In North Mayo with my little lads. The light. The colours... what a country we live in. 
And I’m in a Sean-nós mood. The remarkable Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh and Billy Mag Fhloinn
Eleanór na Rún
This landscape saw terrible suffering in the Great Famine, its impact can be seen in the abandoned potato ridges on the mountains. Emigration was one option for people for a century. This song in Brooklyn evokes the sense of loss of exiles
Prof Seamus Caulfield told us a story once by this fireside, of his father talking to a local man, who remembered travelling as a boy with his father to Belmullet to buy “yellow meal”
On a donkey and cart, and the bodies were lying in ditches by the road. It was 1847...
And we, a bunch of Irish and American people all fell silent, stunned by the sense that outside the cottage, in the landscape around us, terrible things would once have been seen...
We were listening to the voice of a man, whose own father talked to him, about a once upon a time boy, who remembered all his life, the corpses by the roadside of the desperate poor, on the road west to Belmullet
In North Mayo, we have the archaeology, history, folklore and memory of generations of survival, loss, community, and hope - from the Mesolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age, the 19th century, and today.
Anyway, if you get the chance, come to North Mayo
