HEATHER BRETT
On Cavan
An Cabhán – ‘the hollow’ is a Border county, in Ulster, and surrounded by six other counties Leitrim, Fermanagh, Monaghan, Meath, Longford and Westmeath. Known as the Bréifne County, Cavan nestles amid drumlins and literally hundreds of lakes. It is a traditional town, relatively quiet with a vibrant arts agenda. Drama and music are rife, and famous literati, from Cathal Bui Mac Giolla Ghunna in the 17th century to today’s published poets, all have been writing about the Cavan Landscape for nearly 400 years.
I am no different, coming from a troubled Northern town many years ago, I found solace in Cavan, a tolerance for the poetic, and a refuge for the artist. There is something in the quiet roll and spread of the drumlins that speaks to me. A linked consciousness perhaps, with the landscape. Or maybe memory. The photographs are my way of looking deeper into the land, of connecting with the spiritual, with stone and soil and growing things. For the writer, this landscape has been caught waiting and waiting and waiting…When you walk through a forest like the Cavan burren, there is an air of the primeval …Today jostles with another time, when thin blue smoke might rise from a campfire, when men wore the skins of animals they’d killed and eaten.
This burren is all about texture… the kneaded rock…as if once it was molten and somehow instantly solidified…an abundance of softest moss; fossils, miniscule monuments to the death of ancient living cells, tiny sea creatures that gave up the ghost and fell, forged into the rock, forever caught there, aeons of time passing…this green-ness…shades of the earth…
Text/pics © Heather Brett
volume three 2014 december © www.liveencounters.net