A hundred thousand thank you’s to Monaghan Tidy Towns who commissioned Inniskeen artist, Geraldine Martin, to paint fellow Inniskonian Patrick Kavanagh’s poem ‘Canal Bank Walk’ onto the fence down at Sheriff’s Bridge (near the Armagh Road end of the greenway).  Over the past few months, weather allowing, Geraldine has been quietly adding lines of text and populating the spaces with all manner of quare creatures – including Kavanagh himself, who wrote his canal poems whilst recuperating from cancer treatment by lying on the banks of the Grand Canal near his home in Dublin.

Kavanagh later attributed his spiritual re-awakening, his re-connection with nature and with the ability to look afresh at ordinary things and see the extraordinary in them as he had once been able to as a young man, to his time lying on the canal banks, often with his shoes and socks off,  surrounded once again by nature and allowing himself to become immersed in it.

Today they call this ‘mindfulness’ and pay a fortune to be shown how to achieve it………..

Why not take a stroll along the Ulster Canal Greenway and let Patrick and Geraldine transport you into a world where ‘life pours ordinary plenty’……