Heritage Rewiliding Ireland

Heritage Rewiliding Ireland Heritage Rewilding Ireland restores former farmland to natural habitat — one square metre at a time. Become a steward. Watch nature return.

🏆 All-Ireland Senior Hurling Championship FinalTomorrow, all eyes turn to Croke Park.Limerick 🟢 v Galway 🟣📍 Croke Park🗓 ...
18/07/2026

🏆 All-Ireland Senior Hurling Championship Final

Tomorrow, all eyes turn to Croke Park.

Limerick 🟢 v Galway 🟣
📍 Croke Park
🗓 Sunday, July 19
⏰ 3.30pm Irish Time

Best of luck to both teams in what promises to be a spectacular All-Ireland final. 💪

For more than a century, the GAA has been at the heart of Irish life.

Founded in 1884, the Gaelic Athletic Association was established to preserve and promote Ireland's traditional games and culture. Hurling itself is one of the world's oldest field sports, with roots stretching back thousands of years into Ireland's ancient past.

But the GAA is about more than sport. It is community, identity, place and heritage — connecting generations of Irish people at home and around the world.

At Heritage Rewilding Ireland, we believe our natural landscape is part of that same heritage.

The fields, hedgerows, woodlands and wild places that have shaped Ireland's story for generations deserve a future too.

🌿 From our heritage, we play. For our future, we care.

Who are you backing tomorrow — Limerick or Galway? 👇

🌿 Irish-American History Series — Thomas Francis Meagher, Part 6After the Civil War, the man from Waterford became the d...
16/07/2026

🌿 Irish-American History Series — Thomas Francis Meagher, Part 6

After the Civil War, the man from Waterford became the de facto Governor of Montana Territory — one of the most lawless places in America. He campaigned for Montana's statehood, built institutions, and continued to carry the flame for Irish independence from the other side of the world.

A large statue of Thomas Francis Meagher stands today in front of the Capitol Building in Helena, Montana — the boy from The Mall in Waterford, immortalised in bronze on the American frontier.

And then, on the night of 1st July 1867, it ended. He fell from a steamboat on the Missouri River near Fort Benton, Montana. His body was never recovered. Historians have debated the circumstances ever since — theories range from illness to intoxication to murder. He was forty-three years old.

Revolutionary, orator, condemned prisoner, escaped exile, Civil War general, frontier governor. Thomas Francis Meagher was too dramatic a figure to die of old age — he simply disappeared.

He never returned to Waterford. He never saw the flag he gave Ireland become the flag of an independent nation. He never knew that the tricolour he flew on The Mall would one day fly from the GPO in 1916 and from every public building in a free Ireland.
But his land is still here. The fields of County Waterford that shaped him. The soil he grew up on.
We're tending it. 🌿

🌿 The numbers are hard to read. So let's talk about what comes next.85% of Ireland's most precious habitats have an unfa...
15/07/2026

🌿 The numbers are hard to read. So let's talk about what comes next.

85% of Ireland's most precious habitats have an unfavourable status. Almost half are demonstrating ongoing declines — with only 2% improving over a twelve-year period.

We are not going to pretend that Heritage Rewilding Ireland alone can fix that. We can't. What we can do is prove, on a real piece of County Waterford land, that the opposite direction is possible. That when you take a field out of intensive production, stop spraying it, stop reseeding it, and simply allow native life to return — something remarkable happens.

The wildflowers come back. The insects follow. The birds come after them. The soil rebuilds itself. The hedgerows thicken. And slowly, season by season, year by year, a piece of Ireland that had been silenced begins to find its voice again.

The estimated investment needed for nature restoration in Ireland is substantial — but nature restoration creates jobs, reduces future costs, and generates long-term economic value through ecosystem services.

Our members — our stewards — are the people funding that restoration, one square metre at a time. Not waiting for government. Not waiting for policy. Just deciding that the land matters and doing something about it today.
This is what Heritage Rewilding Ireland is for.

Will you be part of it? 🌿

🌿 Irish-American History Series — Thomas Francis Meagher, Part 5When the American Civil War broke out in 1861, Thomas Fr...
14/07/2026

🌿 Irish-American History Series — Thomas Francis Meagher, Part 5

When the American Civil War broke out in 1861, Thomas Francis Meagher knew exactly where he stood. He had spent his life fighting for freedom. He was not about to stop now.

He joined the 69th Regiment and set about fusing together five regiments of mainly Irish-Americans to form the famous Irish Brigade. These were the sons and daughters of Famine — men who had lost everything in Ireland and built new lives in America. They fought with the fury of people who knew what it meant to have freedom taken from them.

His soldiers wore sprigs of clover in their hats, marching under a green flag embroidered with an Irish harp and the words "Erin go Bragh" — Ireland Forever. Their battle cry was Faugh a Ballagh — Clear the Way.

They cleared the way at Bull Run, Fair Oaks, Antietam and Fredericksburg. At Antietam — the bloodiest single day of the entire war — Meagher had his horse shot out from underneath him as he led his men in an almost suicidal charge against Confederate forces. The Irish Brigade was decimated time and again. They kept going.

In 1963, President Kennedy spoke of Meagher's legacy and presented the battle flag of the Irish Brigade to the people of Ireland. It hangs to this day in Leinster House.

A flag for Ireland. From a man from Waterford. Fighting in America. 🇮🇪🇺🇸
🌿 Next post: Governor of the Wild West — and the mystery that still hasn't been solved.

🍺 There's an Irish pub in every corner of the world.From Boston to Buenos Aires, from Tokyo to Toronto — wherever Irish ...
13/07/2026

🍺 There's an Irish pub in every corner of the world.
From Boston to Buenos Aires, from Tokyo to Toronto — wherever Irish people went, a pub followed. A piece of home, rebuilt on foreign soil. A place where the craic was good, the welcome was warm, and for a few hours you could close your eyes and almost hear the rain on a Galway street.
We'd love to know yours.
👇 Comment below or tag a friend — what's your favourite Irish pub anywhere in the world, and what makes it special? ☘️

🌿 Irish-American History Series — Thomas Francis Meagher, Part 4Tasmania. The far end of the earth. A penal colony from ...
12/07/2026

🌿 Irish-American History Series — Thomas Francis Meagher, Part 4
Tasmania. The far end of the earth. A penal colony from which no Irishman was supposed to return.

Meagher spent three years there under a ticket of leave — free to move within a district, but forbidden to leave the island. He used the time to think, to write, to plan. On 3rd January 1852, he wrote to the local magistrate formally surrendering his ticket of leave — and slipped aboard a ship off the east coast of Tasmania. He had chosen defiance over parole, escape over comfort.

In an open rowboat he spent four days at sea. The luck of the Irish held — he was eventually picked up by an American whaling ship. He made his way first to Brazil, then to New York.

He arrived to a hero's welcome, immediately taken into the heart of the Irish-American establishment. The revolutionary from Waterford was now one of the most celebrated men in America.

He was twenty-eight years old. He had survived famine, treason charges, a death sentence, a penal colony and four days adrift in the southern ocean.
He was just getting started.

🌿 Next post: the Irish Brigade, the green flags, and the bloodiest battles of the American Civil War.

🌱 Underneath every field in Ireland is a world most of us never think about.Healthy soil is not dirt. It is a living eco...
11/07/2026

🌱 Underneath every field in Ireland is a world most of us never think about.

Healthy soil is not dirt. It is a living ecosystem — home to bacteria, fungi, earthworms, beetles, and thousands of other organisms that break down organic matter, cycle nutrients, filter water, and hold carbon. A single teaspoon of healthy native soil contains more living organisms than there are people on earth.

Irish farming has been governed by policies of production — with subsidies and incentives promoting intense agriculture, resulting in damage to our environment, water quality and biodiversity. Decades of chemical fertilisers, heavy machinery, and intensive grazing have compacted and chemically altered Irish soils, reducing them from complex living systems to a growing medium for grass — and not much else.

When soil dies, everything above it eventually follows.

When we take land out of intensive production and begin the rewilding process, the soil is the first thing we think about. No more fertilisers. No more compaction. Native root systems — deep, diverse, complex — begin to rebuild the underground ecosystem. Earthworms return. Fungi spread their networks. Carbon is drawn down and stored.
The land begins to breathe again from the ground up.
🌱

🌿 Irish-American History Series — Thomas Francis Meagher, Part 3When Meagher stood before his judges in 1848, sentenced ...
10/07/2026

🌿 Irish-American History Series — Thomas Francis Meagher, Part 3
When Meagher stood before his judges in 1848, sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered for sedition against the British Crown, he did not beg for mercy.
Instead he met the verdict with defiant wit. "My Lord, this is our first offence, but not our last," he told the judge. "If you will be easy with us this once, we promise on our word as gentlemen to try better next time."

The remark became legendary. It also proved prophetic.
The Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848 had failed. Ireland, devastated by famine, was in no condition to fight. The only skirmish that took place was a gunfight with local police in County Tipperary, remembered ever after as the Battle of Widow McCormack's Cabbage Patch. It was a humiliation. But Meagher refused to be humiliated.

Public outrage at the death sentences was enormous, both in Ireland and abroad. Queen Victoria herself took notice. In September 1848, Meagher's sentence was commuted to life in exile — transportation to Van Diemen's Land, the penal colony at the bottom of the world, now known as Tasmania. The Genealogist
He was twenty-five years old. He would never see Waterford again.

🌿 Next part: the escape — one of the most daring in Irish history.

🌿 Ireland is one of the most nature-depleted countries on earth. Here's what that actually means.Ireland ranks in the bo...
09/07/2026

🌿 Ireland is one of the most nature-depleted countries on earth. Here's what that actually means.

Ireland ranks in the bottom 10% globally on the Biodiversity Intactness Index. Not bottom 50%. Bottom 10%.

85% of Ireland's protected habitats are in an unfavourable conservation status. More than half of all native plant species are in decline. Nearly one in three bee species is threatened with extinction. Enable Research
63% of Ireland's bird species are in serious decline.

This is not a warning about the future. This is the present. This is what the Irish countryside looks like right now, beneath the surface of what appears to be a green and living island.

How did we get here?
Ireland spent two centuries converting land to pasture to support increased livestock numbers. National agriculture policy accelerated increases in cattle and sheep in the 1970s, with cattle levels now at record highs. Agriculture now occupies 67% of the territory.

The land never got a chance to breathe.

At Heritage Rewilding Ireland, we are giving it one. One square metre at a time — removing it from production, letting native plants return, letting insects come back, letting the soil remember what it was.
It is a small act. But small acts, multiplied, are how landscapes change.

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