Classical Bogland

Culture Night at Belturbet GoodStore & Railway Platform 6pm – 11pm

Classical Bogland is an evening programme of events at The Railway Station & Platform in Belturbet hosted by Restoring Cavan’s Boglands project.

6pm The opening of an exhibition of work by ceramicist Eimear Crowe in The Good Store. Eimear is an established artist in Co. Cavan. She will show work inspired by bog in West Cavan and a new piece ‘The Breathing Bog’ commissioned for Culture Night. This exhibition will be open to the public from 6pm onwards.

7.30pm Singing for Health & Wellbeing Choir Belturbet, with musical director Valerie Whitworth & welcome reception.

8.30pm: Classical Music Concert at The Railway Platform (40 minute performance)

we have no prairies By composer Ian Wilson with Lina Andonovska, contrabass flute,Cathal Roche, contra-alto clarinet

“we have no prairies” (also the first line of Seamus Heaney’s beautiful poem “Bogland”) for contrabass flute, contra-alto clarinet and soundtrack is one of the principal outcomes of a year-long project called Restoring Cavan’s Boglands which took place in West Cavan, Ireland during 2023-24. The project was funded by Creative Ireland’s “Creative Climate Action Fund II: Agents for Change” and involved a core team comprising lead artist & composer Ian Wilson, project manager Karina Charles, ecologist Heather Bothwell, hydrologist Francis Mackin, and assisted by a number of others.

The team organised a series of public information meetings around the west of county Cavan in tandem with group visits to restored boglands in other parts of the country, and the project aimed to encourage people who owned drained bogland to do something positive with it – restored or re-wetted bogland increases local biodiversity and has the ability to sequester carbon from the atmosphere so is very useful environmentally and ecologically.