For International Bog Day Tóchar Stories partnered with the National Library and the Seamus Heaney Listen Now Again exhibition to bring together a public conversation about Ireland’s changing relationship with the bogs and how it values and perceives them. The event titled Bogland – Between the sights of the sun – took inspiration from Seamus Heaney’s Bogland poem and Heaney’s lifelong interest and affection for what he called  these “green wet corners ” to which he felt ‘betrothed’. In the public conversation artists and community leaders working with bogs shared their own lived experience and their creative and advocacy work. Poet Jane Clarke, who comes from farming roots in Roscommon, read several of her own bog inspired poetry – including ‘Recipe for a Bog’ while visual artist Shane Hynan, who recently featured in the RHA Bogskin exhibition took the audience on a visual storytelling journey of our turf lands using archive photography and his work photography. Composer Ann Cleare, from Birr, Co Offaly, unpacked her work “Terrarium’ where she worked deep in the boglands of Lough Boora while community historian Seamus Corcoran of Lemanaghan Heritage and Conservation Group shared the folklore and historical stories of St Mánchan landscape, and traced the journey of the land from ancient monastic toghers to a contemporary debate over the use of the bog for wind turbines – which the community oppose. Fr Michael Long, a volunteer community leader showed how Cabragh Wetlands, in Co Tipperary, where he is a director, has sought to underscore and amplify the concept that people, places and nature are all connected and thrive together.  

We’re curating and sharing some video and audio of the event and that conversation over the coming month including short clips where we asked each of our panellists what the bog meant to them. Poet Jane Clarke gave us a beautiful answer, connecting her childhood memories of her grandmother’s house and the turf farm, with all its warmth and nourishment, a place of love and family, but also how as a young person she wanted to escape ‘the bog’ and it was only later in life, when she began to write as a poet that her appreciation shifted and she realised how precious these places, these landscape are. 

Watch Jane Clarke here: