Dinnseanchas

Dinnseanchas — Envisioning the Uplands was an embedded residency commissioned by Hometree and funded by Creative Ireland, bringing seven socially engaged artists into six upland communities along Ireland's western seaboard. The project brought together art, community, agriculture, and ecology to explore the lore and topography of Ireland's uplands and challenge perceived divisions between nature and culture, human and more-than-human. Alongside artists working in the Borlin and Coomhola Valleys in Cork, Dromid and Corca Dhuibhne in Kerry, Mám in Galway, and Gartan in Donegal, Living Rhythms were situated in Lyreacrompane in the Stacks Mountains of North Kerry.

For eighteen months, we were immersed in its landscape and stories. The name Ladhar an Crompáin means the fork between the converging rivers, the Crumpane and the Smearlagh. The townland is connected by the Mass Path along the banks of the Smearlagh, a route still walked today. The landscape is now characterised by Sitka Spruce plantation and wind turbines, and the conversation about land use here had a different texture and tensions from the other, predominantly agricultural, communities in the project.

Tim O'Donoghue, a farmer and Kerry's first wildlife ranger, welcomed us into Lyreacrompane through the Curlew Conservation Project. Working with the volunteer conservation group to monitor the last breeding pair of Curlew in North Kerry, we began to see the place through Tim's knowledge and love of the land, encountering endangered Curlew and Hen Harrier, declining salmon and trout in the Smearlagh, and the bog that once shaped the rhythms of the whole community. Joe Harrington, Kay O'Leary, and the Lyreacrompane Heritage Group told us how the bog had sustained a thriving community and how much had changed since its decommissioning in the 1960s. Like the other communities in the project, Lyreacrompane has been marked by depopulation and land abandonment. Its spirit perseveres, most visibly in the annual Dan Paddy Andy Festival, celebrating local music, dance, and heritage.

We took part in the festival and the Bog Walk in August 2024, talking with people, recording stories, and building the connections the work would depend on. Through those encounters and a recorded conversation with Tim about his years protecting the Curlew, we made Showing Up, an experimental audio-visual performance exploring care, loss, and conservation. No further nests have been sighted in the Stacks Mountains since the project began. Tim is an expressive and warm presence; to see grief weigh on him, and on Paddy and Pat beside him, the day the last nest failed, is something the work has tried to honour.

Showing Up was first performed at the Sugar Club in Dublin in November 2024. The following April we brought it home to Lyreacrompane, hosting a screening with Tim, the O'Donoghue family, and community centre volunteers. For some, the Curlew project was new; for others, the evening connected to conversations already under way about the land, its changes, and what those changes meant for a community staying with the trouble. Lyreacrompane has been dealing with ecological and social transformation for generations. The decommissioning of the bog brought its own grief and its own community response. Tim spoke about the birds, Ray Ó Foghlú spoke about Dinnseanchas, and the evening felt like one thread in a much longer conversation.

Sound has been central to our approach throughout the residency. Ecologies, a two-hour audio narrative created as part of our residency on Éist community radio, weaves field recordings and spoken word to explore Lyreacrompane's landscapes, the ecological pressures bearing on them, and the social histories bound up in the land.

RADIO SHOWEP. 3

003 Ecologies

17 April 20251:59:37

Our work also included writing: Field Notes from Lyreacrompane 2036, a speculative short story imagining the townland's future through a fictional Hospicer navigating climate displacement and ecological change, was published in the Lyreacrompane Journal and in Dinnseanchas: Visions from Ireland's Uplands, a collection of twenty essays edited by Grace Wells, Lucy Taylor, and Ray Ó Foghlú. Alongside the other Dinnseanchas artists and Grace Wells, we also contributed to "What We Brought Back from the Mountains", a feature in Holy Show magazine published in conjunction with the Earth Rising exhibition at IMMA.

The Lyreacrompane and District Journal has been documenting the stories, histories, and lives of the area since 1990. Edited by Joe Harrington, each edition runs to well over a hundred pages of local history, poetry, photography, and memory, reaching the community and its diaspora across the world. It is one of the few hyperlocal community journals of its kind still in print. The Little Library of Lyreacrompane took that archive as its starting point. All editions of the Journal are housed within a seating structure modelled on the community's dispersed spatial arrangement and built from Sitka Spruce, the monoculture that covers the Stacks Mountains. A data sonification piece draws on field recordings and data from census records, NPWS, and Met Éireann, bringing the ecological and social story of the landscape into dialogue with the community's own sustained act of remembering.

The work extended beyond Lyreacrompane throughout the residency. In June 2024 we presented a sound installation and research poster at the International Sustainability Transitions conference in Oslo, framing our methodology around a question central to the whole project: how can co-created artistic work, rooted in the rhythms of place and community, shape shared visions for regenerative futures?

The Poetic Policies workshop, co-designed with poet Grace Wells, came from a related but distinct concern. Reimagining Ireland's food policies through poetic forms and language, it responded to something the Dinnseanchas project kept returning to: that meaningful change in upland communities is not a matter of individual behaviour, but of challenging the systemic conditions that shape how people can live and work on the land. Real change requires conversation at many levels, through many entry points, and policy genuinely centred on the needs of place. The workshop brings policymakers and communities into that conversation together.

Finally, the work came together with that of the other Dinnseanchas artists at Hometree's Ardnaculla Summer School in Ennistymon in May 2025, before travelling to IMMA's Earth Rising Festival in Dublin that September, where it entered wider public conversation about the future of Ireland's rural uplands.