Writing the Land - Creative collaborative Project

Writing the Land: The Great Forest of Aughty

Writing the Land is a collaborative outreach and fundraising project for nature protection and forest restoration organizations and local communities in the Slieve Aughties. 

Through the development of an anthology and locally based integrated creative project work, our poets, community collaborators, and contributors will help to raise awareness of the importance of the rights of nature and those of the Great Forest of Aughty to be protected and restored and the Slieve Aughty bioregion to thrive and flourish.

With this in mind we have established a project with creative partners, Milkhouse and NatureCulture® LLC, to develop a 2 year multidisciplinary ecoarts platform, to cocreate a project that highlights the creative nexus between the land and inhabitants of Sliabh Aughty in multiple media, written and virtual. Andre St Ledger of The Woodland League championed The Great Forest of Aughty as a living, breathing archive that holds centuries of ecological and social history. However the few remnants of this once great forest are consistently under threat from past and future human and environmental pressures. As a site rich in biodiversity and historical connections, the forest serves as the focal point for exploring the dynamic relationship between people and their environment. Through this project, we aim to document, interpret, and co-create a shared narrative emphasising its relevance to both the local community and broader native woodland and environmental conversations urgent for our times. 

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According to early literature, one of the first names given to Ireland was Inis na Bhfiodhadh, the Island of Sacred Trees. Ancient Celtic tradition held certain trees, especially the native oak, to be sacred, serving as a connect between this world and the next, and even the embodiment of their ancestors. The Great Forest of Aughty in particular, comes from a storied tradition, being the woods traversed by Brian Boru, the High King of Ireland. Please see here for more information from Andrew St Ledger, Cofounder of the Woodland League https://www.woodlandleague.org/the-great-forest-of-aughty-project-proposal/

From original woodland cover of 80%, only 10% of the Island of Trees is covered by woodland today, of which only 2% is native, and only 0.2% ancient rainforest. With this environmental casualty also comes a loss in narrative. The removal of trees untethers the physical connection a place has with its past—one of the reasons the Celts held them in such regard.  

In order to help strengthen and restore the cultural ties embedded within the remaining Great Forest of Aughty, our creative collaborative platform proposes to develop a collection of stories, essays, poems and memories connected to our landscape and the forest. 

This anthology will then be presented in various media including a “sound walk” that will pair material with a hiker’s physical location, and an embedded map in which material can be localised in the terrain. 

This technology https://echoes.xyz/ is free to use and can be downloaded onto any smartphone. The user will follow a mapped route, onto which “echoes” will be added—when the walker enters an “echo” area, the story, poem, or other information will be played automatically to accompany them on their walk. In this way, the past, present, and future can all combine in Place. The project aims to combine the work of local participants with professional artists.

Project Partners:

Ryan Dennis

Galway resident Ryan Dennis is the author of the novel The Beasts They Turned Away, published by époque press and longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize. He is a Fulbright alumnus and PhD in creative writing, and has taught writing at several universities. His work has appeared in various literary journals and he is a syndicated columnist for agricultural print periodicals in four countries and two languages. In 2021-2022 Ryan was selected as a Writer-in-Residence at Maynooth University. As part of the residency, he created and edited Voices from the Land, a collection of short stories, essays and poems by Irish farmers. 

In 2020 Ryan founded The Milk House, an initiative to showcase the work of those writing on rural subjects in order to help them find greater audiences. The Milk House has published Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalists, as well as had work longlisted for the An Post Irish Short Story of the Year award.  

NatureCulture® LLC

NatureCulture® LLC is a small, rural, woman-owned publishing and events company based in the forests of western Massachusetts in the US, whose mission is to help humans be in right relationship with the rest of Nature. Founded and directed by Lis McLoughlin in 2020, as of 2025 NatureCulture® has published 22 books; and produced dozens of online events including the Authors and Artists Festival at the center of the arts, environment, and social justice. In 2023 NatureCulture® expanded into in-person retreats for creatives that result in anthologies sold to support the places poets and artists visit (2023-Cayman Brac; 2025-Doolin, Ireland). Of the volumes we have published, 14 anthologies are part of NatureCulture®'s Writing the Land project, an international land conservation project consisting of a network of over 150 land trusts and 350 poets. Poets are paired with conserved lands, and anthologies are created for land trusts to use to support their mission with fundraising and outreach. The books can be seen on our website: https://www.nature-culture.net/books-publishing and over 100 videos of the poems from this project can be found at https://www.youtube.com/@NatureCulture/

NatureCulture's main website: https://nature-culture.net

Writing the Land's main website: https://writingtheland.org

Short interview with Liz McLoughlin on the Writing the Land project 

Dr. Lis McLoughlin Visits with Poetry X Hunger

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The Creative Communities Collaboration is delivered in line with the following principles and values: 

i. Broaden access to, and participation in, cultural and creative activities locally. 

ii. Use culture and creativity as a catalyst for collaboration and innovation in achieving greater wellbeing, social cohesion, nature and bioregional protection and restoration. 

iii. Strengthen the capacity of local authorities to integrate culture and creativity across place-making, regeneration, renewal, and the development of more vibrant, creative, and sustainable places. 

iv. Investing in culture and creativity to support environmental, social, and economic returns that help deliver on ron from local and regional, to national and international.