The Last Woodland Walk

A friend took this photo of me the day I met John Willmott. John was one of my oldest Irish friends, and last week, I attended his burial under the trees.

On my second trip to Ireland in 2012, I took a “sacred Ireland” tour. John had been hired to be our guide to Carrowkeel, followed by a few hours at his cottage and tree labyrinth at Carrowcrory. I was never the same.

After climbing down from Carrowkeel, we took our minibus to his cottage nearby.

I had no idea what to expect.



John Willmott at Carrowcrory Cottage, 2012


Some of the women were excited to learn how to make a Bridget’s Cross.






I had no idea what a Bridget’s Cross was.



Others wanted to hear John’s partner Claire Roche play the harp and sing old songs.





Normally, I would have been sitting at her feet, but I needed to get outside and take in the view.

This is Keash, in Sligo, one of many places in Ireland where the goddess’s breasts are visible on the horizon. Here, her pregnant belly rises to the sky, and she throws her head back in labor. I contemplated that screaming mountain outside John’s house and tried to integrate what I had experienced that morning on Carrowkeel.

We had crawled into a neolithic passage tomb, and sat under a corbeled stone ceiling, dry and water tight for these thousands of years. Inside, John held a Tibetan bowl bell in his lap. He ran ran the stick around the edge of the bowl, filling the room with sounds on sound, casting a spell, setting us apart from the mundane world.

What is this place for? we asked him, when we could speak again.

It depends on when you’re asking, he told us.

Maybe it started as a grove of trees at the top of a hill, and when those trees died, they were memorialized as a ring of wooden pillars. When the pillars rotted, they were replaced with standing stones. Some hundreds or thousands of years latter, someone moved the ring stones to build this cave or womb facing the summer solstice sunset. Uses change. Beliefs change.





Later, because it had become sacred, people left the bones of their dead, just like we do in churches. Then the entrance was lost, and people only knew it as a cairn. They climbed Carrowkeel carrying sacred stones, building the cairn higher, and lay on their backs to search the skies, or the spirits within, or the sidhe for inspiration.

John’s approach to Irish mythology and archeology was new to me. I had come in search of facts and knowledge. Seeing and touching the places I had read about, like a pilgrim and a collector. Because of John, I found poetry instead. His approach to Irish culture became mine too. I’m pretty sure this was the first day of the trip. Spiritually, I never left Ireland. 

On many later Irish vacations, I caught up with John a few times on a Sunday for “Bards in the Woods.” He would organize a “woodland walk” in a public forest or old estate. People would bring their poems and songs. John would read his poetry, mostly about trees.


Then there would be a fantastic potluck picnic. It was the nearest thing to a church that I would ever join. (“Best of” Bards in the Woods.)


One time, the Bards in the Woods looked for a lost holy well he had seen on the Ordnance map. We found it, choked with its own vandalized stones. To the scandal of a trained archeologist who happened to be with us, we lifted the stones from the well and restored it.








Since I’ve moved to Ireland, John had to stop hosting Bards in the Woods. Even though they were just informal gatherings, he “advertised” them on facebook, so landowners and public works functionaries wanted to charge him money, and get insurance; so he gave them up. John replaced the Bards in the Woods with Sunday Sessions on Youtube. He always encouraged people to share their songs and poetry with each other; now we did it online, which was particularly good during lockdown.

Back in 2015 John and Claire did a West Coast tour in support of the book. We held a house concert in Santa Cruz, which served as the launch party for his book, Bathing in the Fae’s Breath.

John and Claire see the book for the first time. 

His book is an Irish version of shinrin-yoku, Japanese Forest Bathing. 

Claire’s harps in our living room 

A few years ago John had a stroke and I visited him at Sligo hospital. It was my first trip out after the chemo and lockdown. 

Sometime after that, John moved from Carrowcrory and continued his work, sometimes interrupted by a hospital stays. 

Recently he started a substack called Nature Folklore where he published his extensive research, filtered through his syncretic, scientific, and poetic mind. He has seen plenty of weird shit in his life, and met a lot of people with fantastic tales and full blown fantasies about Ireland. He always listened, curious and never pedantic. These writings pulled it all together. 

He was writing a book. His chapters in Nature Folklore about First Harvests, Bridgid, the Sidhe, Bealtaine, Midsummer Joy, Winter Magic are the best I’ve ever read on these topics. My favorite he called “Ale House Wives,” which used folklore and history to draw a thread from the brewers of ancient Persia, to medieval beer makers with pointed hats, to the creation of sacred wells, where a taboos protected the water’s purity. Combined with what we know about the herbal concoctions known as “wine” in ancient times, I now know where witches came from. I hope his family is able to publish the book someday. 

In March, he posted he was in the hospital again, and then came the sad news from his family. My feed filled with grief of my fellow John Willmott fans, and a few lovely photos.

His burial was planned a week hence, in Knockma Woodland Burial in Mayo.

I decided to go. 

John’s gravesite. 

As we walked to where his wicker coffin waited, we looked just like Bards in the Woods. Mostly older folks, folklore nerds, healers, cooks, poets, musicians, seekers and teachers. 

Someone standing next to me said, “This is the last woodland walk.” We sang “Wild Mountain Thyme.”

Everyone said they didn’t know that woodland burials were possible in Ireland, and how perfect that John’s body would become a forest.  

John’s son read a poem from Bathing in the Fae’s Breath. 

When my spirit departs from my body,
It will rejoin the river of spirt that flows
not to any particular place,
but to all places at the same time. 

My body will rejoin the earth
and commune as one, once again.

A tree will be born from where my body faded,
and melted from its unique singular vessel
into an acceptance of letting go,
no longer protecting what it does not own.

What was “my” temple
will nourish another body again.

The tree grows, holding and caring for
another singular drop of spirit,
separated from that timeless river,
to guide the tree into reaching out and sharing.

From that tree another living temple being
will be nourished again. 

John’s walking stick at Carrowkeel, 2012.