IF I’M RUNNING one of our Pilgrim’s Progress tours my day is spent in all sorts of places with a spiritual bent, from megalithic cairns at Carrowkeel to Temple House, the most westerly Knights Templar preceptory in Europe, or the Carmelite hermitage at Skreen.
We stop off at Buddhist retreats, Hindu temples, Lough Derg and even the ghost train at Bundoran, so it’s very eclectic.
I start and end the tour at the Gyreum, the large circular ecolodge I built by hand as part of a documentary I was making for TG4. It was created in imitation of the cairns that dot the hillsides around this part of Sligo and is aligned to three different solstices.
Today it is used as a community space for workshops and retreats and for overnight accommodation.
I have an apartment inside, and most mornings I’m up at around 8.30am, especially if there are people staying who need feeding.
Most people stay on a self-catering basis. People wonder what it’s like to share your home like that, but I love it. It helps compensate for the rain.
If I’m not on a tour I have a number of projects to work on, including a documentary on the Arctic seed-bank initiative, a vault in the permafrost into which is being put all the food seeds of the world, in case of disaster.
I am also at the editing stage of my documentary on purgatory and how it came into being.
Whatever I’m doing, I stop and have lunch with the people staying here and the volunteers that help me run it. I like making lunch. It’s the only thing I do every day that has an end to it. It’s not all organic and vegetarian, either. Today’s was very piggy, for example.
After that I might work in the garden for a while. We have a community gardening session on a Friday where we run workshops about growing, so I might be helping with that.
Most likely I’ll be strimming rushes at some point in the day. We are over-run with them and are always trying to come up with a suggestion to put them to good use. At the moment we are considering them as fillers for mattresses. We feel there must be a great function for them out there, if we could only think of it.
I’ll also spend some part of the day tinkering with the wind turbine.
It’s very sociable here, and in the evening we watch movies or documentaries on a huge widescreen TV. Then I’ll go to bed and probably give some thought to my next plan for the Gyreum, which is to attach a giant greenhouse to it that will keep us warm through the winter, as well as let us grow vegetables.
* Colum Stapleton owns Gyreum Ecolodge in Riverstown, Co Sligo 071-916 5994, www.gyreum.com
* In conversation with Sandra O’Connell