The keening began at midnight, as it always did, and Dr. Declan O’Sullivan, who had been listening to it for three weeks from his rented cottage on the Dingle Peninsula, put down his whiskey and went outside to find the source. He was an ethnomusicologist, specialising in the traditional lament traditions of Ireland, and the … Read more
9 min readThe river Boyne was in spate when Eithne Gallagher arrived at the Brú na Bóinne visitor centre, having driven four hours from Cork in weather that alternated between biblical rain and the threatening pause between showers that the Irish called “a grand soft day.” She was a folklorist — the last tenured folklorist in the … Read more
9 min readThe holy well of Tobernalt had been kept by the Gallagher women for as long as memory could reach, and longer. It was a small, unassuming thing — a stone basin in a wooded hollow above the shores of Lough Gill, fed by a spring that rose from the limestone with the steady, cold persistence … Read more
9 min readEsme Whitfield ran the last hand-bookbinding workshop in Bath from a narrow shop on a street so old that the cobblestones had been worn to the smoothness of river pebbles. She bound books the way her mother had taught her, and her mother’s mother before that: by hand, with needle and thread and paste and … Read more
8 min readThe church of St. Crispin the Martyr had been bombed in 1941, rebuilt in 1953, and was now, in the wet autumn of the present day, losing its windows. Not to vandals or weather, but to something more insidious: the lead cames that held the stained glass panels were crystallising, turning brittle with age and … Read more
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