'Magnificent' book about Offaly river is launched in Kilcormac

A NEW publication “The Silver River of Slieve Bloom” by John Feehan was launched last Thursday in Kilcormac Community Centre.
This excellently written, beautifully produced and inspiring book was launched by Ella McSweeney, journalist and broadcaster.
John Feehan covers a wide scope in this book, including the natural, built and cultural heritage, focussing on the evolution of the Silver River of the Slieve Blooms and the landscape in its catchment area.
John first started exploring the Silver River in the 1970s and this book is the outcome of many decades of exploring and researching and reflects new interpretations of its geology.
For those that have been walking the routes upstream and downstream of Cadamstown for many years exploring Paul’s Lane Loop, the Offaly Way and working up to Spink, John's new book will offer many new insights.
The publication has many illustrations with great additions of paintings by Brigid Birney and Jock Nichol, photos by John Gill and reconstruction drawings of Barnascart by Philip Armstrong. There is a section remembering May Scully by Richard Jack.
The book is published by Offaly County Council and supported by Ceangal, a Heritage Council programme. The book is full colour, highly illustrated, hard back and available for €20.
The Community Centre enjoyed a big turnout for the launch. Cllr John Leahy, Cathaoirleach of Offaly County Council, said Kilcormac is his home town. “We in Kilcormac are delighted that this book is drawing attention to our greatly loved Silver River. The Silver River is a huge part of our town. A number of us have done a lot of work in recent years enhancing it. We are hoping that John Feehan's book will inspire more grants and more works for the Silver River.” He said the author has “a wonderful gift which we are fortunate to witness. For many years he has written many wonderful books highlighting the natural heritage of the Midlands and the nation."
The Cathaoirleach also praised Amanda Pedlow. “I don't know where we would be without her. She does so much work and has lots of infectious enthusiasm.”
Catherine Casey of the Heritage Council said she lives in Birr and she's very aware of the great work which John has done over the years. “Through his books John has given us a priceless gift,” she remarked. “This latest book is a celebration of a river and an invitation to explore it.”
Launching the book, Ella McSweeney said it was “an immense privilege for me to say a few words to launch John’s latest book. I’ve said it before, but he is, to my mind, nature’s great storyteller - a keen observer, recorder, and biographer of our natural environment. A man who goes into the field, offering direct contact with the world, privileging first-hand experience over abstraction. Thanks to John’s work, we come to understand that the landscape itself has a story, and it is a story only understood over timescales beyond our wildest imaginations. The Silver River, if it were a person, would feel a profound sense of honour to have been chosen by John as both muse and teacher. This book is more than a scientific treatise: it is a love letter to a river, a silver thread weaving together geology, ecology, culture, and history.
“In this book, on telling the story of the Silver River, he goes deep and far. He invites us back in time, encouraging us to see the layers and layers of events that lead to what we see today. And so, the birth story of the Silver River begins deep in time, 425 million years ago, in the Silurian seas that once covered what is now Slieve Bloom. 
“As John so eloquently writes, 'Rocks can be thought of as the backbone of the body of the landscape'. John does not stop with the deep past. He focuses in, acts as our magnifying glass, into the life in the river. The Nature of Letterluna reads like a field guide written by a poet-naturalist. We meet stoneflies, black-fly larvae, mayflies, and white-clawed crayfish - all shimmering parts of the river’s intricate web. He reminds us that trout and salmon once thrived here, and though now rare, they remain a beacon of hope and possibility. They can return, if we want them to.
“As always, John gives equal reverence to the flora - ancient sessile oaks, snakeskin liverworts, and rare mosses play their part in this living tapestry. The exhaustive vascular plant checklist, spanning over 200 species, underscores the Silver River’s role as a corridor of life here in the centre of Ireland.
“The Silver River has always been more than water and rock. It has come to define and shape us too. John traces the human thread alongside the natural one. From its older name, “Mountain River,” to its 19th-century designation as the 'Silver River'. Mills at Cadamstown, Ballyboy, and Kilcormac harnessed its energy for industry, and communal wells and monastic sites remind us of its role in daily life and spirituality - all of it nourishing that intangible part of what it means to live a meaningful life, what it means to be connected. Through photographs (John Gill, dairy farmer), beautiful art by Jock Nichol and stories, John's book captures a landscape where human endeavour and natural forces converge. We see the river as a partner in community, shaping identity, and memory - a connector across generations.
“One of the most urgent and powerful threads running through the book is the call for stewardship. John does not merely catalogue loss or critique past mistakes - that would leave us all with no hope. Instead he highlights resilience and the possibilities for renewal, including community-led restoration and ongoing ecological monitoring, pointing to a brighter future, a river reclaimed. This is a story of a river that is injured, but can thrive again – but in order to do that, we must relate to it, engage with the landscape, read the landscape, be attentive students, field workers, observers and guardians.
“May this new book inspire us to follow the silver thread ourselves - through school field trips, citizen-science surveys, or simply quiet afternoons spent by the river. Let it remind us that true understanding, like stewardship, begins with intimacy, attention, and curiosity and the capacity to feel. As John says, to understand a place we must go out, observe, and listen. But in the end, we must as humans remember one thing: the Silver River came first. We must put it first in an attempt to allow it to return to its full potential. This book is the start of that. Here’s to the Silver River, to John and the brighter future that awaits it.”
Addressing the Community Centre gathering, John said it’s almost exactly 50 years since he had the great privilege of studying the geology of Slieve Bloom as a postgraduate student in Trinity College. For over four years after that his job was to reach into every corner of the mountains where rock might have poked through to the surface, and then bring together the clues, the pieces of the jigsaw, that told the story of the formation and subsequent history of the mountains, to form a more or less coherent picture. But he soon began to understand two things. First of all, that in looking at the rocks he was seeing less than half of the story; even if he included the flora and fauna they supported. The other half was the human story. Slieve Bloom is what its people have made it down all the centuries, and a parallel investigation was required to assemble all the pieces of this jigsaw together into a coherent story, and then place it over the first jigsaw. And then you would begin to see how they are really two sides of the same coin. And then, at the end of the four years, he wrote a book about it.
So he began to understand two things. And here’s the second thing he began to understand early on: You couldn’t fit the whole story of all the different places in Slieve Bloom into one book. Each place would require its own book in order to give the colour and flavour that only a more detailed telling could achieve. “And that’s part of the background of how this book came about,” he continued, “and if deadlines such as funding and the length of the individual human life had not been a constraining factor it might have grown into a book many times its present modest length.”
He said he chose the Silver River as the subject of the book because it was the first river, out of the dozen other rivers and valleys that radiate from Slieve Bloom, that he really studied. He studied its landscape, its catchment and its people, and in the process he opened a door here and now into that ancient geological world.
“As for what my hopes are for the book. First and foremost that you will read it, bits of it anyway, and that, as those of you who live in the shadow of the Silver River flick through the pages, you may come on something new, something that helps you to appreciate this special place that bit more. Then, on top of that, I hope it will be read by those who can help in restoring access. One of the biggest changes that have taken place over the last 150 years in the catchment of the Silver River has been the gradual and scarcely noticed restriction of access. It never ceases to amaze me when I look carefully at the detailed six-inch maps of the Ordnance Survey how open the river once was for nearly all of its course between Hugh O’Neill’s Well where it rises at the head of Glenletter and its confluence with the Brosna. With that restriction of access there is a loosening of the connectedness with the natural world the river represents for those who live close to it or come to visit. We hear a lot of talk these days about the importance of digital tools to increase our ‘connectedness’. But along with that artificial connectedness comes the danger of a profound disconnect with the real world, of which we are part, body and soul: and the psychological and spiritual impoverishment the ever-growing restriction of time spent engaging with the real world brings. Let me read a sentence written by the Nobel prizewinner René Dubos: “Human beings need primeval nature to re-establish contact now and then with their biological origins; a sense of continuity with the past and with the rest of creation is probably essential to the long-range sanity of the human species.
“I referred on page 52 in the book an incident from the life of Ignatius Loyola: where on one occasion he sat down to rest on the bank of a river to rest, his eyes fixed on the running water; and as he sat there he experienced an intense and sudden enlightenment: for which, forever after, he could never find words to describe, except to say that all things seemed to have been made new. I hope the book can help you to find something in your engagement with the Silver River which will possess an echo that will lead you where it led St Ignatius, somewhere you too may find yourself unable to find the right words for what it means to you.”
John said the book owes an “outstanding debt to our Heritage Officer, Amanda Pedlow, without whom there would be no book, such has been her close involvement and support from the very beginning. If there would be no book without Amanda, there would certainly be no book without Róisín, who made it possible for me to come back from Africa to undertake my study of Slieve Bloom all of 50 years ago.”
The Silver River of Slieve Bloom will be available for sale from the Kilcormac Development Association, Offaly History book shop on Bury Quay Tullamore and their online bookshop, Midland Books on High Street and SuperValu in Birr.

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