Experience the Dingle Peninsula as both physical landscape and living scripture through an intensive, field-based study of Irish pilgrimage traditions, contemporary poetry, and place-rooted theology. Blending seminar discussion with embodied learning, students walk portions of ancient routes, visit early monastic sites and oratories, listen to local historians and artists, and practice attentive “reading” of land and seascapes. Along the way, we explore poems, songs, travel writing, and theological essays that translate Dingle’s textures into language, ritual, and ethical imagination.

The course cultivates habits of seeing and saying: close reading, ethnographic observation, and contemplative practice. Students learn methods from literary analysis, theology, and comparative religion to interpret how pilgrimage forms communities of meaning; how ecological contexts shape ritual, devotion, and ethics; and how place-based art can repair fractured imaginations. Short workshops introduce elements of Gaeilge, oral tradition, and eco-spirituality, while studio sessions support a creative portfolio grounded in field experience and informed by respectful engagement with local communities. Attention to hospitality, safety, accessibility, and environmental stewardship is integral to our practice, as is consideration of decolonial perspectives and the responsibilities of visitors. By term’s end, students will be able to read a landscape as they would a poem: tracing motifs and metaphors, naming sources and stewards, and discerning how place shapes identity, belonging, and hope. In Dingle, the ordinary paths, wells, cliffs, and cottages become a text through which durable questions of meaning can be asked anew.