Rosemary Barry writes: The Lismore Dance Band rounded off the Taproot season with their eclectic mixture of tunes. A different member of the group introduced each short set with interesting background information. Mairi Campbell explained how Scottish folk fiddling...
Rosemary Barry writes: Renowned bagpiper, academic and broadcaster, Gary West and photographer Barryjohn Stewart, introduced a large and keen audience to Martyn Bennett, who was born in Newfoundland in 1971 to a folklorist mother and geologist father who moved to...
Rosemary Barry writes: Peggy Nicholson (nee MacDonald) and her brother Lachlan entertained a packed house when she gave her talk on Lismore place names. With maps illustrating her examples she began at Point and journeyed south to the lighthouse combining explanations...
Rosemary Barry writes: To a packed house Katy Crossan and Mairi Campbell provided a well organised and entertaining session alternating between fiddle music and Gaelic singing. Mairi described travelling to Cape Breton Island in Canada and the Scottish culture and...
Rosemary Barry writes; Those who braved the cold were treated to an extraordinary session as Tony Currie took us on his journey from buying a record label to engaging his own orchestra and being his own record producer. That buying the Pye ‘label’ wasn’t...
Rosemary Barry writes: It was unfortunate that the weather had been so bad and that the 11th January was particularly unpleasant with disrupted ferry crossings. And the academic sounding title of the talk itself was not one to encourage the leaving of a cosy home on...
Rosemary Barry writes Islanders turned out in force to support local singer songwriter Shona Wright and there was almost standing room only. Shona began with an old favourite - The Wrong Side of the Moon -describing how it feels when the day starts with burnt toast...
Rosemary Barry writes: Master piper Angus Nicolson fascinated those who had braved the dark and stormy afternoon to hear his take on ‘Piping – What’s it all about? With great enthusiasm he interspersed the technicalities of tuning and the extraordinary elegance and...
As a prelude to Douglas Breignan’s Taproot talk - The Daily Grind - on 19 October 2025 he led a group of walkers to some significant milling sites the previous morning at 10.30. He spoke about the Mill at Balnagown before his guided walk to Baligrundle and Fiart...
6 October 2024 Taproot began with Noman Bissell launching his book Living on an Island: Expressing the Earth which combines personal memoir with an in-depth account of the history of the geopoetics movement, seen in particular from Scotland. It is this poet’s...
Taproot, the winter festival which runs on Sunday afternoons at the Heritage Centre from October to March, finished this year in June with a performance of an original play by Jennifer Baker from the Lismore Primary School children. The 2023/4 festival was very wide...
October 2022 to March 2023 On the first Sunday of every month from October to March 22/ 23, 6 talented artists performed an ‘intimate gig’ in the museum room starting around 6.45pm. Stephen Gallager 8.01.23 creator and producer of...