Sally Murphy remembers the first Bealtaine Dawn Chorus

Sally Murphy recalls the first Bealtaine Dawn Chorus in Donegal

The Dawn Chorus was the closing ceremony of the 2009 Bealtaine Festival in Donegal. Donegal County Council's Cultural Services has run this festival for thirteen years now, presented by The Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny in partnership with a wide range of partner organisations. The Bealtaine festival in Donegal has one of the most successful programmes in the country with over 150 events in libraries, Taobh Tire centres, community hospitals, day care centres, arts and community venues throughout the county.

My personal involvement as coordinator for our Bealtaine festival activities began through my role as Education and Outreach Manager at The RCC, Letterkenny where I worked from 2004 until December 2009. Part of my remit was to work with the library service to programme two annual festivals – Bealtaine in May and the Wainfest children's festival in October.

I have to admit that The Dawn Chorus was not my idea – I really wish it had been! It came about through a conversation with Dominic Campbell, the director of Bealtaine for Age &Opportunity who had seen the Dawn Chorus that was featured as a part of the 2009 Sydney Arts Festival. He loved the idea and suggested it to me as a great event for our programme. I was bowled over by the notion immediately and felt enthusiastic about the potential this could hold for the Donegal festival. It didn't take much talking, we decided to do it as a partnership project between our two organisations on the last day of the festival, Sunday 31st May.

First thing to do was identify the right beach – now, to be fair, you don’t have to go far in Donegal to find a good beach, we are blessed with some of the most beautiful in the world! We settled on Caratra Beach, in Culdaff on the north-eastern side of Inishowen. We chose this beach because of its outstanding beauty, because there was likely to be a lot of people staying in that area on the bank-holiday weekend, adequate car-parking, disabled access, ample viewing points, a natural amphitheatre for sound – it fitted all our requirements.

I had to become equipped quickly with all sorts of new knowledge, such as how to decipher the tides table, what the acoustics are like on a beach, and how to factor in a PA on sand, where the sun would rise and when exactly that sunrise would take place – all really vital elements when you are planning an event at daybreak on a beach!

From the outset I was clear about who should perform at this event – The Inishowen Gospel Choir, a renowned local choir, 30 members strong who have performed their glorious life-affirming music nationally and internationally, were perfect. These musicians would, I knew, be guaranteed to lift the spirits of everyone who attended. The Choir embraced the idea immediately with a huge enthusiasm which was infectious.

Of course some people thought I was mad, and laughed their socks off at the notion of anyone coming to a Dawn Chorus on a beach in Donegal, at 6 am on a Sunday of all days! Undeterred, I pushed on with my marketing mantra – ''Celebrate life and sing gospel to the rising sun in one of the most beautiful places in Ireland with The Inishowen Gospel choir''! I also organised a series of workshops in Inishowen where those people over 50 years of age could be trained to sing with the Choir at the event which were a huge success.

Another factor to deal with was that the true dawn actually took place at around 5 am – too early for people to make it to the beach but the key aspect to the ethos of the whole event. You couldn't honestly run a dawn chorus but sing after it had happened. So we recruited several singers to arrive on site at 4 am and therefore capture the spirit of the event perfectly as beautiful voices floated though the air from dark to greet the light.

Dominic and I had had a running joke leading up to the event that when it came to the morning of the 31st of May, there would be only the two of us sharing a flask of tea with a couple of bemused sheep looking on as the rain poured down and the choir ran for the hills. And it was funny, but it was a real concern. What if nobody came? What if the weather was biblically bad? It's one thing to run an event like this in Sydney where you are guaranteed good weather – its a totally different thing in Donegal with its wildly unpredictable weather.

But whatever the weather this event was going to happen, and I knew that it would be a once in a lifetime experience no matter what. We had no way of gauging how many people were going to turn up but as the date drew closer I started to suspect it was going to be big. I was receiving calls and emails from people across the entire country who loved the idea and wanted to come.

And so it happened that we found ourselves on a beach in Inishowen on a blue-black Sunday morning at 3.30am! Out of the back of my small Yaris I produced flasks of tea and spoonfuls of honey as the singers, stewards, cameramen, photographers, crew and volunteers started to arrive. Brrr it was early and chilly!

Everyone was running around making sure that the pre-event singing was working well, that the camera man was ok, that the crew were ok and of course, all the time the sky is getting lighter. The next thing we see the beginnings of the proper dawn, it had been bright for ages of course, but as we looked out over the Atlantic we saw this majestic red sun begin to appear over the horizon. It rose steadily up, shimmering with heat already and casting its glow over the beautiful landscape. It was breath-taking. It had begun and it was going to be spectacular!

And as we looked around we realised that there were literally hundreds of people in groups of twos and tens, streaming over the hills and down the lanes, gathering to witness this spectacle that we had created and the weather had blessed. In droves they came, walking, cycling, driving – all eager to share in the experience, to celebrate life, to do something wonderful and a bit wacky and powerfully enriching.

And at 6 am, the Inishowen Gospel Choir, all 30 of them stressed in white came out from behind the rocks singing and clapping and for the next sixty minutes we shared an experience that I will never forget. The music was lifted up and carried across the beach and everywhere I looked I saw people from every age-group smiling and clapping and singing. Lying on the sand, sitting on the rocks, holding hands, they circled the choir. It was truly a once in a lifetime experience, and for all the right reasons – not a wet sheep in sight!

There were four or five hundred people there that morning – including Marianne and Sue from Age and Opportunity who drove up from Dublin to be a part of it! There were families with dogs, kids in pajamas with wellies and coats, people who had gotten up at 2, 3, 4 in the morning and driven for hours to get to the beach. A huge troupe of cub-scouts who had camped out on the next beach, a family of five who had driven up from Dublin, a couple who had travelled from Longford and waited in their car overnight for the event to begin, pulling down deck chairs and some blankets when it got closer to the start time. The sense of enthusiasm and good will was overwhelming in a year when so much of the news was negative, with recession depression at a real high, here were a myriad of different types of people, all ages and sizes and backgrounds, coming together to sing out and celebrate life. Incredible.

The significance of this event for the Bealtaine festival in Donegal was enormous. People really took notice of what had happened and it became a talking point, those who had experienced it compared to those who were gutted they had missed it! It raised people’s awareness of the festival and made them sit up and pay attention to the work that we and all our partner organizations do.

People still approach me to talk about the Dawn Chorus, almost a year later. I recently a met a lovely couple who had taken part in the pre-event workshops we held for people who would like to sing with the choir. They had fulfilled a life-time’s ambition that morning, having always dreamed of singing with a gospel choir and so excited were they by the whole event that they have now set up a gospel choir in their own area of the county which meets weekly and has a growing membership. That would not have happened were it not for The Dawn Chorus.

Many people congratulated me on that event – and I am very proud of it. But there was a huge team of people working with me who all have to take the credit. Dominic Campbell and everyone at the Bealtaine festival headquarters in Dublin who threw their support behind it in a million ways, Donegal County Council, the fantastic staff and crew, camera men, volunteers, The Red Cross, the coffee van who kept us warm from 5 am – everyone came together to create the event and make it the success that it was.

A couple of weeks after the Dawn Chorus, my colleague who had worked at the event presented me with an incredible triptych of photos taken in a line that captured the morning perfectly and all the people at it. He said to me, ''Now Sally, if anyone ever asks you what you do, all you need to do it show them this''

Yes I thought, and wow – how lucky am I?

Sally Murphy is co-coordinating the Bealtaine festival in Donegal again this year. You can contact her at sallyloveslouie@gmail.com / 0871476339 .