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Walks and ways in Northern Ireland

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Knowing and Ignorance

To know anything well involves a profound sensation of ignorance.

John Ruskin from ‘Modern Painters’

This entry was posted on 22nd September 2025 by charlie.

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Words for Ways

Ye mists and exhalations that now rise

From hill or steaming lake, dusky or grey,

Till the sun paint your fleecy skirts with gold,

In honour to the world's great author rise .

John Milton from "Morning Hymn - Paradise Lost"

Words for Ways

A gap in a hedge, a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the junction of four small fields, these are as much as a man can fully experience.

Patrick Kavanagh from "Kavanagh's Weekly" 24th May 1952

Words for Ways

I have traversed Ireland to and fro from end to end, and from sea to sea. Mostly on foot, for that is the only way to see and get to know intimately any country.

Robert Lloyd Praeger from "The Way that I Went"

Words for Ways

It is better to have nothing to do with seals unless you are willing to do well by them

Traditional saying

Words for Ways

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

T. S. Eliot from Four Quartets 'Little Gidding'

Words for Ways

There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.

G. K. Chesterton from 'Heritics'

Words for Ways

God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools.

John Muir from 'The American Forests'

Words for Ways

Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning.

John Ruskin from 'the Seven Lamps of Architecture'

Words for Ways

To know anything well involves a profound sensation of ignorance.

John Ruskin from 'Modern Painters'

Words for Ways

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Ludwig Wittgenstein from 'Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus'

Words for Ways

To become dwellers in the land... to come to know
the earth, fully and honestly, the crucial and perhaps
only and all-encompassing task is to understand the
place, the immediate, specific place where we live.

Kirkpatrick Sale from "Dwellers in the Land"

Words for Ways

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Gerard Manley Hopkins from Inversnaid

Words for Ways

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;

William Wordsworth from "The World Is Too Much With Us"

Words for Ways

Stand at the crossroads and look;
ask for the ancient paths,
ask where the good way is, and walk in it,
and you will find rest for your souls…

Jeremiah (6.16) Bible, New Intermational Version

Words for Ways

The seabirds push out against the negative. They are pregnant with meaning and are assertions in a world of denials. They concentrate beauty and coherence. They embody genius. They are the opposite of entropy and emblems of hope.

Adman Nicolson from "The Seabird's Cry"

Words for Ways

Ordinarily, I go to the woods alone,

with not a single friend,

for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore unsuitable.

Mary Oliver from "Swan: Poems and Prose Poems"

Words for Ways

That Pharaoh's wisdom o'er again, 'is sooth of lose-and-win;
For "up an' down an' round," said 'e, "goes all appointed things,
An' losses on the roundabouts means profits on the swings!"

Patrick R Chalmers from "Green Days and Blue Days" (1912)

Words for Ways

THERE IS NO WEALTH BUT LIFE. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others.

John Ruskin from "Unto this Last" (1860)

Words for Ways

The path is made in the walking of it

Zhuanzi

Words for Ways

Herein lies the delicate task of the trail-builder: to capture a sense of the wild, to bring order to an experience that is by definition disordered. It is akin to catching a butterfly with one's bare hands. Cup too gently and the butterfly will flutter away, but clap too hard and the butterfly will cease to be.

Robert Moor from "On Trails"

Words for Ways

There is a kinship of the fields that gives to the living the breath of the dead. The earth opened in the spring, opens in all springs. Nameless, ancient, many-lived, we reach through ages with the seed.

Wendell Berry from Rising

Words for Ways

I'd give the collar of an Irish king
for one wet catkin jigging loosely in the spring
when I am weary of the labelled bird
and want the song and not the latin word.

John Hewitt from 'Conacre'

Words for Ways

A place is a location made of memories and possibilities

Taken from "Celtic Daily Payer" vol 2

Words for Ways

To be quiet even wordless, in a good place is a better gift than poetry.

Wendell Berry from Sabbeth Poems

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