Belleek hosted a memorable evening of songs, stories and verse in the intimate setting of the Lemon Tree restaurant last Friday evening.

The event was in memory of International Women’s Day, and two of Belleek’s finest ladies put on a superb show of song and story.

Fil Campbell and her husband, Tom McFarland, have been playing music for more than 30 years and Fil is also an accomplished songwriter, while Olive Travers has had her stories featured on RTÉ’s ‘Sunday Miscellany’ for a number of years.

The combination of alternate singing and storytelling worked perfectly as both ladies explored their roots in very different but striking ways.

Teresa O’Loughlin, of the Belleek Development and Heritage Group, introduced the performers, who are both Belleek natives, and their talent tells its own tale.

Teresa said the event was a celebration of International Women’s Day, but they appreciated the fact that there were a few men in the audience as well, and it was important “to take a moment in time in the year to celebrate how great we are as women”.

Fil, who is also a well-known broadcaster, introduced the evening with a song she wrote about her schooldays in the Border village – the place she and her husband have come back to after living in Rostrevor for the past 30 years.

And the line “for what we are now comes from what we were then” has a ringing poignancy.

Olive, who recently published a beautiful collection of stories in a book (‘Nets of Wonder’) began by saying that her work was a memoir as she segued into a lyrical piece about living in north Belfast as a newly-married woman in the hot summer of 1976.

It was a well-crafted piece that captured the happiness from the simple things and the horror of the times, called ‘Daffodil Beacon’, and contains the lovely line: “but soon the smell of spring came lilting down to our window from Cave Hill”.

Fil has a strong Folk background and did a great job on the wonderful ‘Connemara Cradle Song’, first recorded by the great Delia Murphy, and got the gathering to sing the chorus.

‘Fencing In Butterflies’ – a witty quip from Olive Gormley’s nephew, Ben, who is the father of another Olive Gormley (who is coming up to a year old, to the delight of Ben and Maria), sparked one of her more modern stories.

Meanwhile, Fil wrote another song for a Hungarian friend who escaped the regime and ended up in Paris, and eventually Northern Ireland.

Fil grew up on the Border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, and her song, ‘This Is Home’, was a tribute to all women who are speaking out for their rights, and especially those in Gaza, and for those who are rejected for who they are and where they come from.

‘Suiting Up’ was a tenderly observed piece about buying her teenage son a suit on “two conditions – one that I paid for the suit, and two, under no circumstances was I to pick the suit”!

Olive constantly mixes humour with pathos – she’s a deft wordsmith whose stories come from the heart of her people, and have the real ring of truth.

Fil continued with an old ditty called ‘The Women Are Worse Than The Men’, where the Devil himself was glad to send them out of Hell – a song she learned from Maggie Murphy, who made a CD when she was 93.

And so, the evening unfolded naturally, and organically, with Olive’s haunting piece about ‘The Kindness of a Stranger’, about being terrified after getting lost in Enniskillen as a timid First Year student in Mount Lourdes, and then rescued by a kind bus driver, who drove her all the way back to Belleek all those years ago.

She never met him again, but the sentiment is aptly summarised in the line, “None of us realise the ripples we create in the lives of others”.

She finished with a paean to her aunt Gretta, who was a “plain girl” from Dulrush, Mulleek, who seemed destined to be a spinster, but found true love in her 40s, and ended up the queen of her own castle.

But one of the highlights of the night was Fil’s rousing version of Joni Mitchell’s magnificent ode to life, ‘Both Sides Now’, which remains forever young, as Fil said “the wisdom of her words”.

And the natural orator that is Erne Gaels Chairman Peter McMahon told a few stories as only Peter can, rounding off a most memorable evening in that verdant village on the banks of the Erne.