The town has an annual arts week (that lasts ten days) at the end of each September, and for a small town in the West of Ireland it really punches above its weight.

Writers like Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy and the late John McGahern
are/were regulars here, and groups, musicians and singers like The
Chieftains, Christy Moore, Paul Brady, Tom Russell, Dick Gaughan and
Cherish the Ladies are just some of the artists that have appeared here over the last few years.

Something that might interest those of you who love Irish traditional music, as well as the poetry of Seamus Heaney, is an album that Heaney made a few years back with piper Liam O'Flynn.

Called simply 'The Poet and the Piper', it melds words and music together in a seamless way that seems an echo of the times when harpers, poets and pipers would be found in the court of every Irish chief.

I particularly love the opening track 'The Given Note / Port na bPucaí'. The words tell of how (as in Dezi Donnelly's 'Paddy's Rambles Through the Park') a fiddler heard a piece of fairy music coming from the ground which remained graven in his head and which he played for the rest of his life .

In 'The Given Note', the tune the poet writes about comes from the Blasket Islands, rocky outcrops in the Atlantic off the coast of Kerry.

Liam O'Flynn's playing on the track is touched with magic too and never
fails to raise the hairs on the back of my neck.

As I write this the sun is falling towards Inishbofin, out beyond Cleggan Bay, catching the fuchsia bushes in the last of its light, and the words of Heaney and the notes that came from beneath the rocky soil of the Blaskets are weaving round the room telling their own stories.