May 24, 2026 · 47 min · 13 segments
The poet Moya Cannon takes us to A Corner of the Burren to a place she discovered through her reading of Tim Robinson's maps, the triangle formed by Corcomroe Abbey, St. Colman's Well, Ought-mama and…
Moya CannonHost
Brendan DunfordGuest
Cillian RodenGuest
Mary Angela KeaneGuest
Michael John ConnollyGuest
Silvina MartínGuest
I'm walking up a farm track, and I'm heading up over the Burren proper, uh, with this wonderful flora.
And, uh, we're just very near St. Colmán's Well, dedicated to a 6th century saint, but like most holy wells, it goes much further back to pre-Christian times.
It's a particularly beautiful enclosed little private place, and all around it, there are...
the walls have given shelter to fuchsia and montbretia and brambles and ferns, and I know sometimes we have wild strawberries here.
[footsteps] One of the first poems I wrote about this area was about the holy well, actually.
Rain that flowed down through the limestone's pores until dark streams hit bedrock, now finds a way back past the roots of the ash to a hillside pen of stones and statues.
Images of old fertilities testify to nothing more, perhaps, than the necessary miracle of water trapped and stored in a valley where water is fugitive.
Bad chests, rheumatic pains, the supplications mostly, and the confidences of old age.
Yet, sometimes, swimming out in waters that were blessed in the hill's labyrinthine heart, the eel flashes past.
I have been to this well many, many, many times, and today I'm fortunate enough to have with me the botanist and ecologist Killian Roden.
I'm walking up a farm track, and I'm heading up over the Burren proper, uh, with this wonderful flora.
And, uh, we're just very near St. Colmán's Well, dedicated to a 6th century saint, but like most holy wells, it goes much further back to pre-Christian times.
It's a particularly beautiful enclosed little private place, and all around it, there are...
the walls have given shelter to fuchsia and montbretia and brambles and ferns, and I know sometimes we have wild strawberries here.
[footsteps] One of the first poems I wrote about this area was about the holy well, actually.
Rain that flowed down through the limestone's pores until dark streams hit bedrock, now finds a way back past the roots of the ash to a hillside pen of stones and statues.
Images of old fertilities testify to nothing more, perhaps, than the necessary miracle of water trapped and stored in a valley where water is fugitive.
Bad chests, rheumatic pains, the supplications mostly, and the confidences of old age.
Yet, sometimes, swimming out in waters that were blessed in the hill's labyrinthine heart, the eel flashes past.
I have been to this well many, many, many times, and today I'm fortunate enough to have with me the botanist and ecologist Killian Roden.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
