Ireland and the Otherworld: Listening to the Land Speak

Ireland.

When I first arrived, I knew or perhaps I had only heard whispers that there was something special about this land on the edge of Europe, standing at the threshold of the vast Atlantic Ocean and perhaps other continents, and maybe even other universes.

Yet beyond its stunning cliffs and the many rainbows that can appear in a single day, thanks to a good drizzle in between bursts of blazing sunshine, I found myself asking a deeper question. I started to listen to the land speak.

Or perhaps I was already listening years before.

I remember being in my teens, playing music in Bavaria in an Irish folk band at school and the leader of the group said to us:

"Do you know that many of these tunes came into being because people literally offered their listening ears to the land? To the hills, the fairy forts, and those thin places where many of these otherworldly melodies originate."

Already back then, perhaps my fascination had been captured. I was eager to learn more about this way of listening to the land and to be initiated into the magic resting in its stones and blades of grass.

One of my guiding lights became books and stories. Among them was the work of Manchán Magan, whose beautiful book Listen to the Land Speak invites us to rediscover Ireland through its language and landscape: https://www.manchan.com/listen-to-the-land-speak

Another great inspiration was his RTÉ series of the same name, Listen to the Land Speak (RTÉ Player), a meditation on Ireland’s landscapes, myths, rivers, mountains, and sacred sites. Moving through the seasons and ancient places, it opens a way of seeing the land not as scenery, but as a living presence shaped by memory, language, and story.

I often return to one of his reflections:

"I often think of Ireland not as a country, but as a kind of spell."

And perhaps that is exactly it.

The longer I spend on this island, the more I wonder whether the spell is not something cast upon us, but something we slowly awaken to - by listening.

But why does Ireland, this emerald island, seem such a magical place?

I am still on the quest to understand its enchantment, yet I feel I have gathered a few answers along the way.

Perhaps the first lies in its geography. Situated at the western edge of Europe, Ireland remained for long periods more removed from many of the upheavals that swept across the continent. Celtic culture was able to flourish here in distinctive ways, and older traditions lingered, woven into the fabric of daily life.

This may also help explain the astonishing number of Neolithic sites scattered across the island. More than 1,500 monuments, including passage tombs like Newgrange, stone circles, standing stones, and dolmens. These are not merely relics of the past; they feel like echoes still resonating in the present landscape.

Prior to the pain and suffering of more recent centuries, the wars, and the division of the island into Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, this was a place where older ways of seeing and being could endure more easily. Stories were not separate from the land, they were part of it.

But if we go back even further, we encounter myths that open an even deeper mystery.

At the heart of Irish mythology are the Tuatha Dé Danann, the People of the Goddess Danu. According to legend, they inhabited Ireland before the arrival of the Milesians, the ancestors of the modern Irish people.

When the newcomers arrived and took dominion over the land, the Tuatha Dé Danann did not disappear. Instead, they withdrew into the hills and beneath the earth, entering the sídhe, the fairy mounds and ancient earthworks that dot the landscape.

There, they became the Aos Sí, the fairy folk, dwelling in an Otherworld that exists alongside our own.

And perhaps this is one of Ireland’s greatest gifts: the sense that worlds overlap here. That behind a hill there may be another realm. That an old hawthorn tree may be more than a tree. That a melody may not be composed, but remembered. That the land itself speaks.

And perhaps, if we listen carefully, we may discover that it has been speaking to us all along.

If you would like to hear more about these stories and listen to the land speak through its tunes, I warmly invite you to join me for my concert called “A Journey into Ireland & the Otherworld” on the evening of the summer solstice.

You can join at 7 pm UK time in Findhorn, or join via livestream from anywhere in the world, or simply sign up to receive the recording afterwards.

I would be delighted to share this journey with you.