Restoring Mayberry

This is St. Brigid's Day, to commemorate a saint who built a learned and peaceful community here as the Roman Empire was experiencing it...

I don't usually get into politics, but some people have asked me about the perhaps confusing news coming out of Ireland right now. I dea...

If my writing's been a little sparse lately, it's partly because I've been busy writing the cover story for the next issue of th...

Thursday morning it began. In the wet darkness before dawn I rode from our rural home to my day job in Dublin, listening to news on the bus ...

You can see many Stonehenge-like structures like this across Ireland, this one taller than a person. It rests on the Burren, that stark land...

We just finished one of the last three-day-weekends of the year here in Ireland, and one of the last days we can spend the weekend working o...

A few days ago, I talked about the village markets people used to have here, and thought I would explain where the animals came from. This i...

We just finished watching 1960s footage of the animal markets in Irish villages. It was a world many older people here remember -- even my w...

My day job sent me to the Book Fair in Frankfurt, Germany last week, and amid the frantic schmoozing that such events require I was able to ...

In lieu of more extensive blogging, here is an update of what we have been doing lately. Pickling: radishes, cabbage, cucumbers, gherkins an...