I was born and raised in a small farming community just outside the village of Portglenone in Co. Antrim, N.Ireland. Life in the early nineteen fifties in that close-knit rural community was very different from the thrust and frenzy of today.

Having studied English Language and Literature at Queen’s University Belfast, in the late nineteen seventies, I went on to spend the next forty years in teaching in the south of England. My final position was as Principal of a secondary school in Reading, Berkshire from which I retired in 2012.

I moved back to N. Ireland with my husband Geoff in 2014 and we settled near Randalstown in another rural community, not far from where I grew up. We divide ourselves between there and our coastal holiday home in Ballycastle.

Not surprisingly perhaps these two place- types reflect strongly on the person I am. I have always loved nature and the sea-the rural and the coastal, and how these are portrayed in poetry, prose, art and music.

In retirement, I have developed a love of gardening and a fascination with the seasonal movement of things. I have also joined a small, local writing group and begun to experiment in prose and poetry. I find great satisfaction in playing with the nuances and the sounds of language and the evocative power of strong imagery.

Moonlit Imaginings

Late September, the evening closing in

had caught me unawares

lights twinkled on and the clink from boats

brought magic to this little seaside town

a spectral darkness gathered itself 

cloaking the harbour, settling in for the night

My familiar walk along this coastal road

assumed a strangeness that night

its shadows, shapes and sounds so altered 

in the silvery glow of the moonlight

that glittered and glistened off the sea.

 I stood to take it in

The immense Atlantic growling, far out

and the soft, seductive siffling of waves on the sand below

like a grain of sand my life

amid this undulating music of eternity

 Fair Head loomed into view

 like a great black giant or sea-horse

heaving its menacing mass shoreward

as in some ancient sea-faring tryst.

its rough-cut face leered as in ugly glee

at those tragic lives claimed down through the centuries

Further out, the length and bulk of Rathlin lay prostrate 

its ancient form straining to support its own Valhalla

proud resting place for seafarers of old 

fishermen, islanders, ancestral foes

those great sea-warriors, perished on the whale-road*

Such thoughts, imagination stirred

lively as the dazzling flash from the East lighthouse



I turned for home 

wrapped in the shawls of moonlight

dancing on the ocean. 



   *hwael-weg (Old English,Anglo-Saxon)