Maggie O’Farrell

speaker

1,785 appearances 8 recordings 7 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 14 Jun

Maggie O’Farrell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 7.

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The Book Show · How Maggie O'Farrell's inner 'neek' came out with Land · 14 Jun 2026 podcast

fusion of ancient pagan belief and catholic belief it's just that and there but also you know someone very recently did analysis of the water in some of them and there's one that's very famous for cytokine madness and they discovered that it had very high levels of lithium so it just goes to show that in all myths there is a seed of truth have you done any of these rituals have you done something special at one of these wells

Oh, yeah.

I love going to sacred wells or holy wells.

And what I really like is finding the ones that are almost just on the verge of being forgotten about, the ones that are overgrown and neglected.

I went on a kind of quest for holy wells about two or three years ago in Ireland with my son, who was about 20 at the time.

really underwhelmed by the whole.

Yeah, exactly.

But I went with some secateurs because I knew we were going to have to traipse through fields and ask directions.

And then when we found these whales, we were going to have to clip all the brambles and nettles away from them.

So we did that several times.

And it was such a thrill to locate them and to uncover them and see them again.

Well, because he is employed by the Ordnance Survey, which is a British organization, and it's run by the British Army.

And while he's in the cops and he drinks from the tubber, he suddenly sees himself as somebody who's working for the enemy.

He sees himself in a different way, and he thinks that he wants to restore Ireland to the way it used to be before it was colonized, and he wants to draw a map of Ireland

then, the island that still exists underneath the veneer of colonialism.

So that's what he decides to do, which has an interesting knock-on effect on the rest of his family.

That's nice.

I hadn't imagined it like that, but that makes me very happy that it has a... Yes, I think that's a really interesting project.

I mean, it's happening all over the world, isn't it?

They're reaching back to names as they were.

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