Ten Years of Ireland: The 2027 Magical Irish Countryside Calendar

There are places that stay with you long after you have left them: a flower-lined boreen, an old stone bridge, a field glowing beneath a sudden break in the clouds. A photograph can hold one of those moments. A calendar lets it return to you, quietly, every day for a month.

That simple idea has been at the heart of my Moods of Ireland calendars for ten years. The 2027 Mystical Moods of Ireland: Magical Irish Countryside Special Edition brings together twelve photographs chosen from a decade of travelling, watching and waiting for the Irish landscape to reveal one of its many moods.

A Project That Began with the Books

In July 2015, I was recovering from an illness and temporarily unable to go wandering through the countryside with my camera. The enforced pause gave me time to revisit earlier projects. Readers had been asking about calendars, although I confessed at the time that I had always thought they were a bit “dated” — pun intended.

I decided to create a set for 2016 based on the first four books in my Mystical Moods of Ireland series. Each calendar carried the atmosphere of its companion volume: Celtic skies, Irish mist, rainbows, sunrises, country roads, historic ruins and the intense greens of the landscape.

The calendars soon developed a life of their own. Over the years, I explored Irish wildflowers, blessings and proverbs, Celtic crosses, castles, bridges, Atlantic seascapes, the Aran Islands and local County Clare villages. At one point, the collection had grown to thirteen different themes.

Yet Magical Irish Countryside always remained close to the original impulse: to share the Ireland I encounter beyond the famous viewpoints, where an ordinary road, a stone wall or a break in the weather can become the entire story.

What Ten Years Have Taught Me

Choosing photographs for a calendar from my archive of more than 100,000 images is unlike choosing one image to hang on a wall. A calendar photograph lives in a home for a month. It must continue to offer something after the first glance.

That does not always mean a grand landmark. Often it is a small detail that keeps the image alive: rain shining on a narrow road, Montbretia and Purple Loosestrife leaning into a boreen, rowan berries marking the turn toward autumn, or dark stone catching a brief wash of sunlight.

The weather does much of the arranging. Ireland’s light can change the character of a place in minutes. Fields brighten beneath heavy cloud. Mist softens the far side of the Shannon Estuary. A rainbow appears over wildflowers and is gone before there is time to reconsider the composition.

Readers have shown me another side of the calendars. They have travelled far beyond County Clare—to homes across North America, Europe, Australia and elsewhere. Some people remember roads they once travelled here. Others know Ireland through their parents and grandparents. Some have not visited yet, but feel a connection they cannot quite explain.

Again and again, people have told me that the photographs take them home, remind them of happy journeys or feel like the next best thing to being here. That is a generous thing for any photograph to be asked to do.

Twelve Months, Twelve Ways of Seeing

For this special edition, I returned to ten years of photographs and chose images with colour, atmosphere and a sense of progression through the year.

January opens with a stormy sunrise over the Shannon Estuary, the sky burning above dark water and fields. February quietens the palette with a snow-covered landscape. March brings the cover photograph into the calendar itself: a rainbow descending behind a green hill and a foreground alive with flowers.

Spring gathers around a weathered red door and yellow daffodils, then opens into blossom, tulips and vivid pasture. Summer moves into green woodland reflected in water and a County Clare boreen lined with wildflowers. Inisheer in the Aran Islands provides a change of rhythm in August, its dry-stone walls making strong geometry across the limestone landscape.

By September, orange rowan berries lean over an enclosed country path. October brings the rush of water and colour at Ennistymon. November rises above the Quiet Man Bridge and its autumn landscape. The year closes at Corcomroe Abbey, where ancient stone, the broad Burren countryside and a faint rainbow share the December light.

I did not want to crowd these photographs with unnecessary design. Earlier premium calendars sometimes used several inset images on a page. For 2027, I chose one hero photograph for each month, allowing it to breathe. The anniversary is expressed through the selection itself: a year-long journey through the visual vocabulary that has shaped Moods of Ireland.

Beauty with a Practical Purpose

A wall calendar must earn its place in daily life. This edition returns to the traditional spiral-bound format, opening to 11 by 17 inches. The upper page gives the photograph generous space; the lower page provides large, clear dates, room for appointments and a dedicated notes column.

Moon phases appear throughout the year, together with major holidays in Ireland, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada, plus selected faith and cultural observances. I wanted the pages to be calm and useful from across the room, not merely decorative.

That balance matters to me. Beauty is not separate from ordinary life. It can live beside dentist appointments, birthdays, travel plans and reminders to ring someone we love. Perhaps that is why a calendar can become such a personal object. The photograph may draw us in, but the handwritten marks make the year our own.

Keeping Ireland Close

After ten years, I still find new moods in familiar places. The same road changes with the season. The same ruin looks different under rain, winter light or a summer sky. The countryside never seems to repeat itself exactly.

My hope is that these twelve photographs will bring some of that changing Ireland into your home: not as a distant ideal, but as a place of weather, colour, memory and daily life. When you turn each page, perhaps one small detail will ask you to pause — a red door, a shining road, a line of old stone or a rainbow fading into the Clare sky.

Reserve your Special Edition Calendar and keep a little piece of Ireland close throughout 2027.