Field Notes by Aislínn • 5 September 2026

The Green Griffith

When I worked in Leinster House for a while, I used to pass Arthur Griffith on my way out in the evenings.His portrait hangs near the front door, among the afterlife history has arranged for the revolutionary generation. Griffith and Michael Collins on one side, Éamon de Valera looking back from the opposite wall. On my first day, I stopped in front of Griffith, looking up at his knowing eyes and moustache.I had always been taken by his story, the revolutionary who never lived to see the indepen...

Field Notes by Aislínn • 30 August 2026

East of Deference

Who are your teachers? Do you have inner guides? When does wisdom deserve admission? The Church, I suppose, tries to elect them for you first. Jesus, Mary and the saints form an entire cabinet of figures to consult in moments of moral uncertainty or when you’ve lost your wallet. I seem to have democratically elected mine instead, assembling over the years an internal committee of characters whose voices have somehow become part of my own.I think people are sometimes surprised by my personality....

Field Notes by Aislínn • 16 August 2026

Built in Urgency, Removed in Hindsight

This Riverfest, a new art instillation invited visitors to stand, smile, and capture King John’s Castle rising neatly behind them. The LK Frame positioned history as composition. The castle, acknowledged as Limerick’s most iconic structure, sits at the centre of the frame.There were once council houses inside that castle.In 1932, Limerick Corporation constructed 22 local authority houses within its courtyard after a tenement collapse made urgency unavoidable. Medieval stone met washing lines and...

Field Notes by Aislínn • 11 August 2026

The Public Aren't Thick

Visiting Newgrange with my friends recently brought me straight back to being seventeen and studying Neolithic art.We had to draw diagrams of concentric circles, pinpointing the different places across Ireland where some of the oldest expressions of belief in the world had been carved into stone, and then surmise their possible meanings. There was something wonderfully ambitious about it. Here were a group of teenagers being asked to look at marks made thousands of years ago by people whose cosm...

Field Notes by Aislínn • 5 August 2026

The Workhouse and the Plough

Do buildings remember?Not in the supernatural sense. I don’t think I believe that walls whisper or ghosts linger in empty corridors, despite recently being spooked hearing a story about a lighthouse supposedly haunted by a little girl climbing its stairs.What I do believe is that certain places refuse to become ordinary. They possess a kind of aura, compressing time until the veil between the present and the past feels unusually thin.This is why I spend so much of my life wandering abandoned rai...

Field Notes by Aislínn • 29 July 2026

Harbouring Ideas

Field Notes revolves around landscapes and the stories they tell. German Letters is my attempt to understand why I keep booking flights to Germany despite possessing limited German and repeatedly convincing myself that moving there would solve most, if not all, of my problems.My first visit came in 2023, fresh out of university, when I travelled to visit my friend Jette, whom I had met during Erasmus in Stockholm.Looking back, Erasmus was the making of me. I arrived straight out of the pandemic,...

Field Notes by Aislínn • 17 July 2026

Cahir Railway Station

When the train crosses the River Suir into Cahir, it feels less like arriving at a railway station and more like passing through a fortress.William Dargan understood that railways were not merely engineering projects but ways of choreographing arrival.Approaching from Limerick Junction, the limestone towers of the viaduct deliberately echo the battlements of Cahir Castle downstream, allowing the railway itself to become part of the medieval landscape rather than an interruption to it. The town u...

Field Notes by Aislínn • 8 July 2026

The Architecture of Care

Two years ago, in the middle of what felt like an acute quarter-life crisis, I was doing my usual post-work Fernhill loop, listening to Brat, when I noticed plumes of smoke rising in the horizon punctuated by the Poolbeg chimneys.Someone had set an industrial unit on fire. My first reaction was concern, followed almost immediately by a blistering there goes tomorrow’s running order. The chimneys serve as a staple of Dublin, like the Harland & Wolff cranes have come to symbolise Belfast, the two...

Field Notes by Aislínn • 2 July 2026

Cap of Daisies

I was with my friend Chi yesterday when we visited her grandmother’s grave in a cemetery in Ballybrown.It’s an overcast summer evening ceilinged by a quilt of grey clouds, the threat of rain never being realised.The cemetery sits on a rise above the surrounding farmland, reminding me of Loughkent in Tipperary, where the remains of a church stand amongst limestone headstones so long in the weather that the engravings have begun to melt back into the stone itself.Blooming yellow lichens obscure su...

Field Notes by Aislínn • 16 June 2026

Shapes of Shelter

It was a warm London morning, the type of heat that makes a cotton dress cling to your thighs and turns the Underground into something to be endured rather than enjoyed. The destination was the Barbican.On approach, we scurried through one of the busiest parts of the city, past marble, sandstone and glass. Before long, we started joking that it was anti-blue-eyed infrastructure. Every surface seemed determined to throw the sun directly back at us, to single us out, to force us into a permanent s...

Field Notes by Aislínn • 4 June 2026

Refusing to Begin

The most frustrating thing about Ireland's climate crisis isn’t that we do not know what to do. It’s that we continue to elect politicians who know exactly what to do and refuse to even attempt it. It was reported in The Irish Times that the Minister for Transport has effectively conceded that Ireland will not meet its legally binding climate targets. After years of reports, plans, consultations and promises, we are now facing the possibility of spending billions on compliance measures because w...

Field Notes by Aislínn • 30 May 2026

The Runoff Economy

This week, I attended the Future Lakes conference in Limerick as a scribe and rapporteur for a panel on governance. I arrived feeling slightly out of my depth. I’m not a limnologist, a hydrologist, or a water quality expert.As the morning unfolded through discussions on nature-based solutions, however, I found myself settling in. This was territory I understood: landscapes, biodiversity, restoration, and the relationship between people and place.But surrounded by leading scientists, ecologists,...

Field Notes by Aislínn • 21 May 2026

Why Climate Stories Need Place

This post is adapted from my contribution for a panel discussion I took part in during Climate Action Week, Climate Conversations at Mary Immaculate College. I’m standing on Mew Island trying to look competent while actively losing a fight with a bramble bush.The North Irish Sea crashes behind me, where seals are scattered on rocks around the Copeland Islands. Seagulls circle watchfully overhead. Somewhere nearby the project team are operating drones and setting up a spotting scope.I have wander...

Field Notes by Aislínn • 11 May 2026

Restoration Mindset

There has been a slight lapse to the usual rhythm of Field Notes. The last few weeks have been unusually full, and in the last few days I have retreated slightly into a kind of tired goblin mode after what felt like four PhD milestones compressed into one month. I attended my first academic conference, my project progression, the project launch itself, (which involved yet another red-eye train from Limerick that I have now taken so many times it is beginning to lose its romance), went on my fir...

Field Notes by Aislínn • 26 April 2026

Here Lies the Family Farm

In County Tipperary, land has long meant something more than acreage. Fields, the Vee, surnames tied to farms that predate the state. The Suir, good hurlers, beautiful castles, excellent farmland.But perhaps its identity is changing.At this rate, we may as well save ourselves the trouble and rename it after Coolmore Stud.Coolmore, alongside the Magnier family and associated companies, is estimated to control over 10,000 acres of agricultural land in the county. That kind of scale does not arrive...

Field Notes by Aislínn • 22 April 2026

Tipperary Says Glow

Tipperary County Council’s elected members have unanimously decided to press the Minister for Transport to introduce legislation that would make it mandatory for pedestrians, cyclists and e-scooter users to wear high visibility clothing in the interest of public safety, which places this proposal firmly in the same category as suggesting we move the Rock of Cashel slightly to the left for better traffic flow.They are not making law, but they are making their thinking very clear and that may be t...

Field Notes by Aislínn • 17 April 2026

Under the Shelter of Each Other

I was reading an article recently about the many Irish words for visiting your neighbour, and I kept coming back to the phrase ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine, under the shelter of each other, people survive. Lately, I keep thinking about that shelter, what it might look like in practice, and whether we have drifted further from it than we realise. In my head, it takes the shape of a room.A sort of potluck, if you will, where everyone brings a titbit of their perspective on land and life...

Field Notes by Aislínn • 10 April 2026

Tractor Runs

There is something revealing in the images that have defined the ongoing fuel protests. Not the traffic jams or the rocketing prices at pumps or even the political soundbites that followed, but the tractors.Big, blistering tractors.Farming, as it turns out, sits at the sharpest edge of our collective failure to take climate resilience seriously.That reality has been building for years, shaped by policy choices that stretch back across the long arc of Irish political history, from colonisation to...

Field Notes by Aislínn • 2 April 2026

Whitaker State of Mind

One of the quickest ways to drive me up the wall is pessimism for the sake of it.Transport is often where it shows up most clearly. The second you mention improving rail, someone will tell you nothing will ever change, Ireland is uniquely incapable of improvement, and we are somehow doomed to be permanently behind everyone else.It is such a dead-end way of thinking. It’s also just not true.I noticed it a lot while canvassing during the last general election. People in Limerick were not angry, wh...

Field Notes by Aislínn • 29 March 2026

Hollow Smoke

The past few weeks have been busy. My PhD fieldwork has been fantastic. I feel like I have finally begun to break ground. The writing that has resulted since returning from the trips has been fluid and abundant. A few other projects are beginning to take flight and come into fruition, which feels almost dizzying after months of planning.In the sun, I come into my own. The winter felt long, and now positivity and progress has split open in the March light. I am trying to make hay while the insp...

Field Notes by Aislínn • 16 March 2026

Dog-Eared Saint

There’s something deeply moving about Sinéad O’Connor.I realised this recently while watching an adaptation of Wuthering Heights where she plays Emily Brontë. She seemed to embody an ethereal combination of defiance and genius.Her voice has been the soundtrack to millions of lives, yet she never seemed particularly interested in playing the role of “celebrity.” She was more like a force of nature, inconvenient, brilliant and absolutely not kowtowing to any institutions.I’ve been listening to her...

Field Notes by Aislínn • 9 March 2026

A Different Lens

The first thing you notice about the Great Light in Belfast is the scale. It rises in front of you like a piece of glass architecture inside a curved structure along the Maritime Mile near Titanic Belfast. At first glance it almost looks decorative, like several enormous crystal structures stacked on top of each other. It has the slightly surreal quality of something that belongs in a Bond villain’s lair. Then you remember what you are actually looking at. This enormous optic once sat inside the...

Field Notes by Aislínn • 22 February 2026

The Sea Sees Me

The reaction is usually instant when I describe my research: You’re from Tipperary, and you study the sea?I still struggle with a neat answer. My path to island research wasn’t obvious, shaped less by geography and more by chance. Maybe in part by those childhood summer days spent threading through the waves at Bunmahon, though I’m not sure that counts.Think of this post as me dissecting that thought. What does the sea mean to me? As a researcher only beginning to scratch the surface of studyin...

Field Notes by Aislínn • 15 February 2026

Early Onset Romanticism

I think all this talk of Shakespeare lately has me thinking about how detrimentally idealistic I am. It feels like a diagnosable condition. Early onset, chronic, no known cure.The first Shakespeare play that captured me was The Tempest. Our school put on a production. Like all of my primary school plays it was a complete calamity, with precocious classmates leading, directed by the petty dictatorship of a teacher who seemed to detest the arts, joy and possibly children.I had one line. Maybe half...