Seeing What's Hidden: Uncovering Ireland's Ancient Ways of Knowing

In Seeing What’s Hidden, celebrated, internationally bestselling author of Thirty-Two Words for Field Manchán Magan explores the beauty of precolonial Ireland, finding resonance between ancient Irish beliefs and the interconnectedness of Indigenous cultures around the world.

Ireland may be a modern European country, but its traditions, folktales, and mythologies reveal a relationship to the natural world that much more closely resembles global Indigenous traditions of reciprocity, respect, and reverence. Before Ireland’s conquest, first by Vikings and later by the English, the island was shrouded in fog and mystery, bordered by coastline and covered in green, damp forest.

Manchán reminds readers that Ireland was once a culture with a deeply spiritual relationship to the earth and sea. Its people, he reveals, are still very much connected to the old ways and stories. By remembering and embracing these ways, we can create a renewed relationship with land, tradition, and each other.

“Wholly powerful meditations. . . . Never more than now have we been invited into these musings; these questions; these observations. Never more than now, in this haunting, vital book, have we been asked to come and take our place around the fire.”
—Kerri ní Dochartaigh, author of Thin Places

“Manchán showed the Irish people what is hidden within ourselves, our language, our place names and our culture. . . . He lit the spark of curiosity in so many to rediscover who we are . . . and now it is up to us to carry that torch on in his honour.”
—David “Indiana Stones” Keohan, author of The Wind Beneath the Stone

“Seeing What’s Hidden is choral. Scores of voices and tongues, living and dead, sing and speak through it: [Manchán’s] own voice, the voices of the land, the placenames, poems and songs which [he’s] called back for us.”
—Robert Macfarlane, author of Is a River Alive?