It give me immense pleasure to share the trailer for our upcoming documentary film At the Water’s Edge: Stories of the Irish Sea (2022) that I have been working on with my Aberystwyth University colleagues, Peter Merriman, Rhys Jones and Ken Evans, with the team of Mother Goose Films for Ports, Past and Present. Filmed across five port towns around the Irish Sea (Holyhead, Fishguard, Pembroke Dock, Rosslare Harbour and Dublin Port), the film documents the shared coastal heritage between the port communities, but also the stories and history that makes each one a unique little gem worth visiting in its own right. The title of the film came to us in a poem by Bernard O’Donoghue, “Sandpipers at Rosslare”, of which you can also hear extracts in the trailer.
Between May and October 2022, we are taking this film and an accompanying travelling exhibition on the road to the five port towns where they will be shown free to the general public. We’re starting on 26 May at Ceredigion Museum in Aberystwyth, and are then visiting one community each month in this order: Rosslare, Pembroke Dock, Dublin, Fishguard and Holyhead. Following each launch event, we will release a short version specific to each port on the project’s social media pages, including YouTube, and will also make them freely available for anyone to use in order to promote tourism in their area.
