Bringing Lammas’ bread and an Un-Dry Cauldron Back to Cabra, Dublin

At winter’s end, Lisa introduced me to Louise, a PhD scholar in nursing and midwifery at Trinity College, who works with mothers in addiction recovery using storytelling as a method. After some conversations, we decided to visit her in Ireland and organize something around ecomythology. After some steps back and forth, it became a small community event in Cabra (An Chabrach, “the poor land”), an inner suburb on Dublin’s northside, on Sunday August 2nd. The date was chosen partly because we wanted a summer day (it can be gloomy there at other times of year), partly because it had to happen after the symposium in Latvia, partly because that Sunday is a powerful date. In the preparation, an ecomyth emerged…

On the weekend before Mabon, the second harvest, it is time to look back to what we have been learning so far…

Eco-mythology

• Eco, from oikos, home, household.
• Myth, from mythos, story, narrative.
• Logy, from logos, knowledge.

Eco-mythology is the knowledge of the stories of home, the household in the old, wide sense. This means the community of humans, waters, soils, and others we share a world with.

We believe we need new (living) stories, rituals, and ceremonies, calibrated to today’s social and ecological needs. Myths can serve as medicine. For that, we need cauldrons to make and calibrate stories. Cauldrons are places and events to co-create and feed our living stories.

And … Ireland is such a magnificent place to experiment … because the land all knows about cauldrons.

But… what is a cauldron in Ireland nowadays? It can be a tool, a place, a series of activities, a practice. I believe our ancestors, who were more attuned to the rhythms and schedules of more-than-human nature, chose their dates for a reason. I was very aware that we should aim for that first Sunday in August, because it is connected with Lammas and Lugnasadh.

Lammas is all about the first harvest, the turning point where the land’s abundance is gathered and shared. I knew there would be folklore to work with, and even before I did my research, my gut feeling told me there would be an Irish variant. And yes, the microbes in my gut were right.

Crom Dubh Sunday

To my surprise, I read on the same Wikipedia page about his link with Saint Patrick…

“Crom Dubh attempted to throw St. Patrick into an eternal fire, but Patrick countered by drawing a cross on a stone and casting it into the fire, which became Poll a’ Sean Tine (the hole of the old fire). Crom Dubh was then driven by St. Patrick into his home of Dun Briste, which Patrick separated from the mainland by driving his crozier into the ground. The site of Downpatrick Head became an important place of ritual and pilgrimage during the Festival of Lughnasadh – similar to Croagh Patrick. The alternate names associated with Crom Dubh at Downpatrick Head include Cormac Dubh, Geodrisg, Deodrisg and Leodrisg. In other stories St. Patrick banishes the snakes of Ireland to Dun Briste.” (Source text and photograph: Wikipedia, “Crom Dubh”)

Oh wow, now I really want to play with this story. For me, St Patrick’s story is all about the erasure of older ways and older knowledge, which I already touched in an earlier blogpost: which I wrote about here: Skipping International Women’s Day, Rewilding St Patrick’s Day Instead.

Bring Snakes and Cauldrons back to the Poor Land

When Louise introduced the idea of doing this Lammas ritual in a new Family Resource Centre, midwived by her former colleague Sue, it felt almost too… synchronistic that this was happening in Cabra, a place whose name means “poor land.” Sue was enthusiastic, and after some boundary exploration, trying not to overstretch ourselves too much, we decided to go for a small community event.

The next step was to listen to the land, to play, and to see which beings, especially the more-than-human beings, can co-create an Undry Cauldron for this community.

Some weeks before Lammas, Louise, Lisa and I were looking at Google Maps (who doesn’t love looking at maps?) to make sense of the place of Cabra (West) and the family resource centre. Lisa wondered whether the tree belongs to the garden and centre. We looked at the Tolka river and the valley, a 10-minute walk from it. There are some allies to work with, that much is sure. But looking at maps is not enough to grasp a sense of place, a walk in and around, and a forest bath, to sense more beings, should still be done. You have to be there, with sharpened senses, ready to listen, to receive.

We Bring the Cauldron

Lammas is Ireland’s ancient harvest festival, a moment when communities thanked the land. We are reactivating it through a contemporary, women-led ritual that reconnects culture, ecology, and community. As preparation, I quickly made a map for some ecomythological mapping to do during the event, collecting and locating stories about plant-people relationships. The programme was co-created between the four of us, Louise, Sue, Lisa and Wendy. We brought a cauldron (back). The other humans and more-than-humans brought the ingredients for some magic and meaning-making.

The Sharing Circle – introducing ourselves through kin

Before any of us reached for a map or a recording device, we sat together in a first circle. First, Louise and Sue did the introduction. I said a few words about Lughnasadh, one of the four seasonal turning points in the Irish calendar and how August is a month of receiving and first harvest, of noticing what is already here, even if it isn’t yet ripe or ready

Then it was time to let the group talk. I asked everyone to introduce themselves not through their job title, but through three relationships with the more-than-human world. It is a small shift with a large effect. We are so used to naming ourselves through our official roles, but that is only ever a sliver of who we are. There is far more power, I think, in introducing ourselves through what I’ve started calling our relationscapes.

We were fourteen people that afternoon, and the circle filled with relations rather than résumés: grass, water, robins, magpies, squirrels, foxes, pigeons, frogs, butterflies, crane spiders, willows, and more.

A series of maps, zooming in and out

Only afterwards (and another break to eat, drink and talk more, of course) did I bring out the maps. I had printed them beforehand. I showed a map of the building itself, then a few of the surrounding streets, and zoomed out further with every map after that. First the neighbourhood, then Cabra as a whole, then all of Dublin … so we could feel the relationships at every scale at once, from the room we were sitting in to the Botanical Gardens and the Tolka River valley, a ten-minute walk from here, where, I’d already been told, some very particular birds keep their own relationships going. I wanted to understand what Cabra Family Resource Centre actually is, beyond its walls and its garden, because a centre is also its relationships: to the neighbourhood, to the rest of Dublin, to whoever walks in through the door.

Ambassador species for/from Cabra

I asked the group a question: if Cabra had one ambassador species, a single more-than-human being to represent it, who would it be? 

N. didn’t hesitate. The pigeon. And I loved that answer, because pigeons carry exactly the kind of poverty and pity we project onto “poor land”. Pigeons are villainized, shooed off statues, treated as vermin with wings, when in fact they were once the most trusted messengers we had. Homing pigeons find their way back across hundreds of kilometres, carried somewhere unfamiliar and still returning, unfailingly, to the place they call home. It felt like a good ambassador, here in and for a poor land that keeps calling its own people home too.

Someone mentioned the banana plant that never grew, because a fox kept coming through a gap in the fence to steal it. There were footprints in the soil where the fruit should have been. The foxes are everywhere on the north side now, we agreed, ever since the wheelie bins took their old food sources away and left them to become the scavengers, and half-blamed neighbours, they are today. And the seagulls, someone said, are only here because we took their coastline. We are, all of us, animals to each other, was how one woman put it, and it stayed with me.

I noted that it was the pigeons, and also the foxes (another elected ambassador) still finding their way in through every gap in every fence, that kept returning us to a bigger question underneath all of this: what does “poor” actually mean, when a place is this rich in stories and relations?

Further relational mapping

One of the participants was a retired horticulturist and Louise’s dad, who had joined us for the afternoon and had already sensed out and listed (at my invitation which he graciously and happily accepted) everything growing on this ground after the first and before the second circle: petunia, lavender, lobelia, sage, dandelion, willowherb, Himalayan honeysuckle, spotted laurel, red robin photinia, ivy, euonymus, bay laurel.

Before I took out the maps, he had walked me straight to the honeysuckle, heavy with berries that pull the autumn birds in. After that break for us to enjoy more food, I was reading the list of plants he had noticed.

Dream for this place

I asked Sue how she pictures this place a year from now, at Lammas 2027. Sue’s answer was less about buildings than about belonging. She wants Cabra properly put on the map and recognised for its own beauty. She wants the many services working here, too often siloed from one another, actually talking to each other: her opening line to any new collaborator is leave your ego at the door, because real change, she thinks, happens when services stop competing for scraps of the same funding and start working as one integrated hub, from the unborn child to the oldest resident, everyone walking in and feeling like this is home. (The foxes, someone pointed out, are clearly already living that vision, three-legged squirrels included.)

From poor land to a resilient village

Someone told the story of the flood, about ten years back, when the buried river beneath the estate rose up through the streets its houses had been built directly on top of, and Cabra responded, as it does, by finding the humour first: a newspaper photograph of neighbours paddling kayaks down the road, someone still managing to fetch food for a baby in the middle of it. That, everyone agreed, is the real character of Cabra: not the poor land its name suggests, but a village that has never needed to look outside itself for help, that argues in the pub and stands behind each other outside it, where a stranger becomes known within a few months simply by staying. Cabra people, someone said, are earthed, resilient, storytelling people who never quite leave, and who, whatever the future holds, will do what they’ve always done: come together, and govern themselves.

Missing Non-human and human board members

We closed the circle with a question about the board’s next, more-than-human member. If magic allowed a plant, an animal, or a fairy folk to sit at the table, who would it be? A leprechaun, someone offered, with a bag of dust to sprinkle over whatever’s meant to grow. A fairy, said another, generous and a little wild. Someone else wanted a young person on the board itself, not just represented but present, the way a youth-led project she’d once worked for had done it properly, with a junior board steering real decisions. And, threaded through the more-than-human answers, a distinctly human one: more farmers, more people who work land with their hands and carry that knowledge with them wherever they go afterwards. A witch, a fairy, a young person, an earthling. It felt, by then, like as complete a board as any cauldron could ask for.

Witnessing, Beyond Recognition

The afternoon had offered an invitation into that kind of witnessing. To notice a robin is not only to recognise a bird, but perhaps to reopen a connection to someone loved. To stand in a wild, untended corner of a garden is not only to see which plants are thriving and which aren’t, but to encounter a place of healing, a reminder of our own vulnerability, our resilience, our belonging to something far larger than ourselves.

It is a quiet kind of power, this attention to plants and to the more-than-human. Even the language we reach for gives it away: we still tend to introduce ourselves through our jobs, when relationscapes. The webs of robins and magpies, squirrels and foxes, crane spiders and willows that had filled our opening circle say so much more about who we actually are. Sue captured it best in a message she sent us afterwards, reflecting on the afternoon: the magic and the meaning of a place like this were never really going to come from its physical conditions, its underfunding, or its half-empty buildings. They come from the people, the land, the stories, the relationships.

An un-dry cauldron, in the end, is simply what a place becomes when enough of its stories are finally allowed to be told.

A Fireweed Ambassador

There was one more more-than-human presence that afternoon. The moment I stepped out of Louise’s car, I noticed a stand of willowherb growing at the edge of the grounds. Fireweed, some call it, or wilgenroosje in Flemish, geitrams in Norwegian. It has been a more-than-human companion of mine for five or six years now, one of those plants that keeps reappearing at the edges of my own life until I’ve stopped being surprised by it. Louise’s dad, our unplanned plant expert for the day, saw me notice it, and I saw him notice me noticing quietly delighted, as if something had just been confirmed.

Fireweed is the first plant to return after land has been scorched. It is sometimes called the phoenix of flowers, because it doesn’t so much survive devastation as rise out of it, seeding itself into the bare, blackened ground before almost anything else dares to. Its significance, for me, has always been exactly that: no matter what has been burned or broken, something is capable of growing back.

Coming Full Circle: Bread, Cauldron

By the time we broke the bread that afternoon, early on, before any of this had been spoken aloud, none of us yet knew how fully the day would answer the question I’d carried with me from Ireland’s oldest stories: how do we bring the cauldron back? 

Lammas has always been about the first harvest, about gathering what the land has given and sharing it out again so that no one goes without … the un-dry cauldron is a basket with bread, (like) hazelnut and coffee smelling pastries, croissants with berries and supermarket donuts passed from hand to hand.

Every story someone offered became another ingredient thrown into the same pot, and the more that went in, the fuller it seemed to get. That is the old promise of the Dagda’s cauldron, the coire ansic: that no assembly ever leaves it unsatisfied, that its abundance comes not from what is poured in from outside but from what is already alive within the gathering itself.

We didn’t bring a cauldron to Cabra so much as we found one already simmering there, tended by people like Sue and Fiona on a shoestring budget, fed by neighbours who’ve never needed much convincing to look out for one another, and now, for one Lammas Sunday, fed a little further by plant experts and fireweed, witches and children and foxes with banana-scented paws. An un-dry cauldron, it turns out, is a (storied) place you learn to notice is already full.

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