Imagining Sligo’s First People

Susan O’Keeffe, Executive Director of the Yeats Society, will interview award-winning author Monica Corish about the research behind her debut novel “LeafLight Moon – a novel of prehistoric Ireland”. The novel, set 6000 years ago in the rich prehistoric landscapes of Sligo and the North-West, tells the story of the fateful encounter between Ireland’s first farmers and the dark-skinned, blue-eyed hunter-gatherers of the Hearth of MotherMountain – the mountain we call Knocknarea.

The author will discuss an aspect of prehistory which has received growing attention in recent years, i.e. that Ireland’s hunter-gatherers disappeared from the genetic record soon after the arrival of the early farmers. The discussion will also focus on the many local archaeological discoveries that inspired LeafLight Moon; and on the ways the untamed Irish landscape, with its insular, ‘impoverished’ flora and fauna, began to change with the ‘dawn of agriculture’.