to return to Ireland to do some more work and the Coillte have graciously invited me back, but for the last couple of years I've been busy carving here in the States.  I am presently getting ready for an exhibition of my shrines at a gallery called "The Gallery" in Chagrin Falls, OH in conjunction with a series of classes I'm teaching on creating personal shrines at the Cleveland Museum of Art.  Also, at the beginning of April I will be teaching a one week seminar on woodcarving at Bryn Mawr College in Penn. - so it looks like I'm becoming a teacher now.

Hope you enjoy this.  Have a great day!

Barbara