WATCH: "Irreplaceable" school tree house burned by vandals in Cork

Wed, 04 Oct, 2017 - 17:22

A playground tree house in Cork which was burned down by vandals is "irreplaceable", according to the school’s principal.

Principal of Sunday’s Well Boys National School Dave Cashman said vandals burnt down the tree house in the ’sensory movement garden’ in the early hours of Sunday morning.

The centre piece of the garden, which was a project developed by a PhD student, was a 300-year-old tree trunk.

"It is irreplaceable. To replicate it like-for-like would cost €20,000. The materials alone cost in the thousands. The tree trunk - we were just lucky to get in the first place and I don’t think it would be possible to get anything like it," Mr Cashman said.

Children were able to climb up the tree trunk to the tree house and exit through a slide.

"[The garden] is a child led project so over the last number of years the children have developed and designed the garden. We got specialist craftsmen in to build everything in the garden," he added.

He said that part of the garden was not visible from the roadside so the tree house burned unnoticed.

"It was the part that all of the children loved," he said.