Event: International Bog Day at Heaney Listen Now Again Exhibition July 26th
Our unfenced country
Is bog that keeps crusting
Between the sights of the sun” – Seamus Heaney
Bogland – Between the Sights of the Sun
Join us 12 noon, Saturday July 26th to mark International Bog Day ( July 27th Sunday) and celebrate the culture, heritage and storytelling of our boglands with a panel of five guest speakers brought together by Tóchar Community Stories at the National Library’s Seamus Heaney Listen Now Again exhibition venue, College Green, Dublin.
The discussion will bring together diverse creative responses that connect our sense of communal belonging through the landscape; from our buried past through our changing present to concepts of a shared future. It will link the National Library’s collection and Seamus Heaney’s own work to our contemporary relationship to the bogland. The panel speakers are poet Jane Clarke, a Roscommon native whose work explores themes of nature, land and climate change, composer Ann Cleare, from Birr, whose work Terrarium draws on aural recording of the buried bog at Lough Boora Co Offaly, connecting us to a vanished mesolithic lake, and Michael Long, a volunteer leader at Cabragh Wetlands, Co Tipperary, who will share the story behind the Cosmic Walk they have created, tracing the bogland to our origin story as a people and a planet, and how the community there became custodians of the land and its habitats. Artist Shane Hynan, from Co Kildare, whose photography draws on the landscape of the bogs, will share his work “Beneath | Beofhód”, and connect with the National Library connection, while community historian Seamus Corcoran, of the Lemanaghan Bog Heritage and Conservation Group, will tell the story of the treasures the bog holds for us in place and belonging far beyond what we extract in energy.
After the event the National Library will host a guided tour of the Heaney exhibition with a particular focus on Heaney’s work responding to our relationship to nature, land, history and the bogs.
Tóchar Midland Wetlands Restoration is co-funded by the Government of Ireland and the European Union through the EU Just Transition Fund Programme and managed by the National Parks and Wildlife Service, of the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage. Tóchar Community Stories is a public engagement storytelling initiative under the restoration scheme working with people across the eight counties of the Just Transition region in Laois, Kildare, Offaly, Westmeath, Galway, Tipperary, Roscommon and Longford.
Visit Tóchar Wetlands website for more details.
Contact Helen on Tóchar Stories: tócharstories@gmail.com