By way of tribute to Manchán Magan, who has died aged 55, we revisit his introdution to his acclaimed documentary Listen to the Land Speak: A Journey of Return - watch now, via RTÉ Player.
The two-part series unfolds from Winter Solstice to Bealtaine through Reek Sunday to Samhain, exploring how the stories and myths associated with the rivers, mountains and lands around us are crucial to unlocking aspects of how we need to rebuild our relationship with nature today. But it also becomes an unexpectedly personal story as Manchán realises that there is a serious illness within himself that makes him see these ancient sites and beliefs in a whole new light.
I often think of Ireland not as a country, but as a kind of spell, if that's not too New Agey a concept—an incantation woven of story, stone, and memory. And yet, for so long, many of us forgot how to listen.
We turned away from the wells, the oaks, the cairns, and the sacred threshold sites which are scattered all around us. We forgot that rivers are goddesses, that bogs are memory stores of the past, and that there are songs embedded in the stones.
This documentary series, Listen to the Land Speak, grew from that forgetting—and from a desire to remember.
Like the book that gave birth to it, the series is a kind of pilgrimage: a journey through ritual landscapes and ancient stories, and through my own reckoning with life and death. I never set out to make a film about cancer or mortality. I set out to celebrate the ecological and mythological consciousness embedded in our land. But what emerged is more intimate. The land doesn’t shy away from the dark.
In collaboration with director Maurice O’Brien and producer Zlata Filipovic, we set out to visit some of the sites where I believe the true soul of Ireland can be found.
At midsummer light, at the largest stone circle in Ireland beside Lough Gur in Co. Limerick, something shifted. I was drawn out of myself, as if by design. I wonder were such sites imbued with that precise intention—to pull us into communion with the sun and the self?
I set out to celebrate the ecological and mythological consciousness embedded in our land. But what emerged is more intimate. The land doesn't shy away from the dark.
These ancient places were not mere shelters or forts. They were sites of celebration, revelation, connection. Take Dún Aonghasa on the Aran Islands. Mainstream archaeology tells us it was a Bronze Age fort. But when you stand there, with the Atlantic opening before you and the sun sinking into its depths, the sense in your bones is that it was surely built for worship, for revelry – maybe even, for raving.
The series moves in seasonal cycles, as our ancestors did—from Imbolc to Lúnasa to Samhain to Bealtaine. These are not just names on a calendar. They are invitations to align with rhythms deeper than clocks. Each one offers its own truths: the stirrings of spring, the gratitude of harvest, the shadowy threshold of Samhain, the ignition of Bealtaine fire.
In Irish, our words describe not categories but qualities. A spider is "damhán alla," a little ox of the wall. A snail is "seilide," a little spit thing. These aren’t quaint oddities. They’re insights into a world seen with reverence.
As we filmed the series I was also facing my own mortality. The brokenness in our culture, our estrangement from the land, mirrors the brokenness within us. Healing—of soil or soul—requires attention, humility, love.
There is something healing about returning to oak groves, sacred wells, rituals. One woman I spoke with has visited over 1,400 holy wells. These are not relics. They are active sites of devotion. Each well holds its own spirit.
Climate collapse is real. Cultural loss is real. But so is this surge of remembering.
That’s why I think of these films not as documentaries but as invitations. If we can listen—truly listen—then the land will speak. It already is.
Watch Listen to the Land Speak now via the RTE Player.
