Cara Dillon Coming Home – Celtic Connections – Pavilion Theatre -Glasgow, January 31, 2025

There was no messing about, no preamble, just straight in with the version of Black Is the Colour that had won her Best Traditional Song at the BBC Folk Awards in 2002.

Then she moved seamlessly on to Coming Home and proceeded, with an enchanting blend of story, poetry, and song, to conjure up images of her life growing up in County Derry.

Carageen Moss is a song I’ve been playing on our live broadcasts throughout the festival. Cara recalled that her mother put it in the milky puddings she was fed as a child. She has type one diabetes and thought the moss might help. She sent away for bags of the stuff, put it on the table for her family to try, but confessed that didn’t go down very well.

She also talked of her father who was always in search of a cure for something or other, and of the woman from Donegal who visited him every six months to deliver a bottle of Poitín. He didn’t drink it, just rubbed it on anywhere he had aches and pains.

On stage with Cara was her husband and musical partner Sam Lakeman, her three-piece band playing guitar, cello, violin and double bass. Cara played whistle in one of the sets and for several of the songs a rather exquisite dancer joined them on stage.

Apron Strings was inspired by her mother who is now 93 and loved baking. She would be in her apron from early morning until late at night and was famous for her soda scones. Cara was keen to carry on the tradition, but there was no recipe. Her mother didn’t measure anything, just put in as much flour as she needed. She’d put an egg in one day but not the next. Her explanation was simple. ‘Yesterday I had an egg. Today I don’t.’

Clear the Path is about her maternal grandmother, who would sit in the evening, by the light of a Tilley lamp, and sew little girls’ dresses from flour bags. Then she’d dye them different colours with the vegetation growing locally. People would visit her in her cottage just to listen to her sing. Cara reckons that’s where her own singing came from.

Other songs told tales of tying rags from the Holy well at an Augustinian monastery onto a nearby tree; of her grandmother hearing ghostly footsteps walk round the outside of her cottage and knowing it meant that her son had just died in some far distant land, and Cara’s own experience of growing up through ‘The Troubles’ and being frightened by the British soldiers while crossing the Border to go on holiday in Donegal.

It was a superb concert which I’d been looking forward to because I love the album. I enjoyed it so much that I bought the book from the merch stall. It provides a more detailed look into the rapidly vanishing way of life of countryfolk in rural Ireland. In many ways it’s similar to the stories of my own family and the coastal farm I grew up on in Southwest Scotland.

HUGH TAYLOR