In the late 1940s, the council began building a housing estate on a megalithic burial site in Sligo town, near the banks of the Garavogue River. Word has it that the workmen were ordered to clear the ground but refused to, saying they didn’t want to disturb the ancient stones.
During the Holy Year of 1950, an opportunistic member of the Catholic clergy sent a delivery by lorry of several chalky white statues in various positions of devotion and had them placed among the megaliths. To this day the estate is arranged around a large grassy roundabout that hosts a peculiar combination of unhewn rock and mid-century monumental sculpture. Each time I pass, I think of the labourers and their refusal to desecrate the work of their ancestors; their respect for those who had passed over the landscape almost 6,000 years earlier.
The topography of Sligo is daubed with such remnants, vestiges of those who were here before, and the mythologies and folklore associated with them is embedded deeply in the landscape. William Butler Yeats famously took inspiration from this place, as did all the Yeats siblings. It’s there in Jack’s paintings, in Lily’s exquisite embroidery and Lolly’s beautifully produced books.
The Tread Softly Festival, now in its eight year, offers a programme of events inspired by the landscape of the county and the myths, stories and people associated with it. Niall Henry is director of the Blue Raincoat Theatre Company, a venue-based ensemble company established in 1991. He co-programmes the festival along with Eve MacSearraigh and Michael Carty.
He says Tread Softly began in 2012 as a “recession festival”, at a time when there was little or no money. In the beginning, Blue Raincoat staged Yeats plays at lunchtime in The Factory, their performance space on Quay Street in Sligo. In the years since, they have led audiences on foot to locations around the county, performing Purgatory on the cairn on top of Knocknarea, The Cat and the Moon at Dooney Rock and At the Hawk’s Well on O’Rourke’s Table high up on Ben Bulben. This year nine sculptors will work with community groups at nine locations along the Co Sligo coastline to create a series of sand sculptures representing the daughters of Manannán mac Lír, sea god of Irish mythology, referenced in Yeats’ play On Baile’s Strand.
From the outset, the festival has been a collaborative endeavour with other Sligo venues and arts organisations such as The Model, Hawkswell Theatre and Hamilton Gallery. The same spirit of collaboration is intrinsic to the programming. Henry says it is based on symposia and artist participation that explore place and what that means.
While the Yeats connections are always there, Henry likes to think of them as compass points that can help visual and literary artists to respond to the landscape of Sligo today.
Last year 13 artists walked Sliabh Dá Eán, the “hill of two birds” in the Ballygawley Mountains, with archaeological writer and folklorist Pádraig Meehan. Over one week, they worked to produce written and visual responses to the mythic narratives of the Cailleach Bhérra associated with the place. For the participants, used to the rather solitary practice of making and writing, the experience was revelatory; when assembled, the work was much more than the sum of its parts. In Walking Birds Mountain II they will continue the exploration.
Bare Hazel is a new two-pronged arts participation project which will see writers work with groups from both professional and community backgrounds in Co Sligo to create a series of written, visual and musical responses to the Maugherow area of the north Sligo coast. Sean Golden will present a bespoke multimedia happening in Ellen’s Pub called “Maugherow, a much wilder place”. Niamh MacCabe is working with the Sandy Field Writers to produce a soundscape based on The Battle of the Books, a 6th-century copyright dispute that was settled by the rather bucolic verdict “To Every Cow Its Calf, To Every Book Its Copy”. Like much of the festival’s programme, these events are free of charge.
The Cormorant, a broadsheet journal of new writing, was conceived by Henry for last year’s festival and produced by writer Una Mannion. Eoin McNamee and I have joined the editorial team and for Issue 3, which will be launched during Tread Softly, and we read over 300 submissions. We are thrilled with our selections and happy that established writers such as Mary O’Donnell, Nuala O’Connor and Pat Boran are joined by newer voices such as Dawn Watson, John Patrick McHugh and Caragh Maxwell. For some contributors this will be their first publication.
For me, other highlights include To the Waters and the Wild, a series of curated walks around the county, Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen at the Hamilton Gallery, Sailing to Byzantium at the Model and a Paul Muldoon Picnic at the Hawkswell Theatre.
The festival may take its name from one of Yeats's most quoted lines, but somehow it's hard to imagine it being called anything else. In the ethos and the programming there is a sense of both audience and artist moving across the Sligo landscape. Like the mutinous workmen treading softly, mindful of what went before.
The Tread Softly Festival runs from July 25th to August 3rd
