North Clare

THE Burren Food Fayre will take place as part of this year’s Winterage Festival, as producers and chefs come together to showcase the food of the area at one of the region’s most iconic farming events. This year’s event will be held in a marquee on a farm at the start of the Cattle Drive near Lough Bunny on Sunday, October 30. It will include, tastings, cooking demos, storytelling and music with plenty of opportunities for people to meet sample and purchase the products before and after the cattle drive is complete.   The Burren Winterage Festival, which is organised by Burren Beo, celebrates the ancient custom of out-wintering cattle on the upland areas of the Burren. It has developed into a five-day festival, which begins on Wednesday, October 26, features a range of farming, heritage, cultural and family events, concluding the following Sunday. “We are delighted to be hosting this year’s event at the Winterage Festival,” said Jarlath O’Dwyer, …

THE ancient and unique farming practice of out-wintering cattle in the Burren will be celebrated this month at the annual Burren Winterage Weekend festival. The festival takes place between October 26 and 30 in Corofin and various locations across the Burren region. Co-ordinated by local landscape charity The Burrenbeo Trust, this year’s festival features a wide range of farming, heritage, and cultural events. Among these will be several Burren farm walks, a Tea Talk on farming and archaeology, book reading and discussions with bestselling authors James Rebanks and Jane Clarke. There will be ‘transhumance’ cheese tasting, a butter making workshop, a children’s creative nature-writing workshop and much more. A day-long Burren Winterage School will be held on the theme of Education for Sustainable Development in Rural Areas, Farming for Nature Networking Day and National Farming for Nature Awards. The flagship event of weekend, the Community Cattle Drive where hundreds of people will be invited to join a local farming family …

IN MORT O’Loughlin’s home, nestled among the hills of North Clare, a very special archive has been painstakingly gathered over the last five-and-a-half decades.  Since the late ‘60s, Mort has been The Champion’s Ballyvaughan Notes Correspondent, keeping his finger on the pulse of all things local. After 55 years of stalwart service, he is beginning a well-earned retirement and reflecting on the changing times he has witnessed.  To visit the home of Mort and his wife, Teresa, is to take a step back into the history of Ballyvaughan and its scattered Burren hinterland. Clippings dating to the early ‘70s have been carefully preserved as a record of births, marriages, deaths and all manner of community festivities and tragedies over the years. The area’s attraction for motorsport enthusiasts have been well documented, as well as now defunct traditions like the roasting of a kid goat for dinner on St Patrick’s Day and Easter. The animals would be coaxed by local farmers …

A DOOLIN musician has blended music, poetry, storytelling and the breathtaking visual beauty of the Burren landscape to create what has been described as a “love letter to Clare”. Towards the end of the new 30-minute movie “Always a Journey Never a Destination” A Clare Footprint” Oliver O’Connell delivers a key message – “In Clare, music is not what we do: music is what we are.” Instead of opting to showcase well-known tourist areas such as Bunratty Castle, the 73-year-old father-of-three filmed lesser known but beautiful parts of the Burren, which are skilfully interwoven in his own life journey story with music, poetry and his own distinctive prose. The North Clare accordion player is thrilled with the reaction to his “legacy to Clare”. “I wanted to do something that wasn’t done before and I know I got in this movie from the reaction of people who matter,” he said. Accomplished Limerick singer, fiddler and composer, Niamh Dunne, who is a …

TWO Clare-based businesses, have been shortlisted as finalists in the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) Energy Awards 2022. The Falls Hotel and Spa and the Lahinch Leisure Centre in partnership with Tipperary Energy Agency, are among the cohort of energy-conscious businesses and communities that have been selected for their dedication to an energy-efficient way of working. The annual awards recognise and reward excellence in sustainable energy in business, communities, research, buildings, renewables and the public sector. A total of 33 applicants across 10 categories have been shortlisted. Winners will be announced at the national awards ceremony in October, this will return in person for the first time in three years following online ceremonies during Covid. The Falls Hotel & Spa has been nominated for its six-year campaign to reduce its CO2 emissions. The hotel’s sustainability journey started with smart energy changes, such as switching all of the light fittings to LED, fitting aerators on all water supply systems and using …

STUNNING scenes from deep under the waters off the Clare coast, captured by a Lahinch-based film-maker, will be showcased on RTÉ next year.  As part of the national broadcaster’s new season, ‘North Atlantic’ will air early in 2023, providing what RTÉ described as “a reflective, insightful narrative … featuring blue-chip natural history scenes bringing the viewer into the actual moment of discovery of marine creatures”. The three-episode series follows Ken O’Sullivan’s highly-acclaimed, ‘Ireland’s Deep Atlantic’, which aired in 2018.  The new work, which has been in production for two-and-a-half years features scenes captured during the height of the pandemic when coastal areas were almost empty. “Our funding came through a week before the first lockdown,” Ken told The Champion. “We were listed as essential workers, but were very careful not to stick to the guidelines and to avoid going in among people in small coastal communities. I shot a lot of footage on my own in my kayak. There was …

LITERATURE lovers will flock to North Clare on the last weekend in August as Ennistymon once again becomes a Book Town.  For the eleventh year, the bustling town will become a reader’s paradise, with book shops popping up in vacant premises and taking over the Courthouse Gallery and Teach Cheoil.  On offer at stalls and shops will be new, used and antiquarian books, fiction and nonfiction, for all age groups, including rare County Clare items, GAA histories, children’s books, and literary and light reads.  “This year, our challenge has been to find empty shop units and that’s a great testament to how Ennistymon has flourished in recent years,” said organising committee member, Jon Heddon. “Over the years, we’ve had seven or eight units annually that we would have used. Now, those premises have come back into use and it’s just great to see that. “We will still be able to accommodate all of our regular booksellers, from all over Ireland, …

THE WORK of the legendary David Attenborough has inspired a new visual art exhibition that will open in Kinvara on Friday, September 2 at the Courthouse.  Entitled, ‘In the Beginning’, the show is a selection of artwork by former Chairperson of Kinvara Area Visual Arts (KAVA), Pam Fleming. The colourful exhibition is accompanied by a collection of poetry by local authors. “The inspiration for this show owes gratitude to that champion of the natural world, Sir David Attenborough,” Pam said. “Watching his very early TV shows, set in Madagascar, as a child instilled an appreciation of the animal kingdom in me and many others who watched spellbound. The title of the exhibition ‘In the Beginning’ refers to the bible and the giving therein to humankind, domination over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air and over all the wild animals on the earth.” Pam added that she has been very conscious of the biodiversity crisis in producing …