Episode 5: Walking the Landscape

In this chapter of The Bog Bodies, our journey takes us beyond the mysteries of Old Croghan Man and Clonycavan Man to stop and consider the landscapes that shaped them – and how we can connect with these places today. 

Travel writer Fionn Davenport pauses the archaeological trail to ask a quieter question: if these places still hold meaning, how do we approach them with curiosity, care and a sense of wonder? From the royal landscapes of Tara, Rathcroghan and Uisneach to lesser-known hilltops and mounds, this episode explores how a simple short break into Ireland’s ancient terrain can be less about ticking sites off a list and more about slowing down, noticing connections and feeling part of a longer story. 

Alongside reflection comes practical insight, exploring the realities of visiting today: guided-only access, open hilltops, interpretation centres and the balance between managed and untouched spaces. Sometimes, the places with the simplest settings can offer the deepest encounters. 

Explore more of Ireland’s ancient past, from the Neolithic to the early Christian era, at https://www.discoverireland.ie/the-discovery-series 

Transcript

Speaker 3 0:01

When I set out to uncover the mystery of what actually happened to Old Croghan Man and Clonycavan Man, I thought I had a clear sense of the task ahead. I'd read everything I could about their discovery, I'd visit the locations where they were found, I'd speak to the experts, and hopefully draw some conclusions. Of course, it was never going to be that straightforward, because to really understand what happened to our two victims, I had to step into their world, so to speak. And that meant visiting the places that would have shaped their lives. I climbed Croghan Hill, I stood at Loughcrew during the Autumn Equinox, I went to the Hill of Tara, the ancient capital of Ireland, and I spent time with Old Croghan Man and Clony cavan Man themselves in their final resting place at the Kingship and Sacrifice Exhibit in the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin. And along the way, something shifted. They stopped being archaeological exhibits and became flesh and blood. The world they inhabited felt suddenly vivid and close, which I have to say came as a real surprise because as a travel writer I had visited plenty of ancient sites over the years without ever feeling quite this sense of connection. Now it's also worth noting that interest in ancient sites like these has surged in recent years. Perhaps in an age of constant distraction and digital overload, people are drawn to places that feel older, quieter, more grounding. Places that remind us of who we are and how little really has changed. And the whole experience prompted a simple but important question, one that sits slightly differently within the series but grows directly out of it. If these places still matter, how do we visit them properly? With curiosity, with care, and even a sense of wonder? Welcome to episode 5 of the Discovery series The Bog Bodies. I'm Fionn Davenport, and to help me answer this question, I'm joined by Padraig Clancy, product development officer with Fáilte Ireland, Karen Cruthers, Regional Development Officer for Ireland's Hidden Heartlands team, and Pól O'Conghaile, who's travel editor of the Irish Independent and one of Ireland's best-known travel experts. You're all very welcome. Padraig, when we step back from the individual stories of the Bog bodies, what do the wider landscapes represent in the story of Ireland? And I don't mean just historically, but also culturally and even emotionally.

Speaker 2:29

I think Ireland is quite unique in the layers and the embedded meanings that are within our landscape. And like as a product development officer, we're always talking about immersive experiences. And sometimes the landscape is one of the biggest and most immersive experiences a person can have. The minute you leave your front door, you're in the landscape. The minute you go down a road in Ireland, that road has history. You cross a medieval bridge, you cross a contemporary bridge, you enter a bog that has his thousands of years of history embedded in it. And I think you are right. I think the Irish people are embracing their landscape more. I think as well, we're quite lucky in this country that we have a small island but loads of history, and every corner is packed full of either castles, prehistoric monuments, or stories and narratives relating to it. And I think the more people embrace their mythology and their kind of the stories and folklore, they unpeel and unlayer that landscape. And you can do that over dinner, you can do it over a drink, you can do it hiking, you can do it multiple ways. And I think it's great to see families explore this anew. And perhaps in previous generations, it was going into a pub with an elder person who was telling stories in Seanchoíche. Now it's very much interactive. You're going out, you're exploring it. You might get your information via Google or discovery pages, but it's all the same. It's about people immersing themselves in landscapes. And it's triggering the imagination that when someone is walking across a peatland now, they can imagine a bog body. They can imagine what it's like for a prehistoric person or an Iron Age family or to go out and witness a ritual ceremony, that they've gone to the National Museum in Dublin, they've seen the bodies. They're then travelling Laois and Offaly and the Midlands, and they're seeing the peatlands, and they're making that connection, and their imagination is being triggered.

Speaker 3 4:36

And you also have noticed a change in recent years about how people are responding to these places. I mean, like sure it's there's facts and dates and all the rest of it, but do you think that people are looking for something different now, maybe even deeper?

Speaker 4:52

Yeah, I think I think people are becoming very much mindful of their landscapes, mindful of the narratives embedded in them, and that's triggering curiosity. They want to learn why that name, why that place name is there. They want to know what the place name means. And in we're blessed in Ireland in that through the Irish language, we have these layers of narratives, layers of meaning. So no one name has one translation. And I think people are engaging more with their landscapes, and by engaging more with their landscapes, they then realise that there are global commonalities. So the more diverse the Irish population becomes, the more exposed they get to other culturals. They're kind of going, wait a minute, that bog body, that's quite like another cultural thing I've seen abroad. That is quite like what we have here. So you begin to understand the complexity of Irish society. We're a little island on the edge of Europe, but all our layers of heritage reflect global trends.

Speaker 3 5:54

It certainly came up during the series where you had the resin in clony cavan man's hair that came from the Pyrenees. Um, you had like this incredible hairstyle that seemed reflective of something beyond these shores. Um, Karen, we live in an instant age. Like everything is happening in in the moment. And so there's constant communication, which also means constant distraction. But do you think people are drawn to ancient places? And it's worth pointing out there are literally thousands of them on this small island of ours. Um because they're offering something, I'm not saying it's increasingly rare, but it's certainly at odds with the with the modern world in which we live, a sense of stillness, perspective, you know, grounding, whatever.

Speaker 6 6:41

Yeah, definitely. I think it's two things. I think you can go to some of these places, so you can go up onto the Hill of Tara on a, you know, a cold Sunday morning in February and be maybe one of two or three people there, or you can you can, you know, you get that sense of perspective a little bit, I guess, you know, um, that you're part of something much bigger and you can feel the past and you can feel the layers and you that's the stillness and that sort of it's almost spiritual, but even if you're not spiritual, it's that energy that these places have that's incredibly rejuvenating, like you can feel it inside of you. But I also think there's something about going to these um monuments with other people. And I think, for example, of some of the festivals they do up on the Hill of Uisneach, like the Bealtaine Festival, where everybody is there for a common purpose and they're lighting a fire and it's the start of summer, and you're sharing this experience with really like-minded people, and there's just something incredibly peaceful and energetic almost at the same time in that. You know, it's just it's incredible.

Speaker 3 7:46

Pól, you visited lots of these sites yourself. And I'm curious about your own experience of what we're talking about. Like when you, I don't know, say Bru na Boinne or or Uisneach, as Karen just said, like, do you feel something?

Speaker 1 8:00

As you say, when you you're visiting a lot, different sites are interpreted in different ways. Some have guides, some have signage, some are just there with a cow staring at you as you try and appreciate what's in front of you. So for me, it very much depends, right? It depends on where I'm at, who I'm with, and what is kind of pulling me out of the nine to five and into this place. So I have, you know, sometimes I'll drive past a site and I simply won't understand it. But I do have some absolutely beautiful memories of sites where I've pulled in and the right guide with the right story at the right moment has brought me into these layers. And I give you one example. In the Céide Fields in North County Mayo, this is a very off-radar strip of the Wild Atlantic Way. Um, that these this is a patchwork of, as I understand it, prehistoric stone fields that were discovered in the 1930s by a farmer cutting turf, as sort of basic as that. And I was there when you're in the landscape walking around, you're going, okay, thousands of years ago, I don't have farming experience. It's beautiful, but how do I relate to this? But a man called Seamus Caulfield was with me, it was his dad who actually noticed this first. He took a long metal probe, he sank it into the ground about two metres down, and there was this clunk. And he said, That is a stone wall. And then he brought me to another slice which was like a section of the bog where you could see like the almost the strata of rock that you might see on a cliffside or something. And he he goes down a metre or so and he says, That's when the Vikings were here. And the next bit he goes, That's before our Lord, and he goes, and that's when the fields were made. And he's standing there and it's barely taller than himself. And I just it just as a simple example of you know, just talking around the science, talking around the history, making it relatable, I was totally engrossed in it. So I do, I feel like how they're presented, what mood you're in, and the person makes an extraordinary difference.

Speaker 3 10:02

That that is remarkable. And one of the biggest revelations for me during the series was around the bog. I mean, I think I think turf farmers deserve a huge amount of credit for being, you know, the amateur archaeologist of this country. Because in the first episode, I was by the bog in Balivor in County Meath, which is where Clonycavan man was found, and I was with Noel French. And he has this lifelong interest, not just in bog bodies, but in the bog themselves.

Speaker 2 10:31

Bogs are fascinating. The plant and the wildlife is colossal, like and and these are embodiments of our history. These are uh around for two, three thousand, four thousand, five thousand years, these bogs, and particularly the midlands uh uh of Ireland and the bogs have been so important to local communities here for so so long. These are living parts of nature that uh still have very strong links into the local communities.

Speaker 3 11:06

Padraig, I think these testimonies and these connections they make you look at these brown stretches in a completely different light, don't they?

Speaker 11:15

They do. I had the good fortune of actually excavating a bog body when I worked with the National Museum of Ireland. And it's a very unique experience to be on the peatland and to watch this human form emerge out of peat. And you're lying there. And for anyone who has worked with peat, peat is not like soil. Peat is little bits of plant. As you're lifting it with your hands, you can see the organic nature of it. So it is every season that has passed, those leaves and that organic material has built up. So you're peeling back layers of seasons, and it's it's year on year, autumn, spring, summer, you're peeling it back and back and back, and then out of that comes this human form. And a bog body, when it emerges from the peat, the skin is very soft. The the it's it's quite like very softly tanned. It's a unique experience because it's very human and you're there in this organic material, the human body is emerging from it, you're you're treating it with respect, it's getting all due conservation that the National Museum could give it, but also you're very in tune with the moment at which that went into the bog. And I think peat and peatlands are quite unique in that way because when you excavate tokers or you excavate timber objects, or I've also had the fortune of like excavating bog butter and bog kegs, they come out pristine and they come out the way they went in. And you can almost trace the fingerprints of the people that place that object in the peat as it's emerging. And it's fantastic to see them come out of the peat land to work with peat workers, Bord na Mona and the Bord na Mona representation representatives, along with the milling guys, like they're fantastic, like they spot stuff in these black, as you say, peat when it's being milled, are acres of blackness. And then these guys are very in tune with the landscape, and they can spot stuff, and then you go out with them, and objects emerge, stories from the past emerge, and they're they're wet, they're kind of unconserved, and they come out the way they went in, and you're very much in tune with it, and that's the beauty of the bulb. And I think peatlands have this open sky, it it's very much you and the landscape. And if you allow Peatlands to speak to you, they will speak to you in many ways.

Speaker 3 13:58

Yeah, because Karen it it with that in mind, it makes the experience to say visiting, say, Corlea or Lough Boora like an entirely kind of it adds all new dimension to a visit, doesn't it?

Speaker 6 14:12

Oh, it does, and I think there are so many Peatland stories to be told, and that's what's really exciting. And a lot of the different sites, some of them will tell all of them, but some of them are more specialised, like Corlea. For me, it's very much about what's underneath, you know, the trackway and when you dig down underneath and the archaeology and what's there, and you know, that visitor centre is brilliant and a really, a really good tour because they give you the kind of local colour of it, but then you get that kind of big reveal at the end of the actual trackway itself, which is amazing, you know. But then if you go somewhere like um Lough Boora, for example, you'll get the nature, you know, and it's incredible. Walking into Lough Boora, there are flocks and flocks of Lapwing. And the Lapwing, if we've ever seen them, they do this kind of curling and they have this amazing, sort of almost mournful sound that they make. And you know, there aren't that many of them in the country in such big numbers as there are, and to go and experience that or all of the other birds and animals that are there, you get nature. But then you can go to um uh Lully more, for example, you know, and Lullymore Heritage Park, they'll do, they'll tell you about actual turf cutting, they'll tell you the history of the people who live there and the families who came in from abroad and married in, and when there were fights in the in the dance halls because the fellow from Mayo that who had the good board and moan a wage was taking the, you know, the girlfriend of the lad who didn't, you know. So there's all these different stories, and that's what's really exciting about it. You know, you don't just have to talk about one thing, you can talk about 20 different things.

Speaker 3 15:44

It's incredible. It really just to show you that not much has changed because you could you could transplant that same kind of tensions 2,000 years before into the heart of the Iron Age, and you'd have the exact same kind of like Absolutely could.

Speaker 6 15:55

Yeah, you absolutely could, and all the communities you know, that just that were never there or wouldn't have existed except for um the peatlands in various guises of peatlands, you know.

Speaker 3 16:05

Um Pól, for me, one of the things that became clear very quickly when we started with the podcast was that these aren't isolated monuments, that these aren't just like, you know, that Bru na Boinne isn't just or the Hill of Tara, that these these were part of interconnected landscapes and that they're places that were linked by movement, but also by ceremony, by shared meaning. So, to what extent do you think it's important to understand that kind of connected landscape to really kind of gain a fuller appreciation of these sites?

Speaker 1 16:40

Yeah, to gain a fuller appreciation, yes, I agree with you. You don't necessarily need to have the fuller picture to enjoy going to the Corlea Trackway, for example, or to see the body in the museum, or to stand on the Hill of Tara. But I do feel, and I have felt this myself, standing, let's take the Hill of Uisneach as an example, standing there looking around, you know, on a good day, I don't know how many counties they say you can you can see, but there are several different sites you can visit. There are sort of glacial erratics that that tie you into the landscape. You you're told the story about Uisneach is on a working farm, so you pay for the guide, you're literally sort of stepping between cow paths as you go to these prehistoric sites. It's really brilliant. You're uh you are get this sense of a mythical fifth province that where, like a kind of a crossroads of the country, and there's this big glacial erratic rock at the middle of it that was like almost described as the belly button of Ireland at one stage. And that does bring you in, it's you're looking this way, that would be towards the Hill of Tara, and that way might be out towards Connaght or whatever it may be, and the interconnectedness come together. And I think in I'm really receptive in that space, particularly with a good guide to hearing all of that, but I love that sense of connectedness, yeah.

Speaker 3 17:57

Because Padraig, like to Póls point, so you could stand on Uisneach but and know that there's a connection between Uisneach and Tara, and then if you're looking west into Connnaught, then Rathcroghan. There's these are these these all were connected to the people to whom these places meant the most. You wouldn't separate these things from each other.

Speaker 18:23

No, you couldn't. There couldn't, because like each one of those sites mimics each other. Yeah. They're the same social network, they're the same social tools and structures. So they're replicating them across the country. It's a very unique thing to have an island whereby you have a string of kingship that is now present and represented in Rathcroghan um, Tara, um, Dún Ailinne, and Emain Macha. Like they're the they're the last relics of those landscapes, but they represent a deeper layering of high kingship, sub-kingship, kinship groupings below it. And it is what Paul was saying is it's about the continuum of landscape and immersion and understanding that landscape. So if you sit take Croton Hill, like that sits within the territory from which St. Brigid came. And then Saint Brigid migrated over to Kildare town. She's known for her fire, she's known for her link with the pagan. So it's almost as if you have this transition from the peak land to the foothills of Kildare, and then you have the amazing Curragh Plain, which was for the Onox and has the burial monuments similar to Tar on it. Like there's something like 200 burial monuments there. But that gathering of people then is represented in the derbies and the horse racing today. So you get this lovely continuation of landscape. And I think it's only as people, sometimes people are traveling court to Dublin. It's stopping and pausing, and it's taking the time on your journey to go, okay, I'll stop off here. I'll stop off and I'll grab a coffee in Kildare Town or into the current race course. And then to ask the question, wait a minute, what is this big grass, 5,000 acres of grassland? How is that related to Brigid? That brings you back to Rathcroghan, that brings you back to the bog body, and it is this continuation that, like, there's not that far, time-wise and chronologically, there may be huge jumps, but that bog body that was getting resin from Spain isn't quite so dissimilar from Bridget, who is one of the four key saints of Ireland and represented in the greater European monastic traditions. Like we're a very global landscape once you start peeling it back.

Speaker 3 20:50

I think that's a very good point. Karen, I mean, I think again what's striking, I think, is how subtle some of these places can be. They don't necessarily announce themselves the way we might expect. And I made the point during the series that the Hill of Tara strikes me as the most important singular site in the entirety of Irish history, just by dint of its importance for so long. And yet, now we're all familiar with the aerial pictures of Tara and these wonderful kind of circles in the landscape. But when you go there, and particularly if you go there at a time, say in winter time when when the visitor centre isn't open, it you need something more, but that subtlety somehow seems important then in interpreting the meaning of Tara.

Speaker 6 21:41

I think so. What I what I like about Tara, and I walk there a lot, and you know, you get out of the car and you're you're standing at the car park, and it could be freezing cold, and you're sort of looking up at this hill and going, Oh, crikey, and then you start walking. And I tend to come at Tara sort of around the side, you know. I I I don't go straight up to the top, so we'll walk. Around some of the fields that lead up to Tara, but you you start to get a sense of the landscape straight away because even at a lower level, the landscape is this lovely undulating ground, and there is that kind of curiosity as to what is it that this is, and then you walk around and you eventually will come up to the kind of top of Tara, and then you get the view. And every single time, honestly, that view is surprising. There's something about it. You just don't think that you're going to be so high up and be able to see so much from the car park. I don't know what it is. It's incredible, you know. And you know, Tara definitely can be challenging if you don't have somebody there because there isn't necessarily interpretation. I probably don't necessarily look for it. I just like to maybe use my imagination a little bit more on Tara and think about what might have happened here or who might have been up here over the years.

Speaker 3 22:52

I was very lucky because when I visited Tara for the podcast, I spent the afternoon with Margaret Brady, who's the OPW guide there, and she's been there for more than two decades, I think. Um and talking to her gave the whole experience a completely different meaning.

Speaker 5 23:14

I tend to walk the quieter parts off the hill. I feel that centres me. I feel a greater sense of awareness on the the quieter parts. I have a lot of inner reflection when I walk. I never feel worse coming off the hill than I do coming on ever. And I come up a lot of times in the mornings uh sunrise. I look out on the plains, I look over to the Slieve Blooms, the southwest, coming up to Ishnok, over to Loughcrew, all the way up to Slieve Gullion, the Mourne Mountains, and then the monuments over at Newgrange and Knowth, and then finishing up looking over at the Bell Tower on the Hill of Skryne. Skryne meaning shrine, and that's dedicated to some of St. Column Cille's relics. Um, but I think to experience it and to put harness whatever tower is to you, because it's a different tower to everybody, you know, be that pagan, Christian, holistic, spiritual, is whatever you get out of it. But I feel that you do have to find your own place on the hill and your own part that means something to you. Um, and a lot of people walk on their own up here. A lot of people come for their own time and take from that whatever they, you know, whatever bit of positivity or whatever is going on in your life, it is um a very, very spiritual place. And you can gather your thoughts. And I suppose there's so few places, isn't there, in Ireland where you can have this amount of space. And that is the I suppose the the joy of Tara. There's a hundred acres of state-owned land and it's an open site. You can walk anywhere you want on that land. And that is why I suppose as the OPW we would hope that people who come to it respect it and leave it as they found it. Um because it is a joy and it's something we should never take for granted.

Speaker 3 25:26

Indeed, never take it for granted. I think uh what Margaret is speaking about there is that that this that important difference between simply visiting a place and and having an experience of a place.

Speaker 1 25:38

Yeah, I I love the way it's uh the sites are being spoken about. In in travel I hear an awful lot these days, uh particularly from the luxury end of the market of people saying, you know, m the real luxury is time. And time doesn't have to be a week on an island somewhere that no one else can afford. Time can be an hour or two hours out of the house, away from the full washing machine, away from your emails, not having to taxi yours on to a soccer game, going to somewhere like this. Um I I took a walk in the Wicklow Mountains with my son a few years ago to a tomb uh called Seefin. Now it's an unguided sight, it's fairly raw, you have to hike up the mountains to see it, but just there, plonked in the middle of the landscape, is this thousands of years old passage tomb. And along the way we had the chats, and when we got there we wondered what it was about, and we looked and saw, and was that Wicklow or was that Carlow or what was it? And we came back down, and I remember it is a wintry time of year, and he looked down at the different colours and he said, Dad, that's like different shades of death. And I was like, Okay, I'm instantly noting that and going to steal it for some other piece. And for me that was better than spending any amount of money on a trip. So it doesn't need to be that kind of all singing, all dancing uh experience. What it needs to present, I suppose, is a kind of a a compelling reason to just break your routine, make it an overnight stay of it, and just pop it at the centre. And then I find when I get there what helps is the relatability of it. So even if there's just a few lines, like in um the Cavan Burren, let's say, for instance, you can do a one or two kilometre little walk, you can do longer, there's gentle little signage that bring you into the place. So you can say to a young child, how do you think that was built? And you can maybe guide them with or how do you think that or how old that is, and then you can maybe say, Well, is it older than Grandad? and have a laugh and walk on to the next place. So that that's for me that kind of connectedness. Yeah. Just to bring it back to your point about that's experiential, that's time, but that's m me and my son in that space, and and it almost it relates to the the people that built it thousands of years ago, and at the same time it doesn't at all. You just wear it very lightly, and that's what I love about it.

Speaker 3 27:56

Clearly, Karen, slowing down is a part of being able to appreciate the things that Pól is talking about. But if you slow down, do these places then reward a different uh uh kind of attention?

Speaker 6 28:12

Yes, I think they I think they absolutely do. Um I think what's lovely about a lot of these sites, whether they're guided or unguided, um they tend to draw maybe not like-minded people, but maybe people who are maybe searching for the same thing. And you end up, you know, you can have these lovely conversations. Like I remember being up on Croghan Hill one morning, and you know, I met a man and and his wife, and they were from Cork and they were travelling around some of these sites, you know. Um, and they had started, I think they had gone to Bru n a Boinne couple of years previously, and they had done the guided tour and they'd gotten the information, and that was kind of their starting point, and then they'd gotten interested. And so anytime they were going anywhere, I think they were going up to Dublin to visit their daughter, and they had basically sort of detoured via Croghan Hill just to climb it and have a look at it. And we had the loveliest conversation about life and their kids and travel and all sorts of really random things, and it was a lovely experience, and I think that that's what the slowing down really does, you know. Um, and and that happens a lot. I remember being in Wrath Crohan um another time and you know, did the site visit, and it was it's really wonderful and it's really well done. But again, in the coffee shop, met a couple of locals who talked about, you know, who were farmers who were part of that scheme, who talked about what it meant to them and kind of how they interacted with the landscape and how their perception of it had changed from kind of something that was a bit in the way and a bit annoying, and kind of brought all of this red tape to something that they really valued and that they loved coming into the coffee shop to speak to visitors. So there's all these kind of sidebar things that happen when you slow down at these sites that I think are amazing.

Speaker 3 29:53

I mean, Padraig, it's also worth pointing out that of these thousands of sites, there's a massive spectrum in how they're presented. So, you know, some have visitor centres, some are incredibly well developed, they offer guides, interpretation, and others are just there, you know, they're just unmarked hills or quiet fields or or these open landscapes. So, like, how do you think that these different ways of presenting the places, how do that inform how people understand the places?

Speaker 30:25

I think it goes back to that um the meaning of your journey.

Speaker 3 30:30

Yeah.

Speaker 30:31

Yeah, and who you're doing it with and the surprising people you meet along the way. And um it is the father and son going up to have the chats, or it is going on a tour and trying to get information so you can learn about the site, or like the last time I was on Loughcrew, it was at it was a day that wasn't associated with the day, it was with the site, it was actually the longest day of the year. Um, but we went up to see the sunset, and when we got there, there was a whole crowd of people witnessing this amazing sunset at the end of summer, and you looked across it and you kind of went, there was a whole plethora of different types of people. You had a shaman-esque kind of group in the corner with their bodhran on under a bodrum, and they were celebrating the setting sun on the longest day of the year. You had another group of kind of early 20s, 30s playing hurling and just kind of having the laugh and watching the sun go down. Then you had locals that were coming up and obviously came up every year. Now, the site itself obviously is equinox-based, so it's not s like longest sun sunset based, but it was just really nice to sit there in a cluster of monuments, looking down at this amazing rolling landscape, and you could just make out lakes in the distance as the sun set, but each group was enjoying it at different levels. They all had different packages of information in their heads, and they were all interpreting it differently, and they were all taking the time to just sit there and be at one with the landscape. The pagans were celebrating it in a rather structured religious fashion, and the hurling crowd were having to laugh. So y your understanding of them depends on the day you're coming, the amount of learning you want, and the degree of immersion you put into the sites as much as they give you back.

Speaker 3 32:38

I'd never climbed Croghan Hill before embarking on this series, and it made a huge impact on me. I think we spoke earlier about being at the parking site of Tara and being surprised by like how I up and how much you can see from there. Similarly for me with Croghan Hill, this 200-odd metre hill just protruding out of the flattest pancake landscape, and you know, that it was it it's hardly surprising that it's just what's left of an ancient volcano, so on and so forth. And at the top of the hill is this sculpture in the old Trig station by the artist C iaran Byrne. And so I climbed the hill with the local heritage officer, Amanda Pedlow, and she told me this lovely story, similar to the one you're talking, Pol, about you and your son, about how young people interact with it.

Speaker 4 33:30

This is the only piece where children run ahead of their parents to see it. Any other information board, you know, you see the parent reading it and the child is is there. But this is the only, if you come here with the family, the children will run up and they'll literally be touching it and exploring it, and then the parents catch up with them. And we heard a beautiful story um of somebody who has very limited sight, and they were brought up by two people who obviously walked with them up to the top of the hill, but they were able to to braille out the feel out the whole of the sculpture, and it was really emotional, you know. And even when we gave that feedback to Ciaran Byrne sculpture, he was so delighted. So I I feel as a piece of um as an intervention, well, we were talking about how do you tell the story of Croghan Hill and by redoing the trig station and doing the sculpture, I just think it's it's I I mean I think it's the best bit of interpretation just we could have done, you know.

Speaker 3 34:26

I thought that was wonderful. I love the I can visualise the idea of children just running ahead of their parents to try and just feel their hands on this this wonderful sculpture uh by Ciaran. Padraig, you mentioned Loughcrew. So, in terms of personal connection, for me, Loughcrew has deep meaning, mostly connected to my father. My father, when I was a small boy, he would take us up there. And I'm old enough, this is before anything, there was the place was empty always, and there was no gates on the cairn or anything like that. So we would get a picnic and we would sit up there, and my father would tell us stories about the importance of Loughcrew and the ancient Irish, and and and I honestly believe it's those stories told to me when I was five, six years old that then later informed my decision to study history and then to become a travel writer, and and I really put it down to those early, early experiences on Loughcrew , even though I didn't know it at the time, but that that they would play out in this meaningful way over the course of my life. Um, Pol, is there one place that still stops you in your tracks?

Speaker 1 35:37

Oh, that's funny that you say that. There's there's loads, but as you evoke the childhood memory, one comes straight to mind which is Clonmac noise. I don't know where it sits on the the the chronology of the sites, but uh we grew up nearby in Ballinasloe, County Galway, and it was very much where we'd go with visitors whenever visitors came and we'd go to Clonmac noise, or we'd go have a Sunday to Clonmacnoise and we'd bring a picnic, and you'd drive through the bog to get there across to Shannon Bridge and beyond, and at the time it was a very nascent sight, like you just hop the wall and walk in, and now there's a sort of an interpreter centre and an indoor element and a cafe and so on. But we would run ahead to sit in the Pope's chair. The chats were there, we were looking at the art on the crosses, we were wondering about the lichen on the stones, about the the doorway over the church, about how how the the the monks got into the round tower and hauled up the ladder and all the rest of it. So that that sight is is is sort of it has a sentimental value for me as well, and and and and it's been influential in my own life. But there's loads of others for I love stopping and pulling in and just looking at Poulnabrone in County Clare, for instance. It's it's like it's a total other era, total other thing. It's just tree rocks. But when you look at it in the splendour of that landscape and the way it reflects the stone and it's surrounded, particularly in May time, by these wildflowers, and you start to wonder how it was made and what was going on here and who was buried under it, and the traffic of footsteps over the years, and now here's mine among them. So it's just it's the simplicity of that. It's just a wonderful, simple emblem of everything we're talking about.

Speaker 3 37:16

And for you, Padraig and Karen, like you know, you you work for Fáilte Ireland, but surely the mystery and magic of these sites isn't lost on you.

Speaker 6 37:26

No, definitely not. I mean, for me, there's a couple. I think we um, you know, when we were kids, we used to climb Croghan Hill every St. Patrick's Day, it's still done, you know, and I still have memories of going with my friends and and their mum, and we'd run literally running all the way up to the top of Croghan Hill, and the whole thing was who could get up there first, you know, it was a huge competition, and then of course rolling back down again and then getting in trouble for rolling back down because you were in your good St. Patrick's Day clothes, and you know, it was just lovely memories. But I also really love um Loughboora Discovery Park, and I think what I love about Loughboora is you've kind of got all of the stories in one, so there is that mesolithic route that you can do that you can cycle. There's also the whole story of the rewetting, there's also the physical landscape which is now more water than brown. And I was thinking when you know you were on Croghan Hill with Amanda and she was talking about how that landscape would have been all water at one point, and it's almost like it's come sort of 360 because now these bogs that are being rewetted are almost going back in some ways to what they were or what they could have looked like, you know. Um, but what I love about Lochbour is because I do Loughboora a lot with um with my goddaughter, and it's so accessible because it's flat, you know, because a lot of these sites, just by their very nature, you know, Bru, Tara, or Rathcroughan, and they are quite hilly. Whereas Loughboora is a flat site and it is accessible to anybody, you know, um, and you can hire uh universally accessible bicycles, you can bring people with any kind of needs or abilities into Loughboora and they can experience it, and there's something really magical about that. It's just, it's it's it's such a great place for everybody to go, you know, and it's so accessible. And also the sculptures. So there's, I don't know, at least 15 sculptures in Loughboora. They have two new ones that just went in in the last while, and each of those is interpreting the landscape in a completely different way. So some of them are metal and they're quite strong and they're quite kind of industrial, and then some of them are literally just mounds of stones or made from turf. So there's all different types of sculpture for all different kinds of people. Some of them are in the water and kids love them. So there's just something really magical about it as almost a first stop for anybody interested in it.

Speaker 3 39:37

Padraig, if you had a visitor, is there one site that you'd go, this is the place I need to take you to?

Speaker 39:44

Um I think it's it's it's more than that. I think we we have such a wealth. Like when we think about the OPW portfolio of sites, like there's 70 visitor attractions like Ceide Fields or Clonmacnoise, but there's 750 unmanned sites. So I think if you're looking at like I think the best gift you can give to the next generation is the gift of exploration and learning how to explore. And if you have someone who's visiting, it's actually just getting in the car with them, taking the time to start the journey to kind of explain the landscape as they move through it, so that you can do that journey from Croghan Hill across the peatlands to Clonmacnoise. You can follow the medieval routes and the early Christian routes from site to site, and you can make it a really enjoyable personalised journey with an individual as you move from site to site across the Midlands because it's just fantastic to explain that, like you can go from Croghan Hill, which is a hill with that amazing piece of sculpture on the top. You then get in your car and you can go over to Corlea Trackway, and you can have a visitor attraction there, and you can see the timber trackway, and then a short skip and a jump down the way, you have the amazing monastic site of Clonmacnoise, and all of a sudden you follow the roots of monas monks of years ago. Like everyone is crazy doing the Camino now and kind of following their journeys and their paths, and you can do that on every Irish byway and back way. Like you don't even have to plan it, you can just get in your car and start journeying. And I think that's the the amazing thing about these sites is they they're not it's not always about having an itinerary and a destination. Sometimes it's about taking that time and just doing the journey.

Speaker 3 41:46

I have one last question for each of you. If you had to pick one tip to give a visitor to any of these ancient sites, what would it be?

Speaker 41:55

Use your imagination and give yourself time.

Speaker 6 41:58

Yeah, I think don't don't just take them at face value, you know. Um take a bit of time to to understand what it means for you. Um but also maybe just do a little you you don't have to do a lot of work, but ground yourself in some information. Like everything is online now, whether these sites are interpreted or not, you know. So give yourself the basics, but then I think as Padraig said, just sit there or stand there, take the time, use your imagination.

Speaker 1 42:29

Well, being practical, I would say some of the sites have various opening hours that you need to check. Some of them, like Dun Aonghasa is a 1k hike up from the visitors and you need boots, you need to prep. So just go on the website and get that basic down. I would bring three little things if you're bringing kids to ask them, or like a treat that you produce at a certain time that's related to what you're seeing. But what I I try and do, um, going back to the whole notion of slowing down and being immersive, uh I and I lead a very busy travel lifestyle fun. I try when I'm at a sight like this to just take a sec to take a breath, to feel my feet on the ground and to look at what's in front of me and just to say to myself, how do I feel? And just give it a minute. And it can open you up to a different read of what's in front of your face, and you can get what we call in in my business the colour and the experience and the sensory stuff that you that that you're drinking in around you as well. So I'd they're my tips, but ask yourself how do you feel?

Speaker 3 43:33

Now the people who built these places, they're gone, but their world hasn't even come close to vanishing. It's still here, it's written into the landscape in literally thousands of monuments that are scattered across the country, each one carrying echoes of lives, beliefs, traditions that shaped who we are today. Some are immediately striking, others reveal themselves more slowly, but each has its own presence, even its own quiet significance. So spend some time among them, walk in the paths, stand where our ancients once stood, and you'll begin to sense not just the past, but I think your own place within a much, much longer story. I want to thank my guests, Padraigh Clancy, Karen Cruthers, Pol O Conghaile. Thank you all very much. And if you want to visit any of the sites that we've talked about, or indeed the ones we didn't, you'll find all of the information you need to start at discoverireland.ie