Irish stories
by Wendy Wuyts

KinShip, Cork, Ireland: Ecologies of Care on a Reclaimed Landfill-turned-Park

Introduction – Let’s start with the Place 

From 1964 to 2009, Tramore Valley Park in Cork City served as the city’s main landfill. It counts 17 hectares of accumulated urban waste. Since its closure, the site has become a remediating and still-active landscape: the central mound continues to subside as buried organic matter decomposes, gases still vent from the ground, leachate still drains through drainage systems. The soil is permanently unstable, the site is protected from any future (housing) development, and its position between a major ring road and Cork Airport makes it physically peripheral. Before it was only reachable by car. Only recently it is accessible on foot. The KinShip project’s approach to place is unusually attentive to temporal, ecological, and social depths. The site carries multiple histories that the project has worked to surface rather than smooth over. Local historian and geographer Kieran McCarthy leads regular walks through the park, weaving ecological histories into layered accounts of what the place has been and what it has done to the people and species that have moved through it.

It is also one of the more generative sites of multispecies urban stewardship currently active in Ireland.

The KinShip project is a long-term socially engaged public artwork and ecological initiative created by artists Marilyn Lennon and Sean Taylor (LennonTaylor) and has been operating at Tramore Valley Park since 2021, and has spent the past several years developing what might be understood as a working model of urban ecological care: 

  • An artist-initiated but designed to become citizen-led model
  • A model grounded in biodiversity science while remaining committed to social engagement and creative practice
  • A model which takes seriously the full human and more-than-human history of a particular place.

Commons-Based Ecological Stewardship

Tramore Valley Park is formally owned and managed by Cork City Council’s Parks and Recreation Department, with additional involvement from the council’s Arts Office and Climate Action Unit. Within that institutional structure, the KinShip project has (co)created something that functions in practice as a commoning, a space governed not by a single authority but by an evolving ecology of relationships between artists, ecologists, community groups, municipal staff, and the site’s non-human inhabitants.

Nature Network Ireland, whose mission is to protect and promote Ireland’s wildlife through education, conservation and research, entered the partnership as the project’s scientific anchor. Over a decade old and operating across Ireland, the organisation specialises in the kind of careful, data-generating ecological work that turns informal observation into usable evidence. At Tramore Valley Park, that meant structured species counts, insect monitoring, and biodiversity surveys, which have all been fed into a nationally verified dataset held by the Biodiversity Data Centre.

The surveys, which began in 2019, produced a biodiversity action plan for the site. This is a working document that has driven real management decisions. Large areas of grassland are now left unmowed for most of the year, with tracks cut through only to maintain public access. The results have been ecologically significant. The tall grass meadow on the park’s central hill has become a nesting ground for meadow pipits, birds under considerable pressure in Ireland from agricultural intensification. Insect diversity has proven high across the site’s grassland areas.

What makes this stewardship model notable from a commonings perspective is how it navigates institutional authority without either confronting or capitulating to it. Before the KinShip project, Cork City Council’s five-year planning documents made no specific mention of other species. The language of urban planning referenced “blue-green infrastructure” and “people and nature,” but the actual creatures whose lives depended on municipal decisions were absent from the page. 

Within the timeframe of the project, two biodiversity officer roles have been created within the parks department. The KinShip project had worked its way, as Marilyn Lennon put it, “inside the discussions”: through sustained relational presence: attending meetings, learning and speaking the council’s language, and consistently expanding the frame of what that shared language was expected to contain.

Kerri Sonnenberg’s description of Nature Network Ireland’s role adds another dimension. The organisation trains volunteers in citizen science to conduct species counts, identify flora and fauna, and contribute verifiable data to national repositories. The public education element seems to be part of how the commons is constituted. Knowledge, in this model, is produced collaboratively, with scientific rigour, and feeds back into governance decisions about the site.

From Unrecognising circular economy in the 20st century to circular design in the 21st century

Before it was a landfill, Tramore Valley Park was part of Cork’s wetland system. The willow wetlands (Carrolls Bog) hint at a fertile commons once used for growing, and connected to the river networks that ran through the city. 

In the 1980’s, a Traveller community, Ireland’s indigenous nomadic people, who face systemic discrimination, was cleared from land near the site to make way for a traffic roundabout; a recycling centre was subsequently built on what had been their holding ground. The informal circular economy, traditional to the Traveller community, got capitalised through this infrastructure. 

The KinShip art project has tried to hold all of this. The project has pursued active engagement with the Traveller community, acknowledging the heritage claims that the community rightfully holds. 

The most visible built element of the KinShip project is the KinShip EcoLab. A response to an architectural competition within the KinShip project, it was chosen as it was conceived as a working demonstration of circular economy principles embedded in material form.

Designed by an architecture practice Fuinneamh Workshop, the design is named, ‘Den Talamh’ which translates from Irish as “from the ground,”.  This is a small shelter in the park that has, to date, won eleven architectural awards and attracted significant attention for its approach to materials and construction.  The construction is almost entirely local and natural: rammed earth walls made from clay sourced in the immediate area; a reed-thatched roof; a small percentage of concrete where structural requirements demanded it. The walls are engineered to last 100 to 120 years. The roof will require re-thatching in 20 to 25 years.  Inadvertently, the reed thatch has highlighted a number of issues, the condition of Irish waterways that no longer support the healthy growth of Irish water reed, destabilising it’s strength, and the decline in the number of trained thatchers in Ireland.   

As part of the architectural team, postgraduates from two local universities (MTU and UCC) under the supervision of structural engineer Kieran Ruane and principal architect Sean O’ Muiri,  participated in the construction itself, testing tensile strength and, working directly with material construction processes. This pedagogical dimension is characteristic of the KinShip project’s broader approach, which consistently treats the site as a space of learning and transformation.

The EcoLab houses (storytelling) workshops, soundwalks, and other events. But its function as infrastructure for multispecies design goes beyond what happens inside it. When the shelter competition arose during the project’s development, the design process was explicitly framed around a question that is still unusual in architecture: how does this structure affect the other species that inhabit the park? How does human behaviour in and around the building shape the lives of the birds, insects, and plants with which it shares the site? These are the questions that the EcoLab, as both object and process, was designed to keep open.

From Artist-Led to Commons-Led

Perhaps the most directly relevant aspect of the KinShip project for the Ecologies of Care research agenda is what the project is currently working through: the transition from an artist-initiated model to a genuinely community-governed one.

The intention was always that the artists LennonTaylor would eventually step back, leaving behind a viable, self-sustaining community structure. The question that has preoccupied Marilyn Lennon and her colleagues for the past year and a half is how to make that transition without losing what has been built.

The KinShip Council of Communities (KCC) is the emerging governance body being developed to carry the project forward. Supported by a working group of project advisors, Nature Network Ireland in a lead role, has taken over the curation and programming of the EcoLab. Next year, a new community organisation is expected to take on the lead role. The project envisions a rotating, mentored model of shared responsibility. But the handover is complicated by several structural challenges.

First, language. The KinShip project operates across registers that use different vocabularies for the same concepts: the world of contemporary art, the world of local government, and the world of community organising all describe governance, partnership, and stewardship differently. A key element of the handover process is building a shared lexicon (a glossary, a handbook, a visual series of posters and governance documents)  that makes the invisible infrastructure of the project legible to new stewards who were not part of the conversations in which that infrastructure was originally constructed.

Second, institutional legibility. Cork City Council operates through procurement processes, policy frameworks, and planning languages that do not map easily onto the ways an arts-led community project tends to work. The KinShip project has spent years learning to navigate that gap, but that navigational knowledge is largely tacit, held in relationships and accumulated experience rather than written down. Part of the handover work is making it explicit.

Third, the ecology of the incoming organisation. Marilyn Lennon used a striking analogy: the handover is not a transfer of property but something closer to a marriage proposal. The new lead organisation needs to already be embedded in the project’s web of relationships, grown from within the community of practice that has coalesced around the site. Open calls over five years have brought many different groups into the project. The incoming leadership is expected to emerge from that ecology, already bearing the project’s values and ways of working.

A community of practice (the ongoing network of relationships, conversations, and shared commitments that sustains the project between formal events and programmes) is understood as the connective tissue that any governance structure depends on. The goal of the transition is not to formalise that community into an institution, but to ensure the institution serves the community rather than replacing it.

Tensions and Structural Conditions

Any honest account of the KinShip project has to include its structural vulnerabilities, which both Marilyn Lennon and Kerri Sonnenberg were direct about.

Funding is the most persistent constraint. The project was initially supported by Creative Ireland through an open call but has since operated on a significantly reduced budget. Annual re-application processes place continuous pressure on the team, requiring the project to make its case from scratch each year rather than building on accumulated trust. LennonTaylor have tracked every hour of their involvement (meetings, administration, creative development) as a form of documentation: a record of the invisible labour that community-engaged projects require but that funding systems rarely fully account for.

The project’s productive relationship with Cork City Council has been real, but it has also been contingent. A sympathetic head of parks, open to experiment in his final years before retirement, and a newer head of dept have created conditions that might not have been obtained under different leadership. If the national political context shifts (if the government changes, or if municipal priorities change), the conditions that have allowed the project to work could alter quickly. The project exists within institutional structures it cannot fully control.

Public understanding of the site remains uneven. For many Cork residents, Tramore Valley Park is the road-facing strip of managed grass, the athletic pitches, the place adjacent to the household recycling facility. The wilder, ecologically richer areas (the tall grassland, the wetland margins) are less visible and can read, to an uninitiated eye, as neglect. The ongoing work of helping people understand that intentional wildness serves species other than humans, is part of what the project does. It is a never finished story.

Writing(with)plants workshop in August 

On August 4th, Dr. Wendy Wuyts, one of the postdoctoral researchers in the Ecologies of care-project and the writer of this article, visited Ireland in the first week of August. She organised a workshop in Dublin and she facilitated an afternoon Writing(with)plants workshop around and under the roof of Den Talamh. Wendy is a certified forest therapy guide and a writer. In this workshop, which she already facilitated in Denmark and the Netherlands, she combines the sensory invitations of forest bathing with invitations of creative writing and imagining. Nine people participated in the workshop. After a short introduction, Wendy did a short invitation for sharpening the five senses before we did a short walk around Den Talamh to notice the species that called our attention: creeping thistle, common knapweed and bramble. Together we shared memories, folklore and the many names these plants carry across different languages. Through quiet observation, creative writing and acts of attentive listening, we explored the landscape from their points of view. 

By visiting and engaging with this patch of the landscape, and the more-than human and human care takers, Wendy got some more insights in the history, presence and possible futures of this place’s communities and ecologies… and the broader ecologies of caring (and uncaring) in Ireland and beyond. This case will be integrated in the (open-access) Case Library that we are developing in the Ecologies of Care-project.  

The KinShip Project is located at Tramore Valley Park, South Douglas Road, Cork City, Ireland. This case study is part of the Ecologies of Care series, documenting practices of commons-based ecological stewardship across Europe. Further information on the site’s history: Cork City Council KinShip page and the LennonTaylor KinShip portal. For Nature Network Ireland’s education and conservation programmes: naturenetworkireland.ie. For immediate updates: @kinshipcork on Instagram.

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