THE West Cork History Festival is back in August with a full programme of events.

The major theme for this year’s 10th anniversary festival from August 7th to 9th will be boundaries: setting them and crossing them.

The festival in the grounds of Inish Beg Estate, on the road to Baltimore, will be opened again this year by the Taoiseach, Micheál Martin.

Tickets for individual days and for the weekend have already gone on sale, but half-day tickets won’t be released until the programme is finalised.

The full programme and the schedule for all events will be released closer to the time, but, as always, the festival will begin with a 3pm start on the Friday afternoon.

Writer and political commentator Iain Dale, who has recently edited a collection of profiles of the Taoisigh, will start proceedings in discussion with a panel of three of the contributors to that book.

The panel members include Gary Murphy, who wrote on Charles Haughey, Deirdre Foley, who wrote on Liam Cosgrave, and Stephen Collins, who wrote on Jack Lynch.

Check online for Saturday and Sunday’s events, but who would want to miss an event marking the 300th anniversary of the publication of Gulliver’s Travels in 1726?

Two speakers will discuss very different aspects of Jonathan Swift’s life. Hester Grant’s book, The Twittenham Summer: The Upside-Down World of Three Friends and the Writing of Gulliver’s Travels focuses on the summer of 1726, when Swift arrived in London from Dublin, with a draft of Gulliver’s Travels in his bag. And Adam Tomkins will speak on Swift and the Constitution.