WHAT can the memories of local people tell us about a changing landscape?

Porpoises once known locally as ‘black pigs’ off Carraigmore. Children picking cockles and periwinkles. The sound of cuckoo and corncrake on the walk to school. A road erased from the landscape by Hurricane Debbie.

These are among the memories being gathered into the Courtmacsherry Nature Memory Archive, a new community heritage project which will be launched in Courtmacsherry Community Hall on Wednesday September 9th at 7pm.

The project is attempting to build a living map of remembered nature and place; bringing local voices, stories, sound, artwork and personal memory into conversation with maps of the landscape itself.

Developed by Courtmacsherry Development Association alongside the Courtmacsherry Community Biodiversity Action Plan, the archive asks people to remember the natural world they encountered in their everyday lives: what they heard, caught, gathered, grew, worked with, played amongst and have witnessed change over time.

The project has been facilitated by community artist Tara O’Donoghue, working collaboratively with local people through memory-sharing, conversation, mapping and creative activities.

‘A place is more than a map. It is memory, sound, smells, weather, work, wildlife, encounters, stories and change,’ she said.

‘That idea has become central to the project. Historic six-inch mapping is being layered with a contemporary digital map of Courtmacsherry, while memories and recordings are gradually being connected back to the places where they belong.’

Alongside the digital work, community participants have drawn and written their own memories onto maps, creating another view of Courtmacsherry - one shaped by lived experience.

The launch will also mark the publication of Courtmacsherry Nature Memories, a new 44-page illustrated zine bringing together some of the extraordinary material gathered so far.

Memories move between land and sea: collecting carrageen and oarweed; threshing and meitheal; salmon fishing; childhood swimming places; sprat covering the rocks; hedgehogs once encountered in abundance; eels in a village stream; and birds whose presence or absence has become part of people’s memory of the landscape. But the publication is not intended to be the finished archive.

The September launch marks a beginning rather than an ending. Over the coming months, the Nature Memory Archive will continue to gather interviews, local stories, environmental memories and sounds from around Courtmacsherry, adding new voices and places to the evolving map.

The project is particularly interested in the knowledge that can sit quietly within ordinary memory: when particular birds were heard, where people gathered food, old paths and place names, changes in fishing and farming, wildlife once taken for granted, and species people have begun noticing only in more recent years.

Together, these individual recollections can reveal something larger about how both Courtmacsherry and people’s relationship with its natural world have changed over time.

The public is invited to come along on September 9th to listen, explore the maps and archive, see the new publication and perhaps contribute another memory to the evolving archive.

The Courtmacsherry Nature Memory Archive is developed by Courtmacsherry Development Association alongside the Community Biodiversity Action Plan. The project has also been supported by Cork County Council and the Heritage Council through the County Cork Heritage Grant Scheme 2026.