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Loop Head hosts summer hedge school

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Carmel Madigan will run a Loop Head Summer Hedge School from July 10. Photograph by Declan Monaghan

AS she prepares for her inaugural Loop Head Summer Hedge School, from July 10 to August 18, Carmel T Madigan cannot be accused of failing to have an intimate knowledge of her peninsula environment.

Born and reared next to the Bridges of Ross, the Barefield-based artist, who also works out of her studio just outside Cross village, remembers blithely hurtling down local cliffs without a second thought.

“We used to skid down the cliffs and things like that,” Carmel says while making tea and unearthing scones on a breezy June morning in Cross.

“Since then I’ve seen the earth fall in. There’s coastal erosion going on there. It wasn’t exactly a sound thing to do but that’s what we did. Our parents were constantly worried because they didn’t want us around the cliffs at all. The environment was our playground, even if we didn’t understand it very much, but that didn’t stop us and our neighbours getting together. We got from the top to the bottom of the cliffs all the time,” she adds by way of further explanation.

Carmel’s parents, May and PJ Magner, sent her to the Convent of Mercy in Kilrush for her secondary school education. She loved it, although the daily 44-mile round trip was a bit taxing.

“For the first year or two, at around 7.30am, we cycled for the bus from our house in Ross down to where the Lighthouse Inn is now. It was a 22-mile trip to Kilrush and 22 miles home. My mum decided it was the best place to go and a lot of us did go to the convent in Kilrush as day pupils. It was a brilliant school, way ahead of its time,” Carmel, who sat her Leaving Certificate in 1979, remembers.

She graduated from NIHE (now University of Limerick) with a degree in business and specialised in finance. Until 1994, Carmel was employed by Burlington in Clonara and later Tel Labs.

“It was just when computers were getting user-friendly to being really snazzy and colourful,” she reflects.
When her third child, James, was born in 2000, Carmel needed more flexibility in her life and found herself drawn towards her love of art.

“I felt the need to be more creative. That’s when I embraced the paint brush. In about 2003, my husband Peter built me a lovely art studio in Barefield. It’s a great workspace. It gave me the freedom to just shut the door behind me. I like to create a mess in work. I’m an experimentalist, so there’s a lot of processes going on. It can be extremely messy. I’d often begin a painting by just pouring paint so as to give total freedom to see what happens and then respond to it. I couldn’t really do that on the kitchen table with a few small little lads around,” she laughs.

“I’d be in there day and night working my own process. I always feel that art is about creating something that’s really you. My key philosophy in art is all about that, rather than just painting a cow.”
Carmel has since exhibited in Florence, New York, the RDS, Lahinch art gallery, Galway and Cork.

Furthermore, her youngest son, James, developed an interest in wildflowers, which has led to the publication of a book and significantly increased knowledge on the Loop Head environment.

“James was only six or seven when he bought this wildflower book. I never had a wildflower book before that, although I ended up writing a wildflower book. We went around everywhere to Rinevella, the Bridges of Ross, the Loop Head Moors and we walked the hedgerows. One by one, we were photographing flowers and knocking them off. No single book had all of the wildflowers. We had loads of books gathered up and we were looking in Google Images trying to match photographs of plants we had taken from the hedgerow,” Carmel said of their fact-finding mission, which will feature in one of the nine modules at the Summer Hedge School.

“We almost by accident stumbled upon Ross Beach, even though I grew up only a stone’s throw away from it but totally ignored it. We got pulled in there because we started studying the flowers on the beach and on the lower shore. We got totally mesmerised and totally sucked into that. For the last three years, we have been calling to the beach, every two weeks, at low spring tide all through the winter. We’ve been continually walking the exact same locations. It’s a nice compact beach but it’s a sheltered shore, where you have a great diversity of species. We’ve identified about 60 seaweeds with the naked eye. I’ve used NUIG and UCC to identify tiny, minute species,” Carmel noted.

The mother and son have monitored Ross Beach and the Lower Shore throughout the winter months and have been fascinated by their findings.

“Delicate changes happen that nobody would ever see. We’ve even monitored the limpets that live on the shore, be it down on the lower shore rocks and the ones that are higher up on the rugged rocks and away from the direct line of the ocean. We also have found lichen that changes colour. It’s pure black 90% of the year but in January and into the early days of February, it turns bright green all over the beach. Then it turns black again for the rest of the year,” Carmel explained.

Modules included in the hedge school curriculum include a rocky shore exploration, foraging for fresh leaves and herbal tea in hedgerows, a guided botanical walk, poetry on the shore with Denise Blake and yoga on the flags with Trea Heapes. Carmel has had to exclude a module on sliding down cliffs, however, on the basis that it could be a bit daunting for her overseas students.

For more information on the hedge school, see www.carmelmadigangallery.com.

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