Holly the Border Collie and her Irish Farm

In the hills of western County Mayo lies Glen Keen Farm—which means “gentle glen” in Irish. At the farm, you’ll find a culinary school, tearoom and bakery, petting zoo, and of course, loads of sheep. But the heart and soul of the farm is Holly, sheepherder extraordinaire.

During our time on the Emerald Isle, I decided the whole of Ireland seems like one big sheep farm, with a few towns and cities dotting the island. I understand that in this country of 4.6 million people, there are nearly 4 sheep for every human! On our travels on the west side of Ireland, I saw sheep being herded by four-wheelers, but when you’re running sheep on steep hillsides, motorized vehicles just don’t cut it. That’s where sheep dogs come in.

Which brings us back to Holly. This is a girl who really loves her job. On our visit to Glen Keen Farm, she was the main attraction. When she wasn’t actively herding sheep, she would crouch, one eye on her master, the other on the sheep, poised for the next command. As I understand it, on many sheep farms, the call, “Come away” or “Away” means herd the sheep counter-clockwise, and “Come around” or simply, “Around” means herd clockwise. Jim, the farm’s co-owner explained that Holly couldn’t distinguish between “away” and “around.” So instead of calling “Around,” Jim would call “Come by.” However, Holly, not just being any old border collie, could understand French! Jim also used the calls, “à droit” (to the right) and “à gauche” (to the left) when the fancy struck him. And Holly understood perfectly!

Jim called Holly his best friend—after all, they spent every day together, all day. At his command, she would explode into action. She could get fifty sheep into a pen within a minute or two. Or she could pick one sheep out of a crowd and into a separate pen just as quickly. Sometimes she couldn’t contain herself, and she would start herding even when she was supposed to wait. But at the command “Stay, Holly,” she would instantly stop whatever she was doing. Well, almost instantly. Watching her, I was thinking she would stop herding only with the utmost reluctance. Or to humor Jim. You pick.

Holly and the sheep weren’t the only animals on the farm. We visited the farm’s petting zoo, that included a few hens in a small mobile coop, and one enormous pig. She had her own pen, and a few people braver than I gave her a pet. Another pasture held two donkeys and a pair of Dexter cows. Dexters are a small breed about half the size of the beef cattle we see in the US, and are known for being good for both milk and meat. Jim didn’t mention what the farm used these cows for, only joked that he was scared of them.

After watching Holly’s sheep herding, we had lunch in Glen Keen’s tearoom—basil tomato soup (excellent), ham and egg salad sandwiches, mini-baguettes and buttered scones with jam on top. (Carbs, I found, are big in Ireland!) After lunch we got a brief Irish step-dancing demo from a young lad and lass, and an older fellow did a bit of a clog-shuffle dance. Still, I think the best “dance” of all was watching Holly’s fancy footwork on the hills of Glen Keen Farm. 

Visit the farm online at www.glenkeenfarm.com!

Irish Pirate Queen Lives On!

Grace O’Malley, Ireland’s 16th century Pirate Queen, is still a big celebrity in the West of Ireland. The morning I spent at Westport House in County, Mayo, Grace’s ancestral home, was a fun and educational blast from the past during my recent trip to Ireland.

As the story goes—told with relish by a young, pretty tour guide—Grace, or Grainne O’Maille in Irish Gaelic, was an adventurer from an early age. As a girl, she lopped off her mane of vivid red hair and sneaked onto her father’s ship to work as a seaman. Naturally she was found out, and even now is fondly referred to as “Granuile” (pronounced "Gran-u-ale"), or “Bald Grainne” throughout the West.

Westport House

She grew up to become Chief of the O’Malley clan and a legendary pirate, ruling the seas from her castle on Clare Island, off the coast of Mayo. After her first husband died, she remarried, but apparently Husband #2 didn’t ring her chimes. This Elizabethan-era liberated woman kicked him out and went on her merry way. I’ve always been fond of the lore and legends surrounding Grace/Grainne—so much that I named the main character in my book Mother Love after her!

Here I am next to the Pirate Queen's
 statue near the mansion.

Back to the original Grainne: She owned several castles and fortresses in the area, one of which was on the site of Westport House. The current mansion was built over the ruins of her original home, which is the basement level of the mansion, or “dudgeon.”

The dudgeon is currently rigged up as a kind of hokey, haunted house-pirate ship, with skeletons, spooky lights and a treasure chest. It's not really scary, but it's definitely a highlight of the Pirate Adventure Park on the Westport House grounds. For me, more fun than the dudgeon was a room upstairs--lounging around a dining table were a dozen wax figures of notable Irishmen, Oscar Wilde and W.B. Yeats among them.

You won't find any Downton Abbey type grandeur at Westport House, since many of the furnishings are centuries old. Still, I was really drawn to the place, because Westport House is also the ancestral home of another of the Twelve Clans of Ireland, the Irish noble family of the Brownes! 

Westport House Dudgeon

Pirate Queen strikes a pose in the Dudgeon

Grace’s great-great-granddaughter married into the Browne family. While I wish I could claim some distant, connected-through-marriage relationship to the Pirate Queen, I...can’t. My husband John has traced his family back to Ireland, but has not yet found any direct link to this branch of the Browne nobility, much less to Grainne O'Maille.

Anyway, I've just dived into the book Westport House and The Brownes, by the 10th Marquess of Sligo, to get more detail on the mansion, the family and any additional nuggets about Grainne. You can find out more about Westport House at www.WestportHouse.ie. 

I’ll be posting more highlights of my travels in Ireland, so stay tuned...And if you’ve been to Ireland, I invite you to share your adventures here!

The Goonies Anniversary Celebration inspires a new story for tweens!

The 30th Anniversary of the cult classic The Goonies and my Astoria, Oregon "peeps" have inspired my new fantasy-adventure, The Secret Astoria Scavenger Hunt! It's a family-friendly mystery that includes ghosts and skeletons, old time smuggling, and Astoria's intriguing past...

Book 3 of the Morgan Carey series

I first got the idea for the story when I came across a newspaper article about the writer visiting a grown-over graveyard. He stumbled upon a girl's gravestone that read, "Forget me not, is all I ask." Later, he saw a photo of that same grave...and in the photo was the ghostly outline of a young girl. I was further inspired by memories of a friend's home when I was a kid in St. Cloud, Minnesota. The house had little passageways between the bedrooms! 

Since I'm a big fan of The Goonies movie, all the Victorian homes, historical sites, and fascinating nooks and crannies of Astoria, Oregon sealed the deal...Morgan, the main character of my paranormal series for tweens, needed an adventure where The Goonies had been filmed! 

While I was writing the book, I was also reading Anne of Green Gables. I was so taken by the sweetness and innocence of that story, that I wanted to reflect that simpler time in my  new book.

A tale that also touches upon the ways kids find their place in the world, The Secret Astoria Scavenger Hunt is available in print and ebook on Amazon!

The Glass is Always Half Full

Kerry, the heroine of my new novel, The Hopeful Romantic, and I have something in common: we believe that things will always turn out okay.

Sunny optimism is almost a requirement for gardeners (what do you know, Kerry gardens too!). How else can you stick seeds in the ground every spring, and trust that plants will sprout and grow from those seeds and eventually feed you? Living on Berryridge Farm, surrounded by a forest in the middle of the Foothills, takes an even more optimistic spirit. John and I grow plants that we trust will survive, despite the constant onslaught of critters determined to steal, gobble up, or otherwise demolish them: deer, rabbits, birds, mice, voles, slugs and our tiny "friends" the aphids and cabbage worms.

Fencing, nets, raised and screened beds, and row cover only goes so far--so we're always glad when a new predator shows up. (Except for mountain lions.) Last week, John saw an animal we'd never before encountered, some kind of skinny rodent with a bushy tail. He of course Googled it, and discovered it's a kind of weasel. Normally, the thought of any more rodents on our place will put me in a tailspin, but apparently, these weasels eat voles. So it's all good!

Anyway, as I dive into another planting season, looking at the bright side gets me through. I'm just sure that this year, my tomato plants won't get blight, that the robins won't sneak inside the nets and devour our blueberries. or slugs won't mow down my new rows of teensy spinach seedlings. I'm heading outside now, but not before I put on my rose-colored glasses!

Mother's Day Goodreads Giveaway!

What's more appropriate for Mother's Day than mothers and love? Maybe...a story about both? Starting today, you can sign up for a free, autographed copy of my novel Mother Love! The Goodreads giveaway runs from May 5 to May 12.

Mother Love, the second novel of the Village of Ballydara series, is about falling in love...or trying not to. It's also about mothers, traditional and not-so-traditional. Here's more about the story...

In this rollicking tale, meet brash, irreverent Grainne Larkin, a modern Irish heroine juggling family relationships and the man she can’t forget…   

Grainne wants three things: her mother's love, a baby, and Rafe Byrne—not necessarily in that order. On Rafe's wedding day, Grainne is keen for a fresh start—why not settle for the nice guy in the wings who’s successful, and mad about her too? Just as Grainne is poised to get her future on track, her family pressures her to leave Dublin for the quaint little village of Ballydara, to help her mother launch a B&B. Given her turbulent relationship with her mam, the last thing Grainne wants to do is live with her.

But when Rafe, her old flame, turns up in Ballydara a free man, Grainne takes a page from her favorite fictional heroine Scarlett O’Hara: she plunges into a no-holds-barred pursuit of the child she wants so badly. But Grainne soon discovers that opening her heart—to Rafe, to the prospect of motherhood, and to her mother—is the biggest risk of all… 

See more about Mother Love, my new novel The Hopeful Romantic, and the Village of Ballydara series at www.susancolleenbrowne.com! 

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up…Your Homestead

Marie Kondo, author of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up  has a lot of wisdom. In fact, when it comes to decluttering, she’s nailed it: Keep what makes you happy and brings you joy, and let go of what doesn’t. So simple, so elegant...right?

I only wish it were that easy! Tidying up Berryridge Farm, I mean. The stumbling block to making magic happen is that country life, food gardening, and generally living closer to the land requires a ginormous amount of…stuff.

My wake-up call occurred recently, when we undertook a major muck-out of our shop-garage: spring cleaning, de-cluttering, and generally tidying up the place. Just having finished Kondo's book, I was sure the job would be pretty straightforward, although (embarrassing disclosure here) we'd left the shop to its own devices for a couple of years. Trying to follow her suggestions, I discovered that all the good intentions didn't matter, because the stuff  is in charge:

If you, like us, are running a small country place without benefit of a tractor, rototiller, or any other large, labor-saving equipment, you need a lot of hand tools. A lot. And you will find that you never met a tool of any kind you didn’t like. 

Engaging in all kinds of homesteady activities—cutting and splitting wood, digging garden beds, clearing ground and cutting brush—you will find that you’re always needing this or that tool: a new hatchet or splitting maul, cultivator, shovel (after you’ve worked your previous tools so hard you’ve rendered them unusable) to at least try to keep up with your workload.

If you’re not having enough trouble keeping your place tidy, you always find yourself needing a bit of wire, a length of rope or twine, a chunk of pipe, a piece of lumber oh, how I could go on. And where are you going to put it all? Well, in addition to all your chores, you'll need to keep building more and more sheds to hold your stuff.  

You may ask, how in the world did you get yourself into this mess? Well, the reason you have so much stuff is directly related to the Number 1 Rule of Homesteading: you never, ever toss something out because you might need it…Someday.

Which goes along with the Number 2 Rule of Homesteading: you never, ever toss out a busted tool or broken piece of equipment because you might find the time to fix it…Someday.

If you’re also married to an ardent hobbyist (say, a sportsperson, a woodworker, or keeper of the family media archives) who’s too busy to do these fun, relaxing activities but has many, many plans to take them up when he or she has the time, you discover that on a homestead, Someday is a hotly anticipated date. 

I was a very tidy person before we moved out to the Boonies. My house and yard was in order both literally and figuratively. Now, however, each day I cultivate not the habit of tidying up, but being able to walk past a mess without my tidy gene having a spasm.

And here’s the other thing: there’s a really, really unfortunate result of not finding the time, energy, or fire-in-the-belly to tidy up your country place—but that’s for another day.   

International Day of Happiness!

What a happy coincidence (or not), that this year, the first day of Spring coincides with the third annual International Day of Happiness! I'm celebrating the day by sharing my favorite "happy" quote (which I found after an hour of tearing my office apart but it was worth it!):

"Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy." W.B. Yeats

Today, I'm very happy to announce that my 3rd Irish novel, The Hopeful Romantic, is now on Amazon pre-order! I imagine that the angsty fellow Yeats was talking about, whoever he is, probably would not have appreciated today's festival of happiness. But I hope you're having a day full of joy, serendipity, and hopes for a fun Spring ahead!