The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: Ireland

  • Landscape Amnesia

    Landscape Amnesia

    As the last horse trailer passes you by on the potholed road you take an exit. Across a green pasture you park the car. You stretch your legs. Gravel grinds underneath the feet while walking towards the bar – “Tattan’s Ring View Bar” it reads on the yellowish plastered building. Flowers in pots await under…

  • Ishmael House

    Ishmael House

    Ishmael House stands along a small stretch of gravel road leading up a hill away from our town. A two-storey granite brick sentry that appears, alongside an old and dying ash tree as no more than an accent stretching out onto desolate sky. The boundary, not that it is needed, is a fence that seems…

  • Wild Alphabet: The Wolf in Irish Poetry

    Wild Alphabet: The Wolf in Irish Poetry

    The final wolves in Ireland were wiped out some time during the eighteenth century, outliving the wolf in England by almost three hundred years. The process of their extinction, exacerbated and even engineered by the English colonisation of Ireland, bears multiple parallels with the gradual diminishment of the Irish language, itself subjected to a sustained…