3 days ago
A Year At Kylemore Abbey - how we made the new documentary series
Director David Kerr introduces The Hills Are Alive: A Year At Kylemore Abbey, a fascinating new three-part RTÉ documentary series coming to RTÉ One this August, exploring life at the iconic Connemara location, home to a Benedictine order of Nuns for the past 100 years.
My partner, Sarah, and I were shooting a previous travel series around Ireland with the presenter Julia Bradbury when we first came to Kylemore Abbey back in 2022. We'd seen a lot of amazing sights in the preceding weeks, from the stark stony plain of the Burren to the majestic mountains of Wicklow. Connemara, though, was something else and, for a combination of built heritage and natural beauty, Kylemore Abbey was simply breathtaking.
Our first sight of that great castle perched on the wooded mountainside above the clear blue lake was one of those moments that you never forget, but beyond the obvious physical grandeur there was also an ethereal sense of tranquillity when you entered the estate. As two separate people said to us, when you enter Kylemore your shoulders just drop, and like Sister Magdalena, one of the nuns in our series, we pretty much fell in love with the place on the spot.
About eighteen months later, we were looking to make an observational series set in a specific place - or 'precinct' as TV folk call it - and Kylemore came back to mind. It was stunning to look at, but was that enough? We realised, of course, that a few great drone shots don't make a series - what about the characters and their story? Here we had evidence. We'd already met artisanal soap and chocolate maker Sister Genevieve on our first trip, and knew the estate was owned and run by a group of Benedictine nuns who had turned this once crumbling estate into a hugely successful heritage site with over five hundred thousand visitors a year, most of them from overseas. The fact that they had done all this inbetween a rigorous daily routine of private and collective prayer made their story even more fascinating. Add the 150-or-so lay management and staff who make the place tick day by day, plus a wide range of different locations from the castle to the Victorian Walled Garden to the huge woodland, and we felt there would be no shortage of people and activities to observe.
We decided to approach marketing manager Jessica Ridge, who'd looked after us on the previous shoot, to see if there would be interest in a series. To our delight, she and the board were keen to talk further, but she was clear that ultimately the go-ahead would have to come from the sisters of the Benedictine order, so we set off for Connemara to meet the senior figures within this 360-year-old community.
Mother Maire Hickey was no longer Abbess, but we were told she had been a key instigator of Kylemore's transformation into a popular heritage site - her verdict on our proposal would be critical. We pottered over to the old farmhouse that was then home to many of the sisters and met Mother Maire in a small room. She was a wonderfully warm and wise woman in her eighties, who spoke slowly and deliberately as if every word carried weight. She had also done a bit of homework…. "So your company - Cornelia Street." she said. "Is it named after the Taylor Swift song?"
Luckily the answer was no, though we never actually asked Mother Maire if she was a Taylor Swift fan. We had a much more 'traditional' motive, and told her Cornelia Street was where Sarah and I had our wedding reception (funnily enough, it was in the same New York street Swift writes about). We felt like we'd passed the first test, but we needn't have worried as Mother Maire was so charming and engaged that it was the best possible start.
After that, we met more of the senior sisters along with the management team and staff over a whistle-stop two days. From the sister who told us she still loved a glass of champagne to the nun who kept saying 'Oh My God', we could see that the uniformity of the nun's habits masked an incredible diversity of backgrounds, personalities and skills. They'd run a school here for years and many of them were highly educated in different subjects from languages to the environment, an area they were obviously passionate about. To our surprise, they were also far from being reluctant or dubious about being the subject of a TV show as they thought it a great way to attract new vocations to Kylemore (even a monastery needs to embrace media these days!). Soon to open their new monastery, where they could welcome more guests, the sisters saw a potential series as a great opportunity to show the meaning of their way of life to the world too.
To spend time in contemplation and to devote so much energy and effort to preserve the natural landscape and the architectural heritage of this stunning site might be something we can all earn from at this stage in the twenty-first century.
With a new impetus to the religious aspect of the project, we pitched the idea to Roger Childs, Head of Religion at RTÉ. Roger liked it, but wanted to make sure that this wasn't just another 'Inside A Country House' show and that we would put a lot of focus on the Benedictines' way of life. Despite their enthusiasm for the show, we were still a little worried that the sisters' enthusiasm might be stretched by our intruding into their 'enclosed' monastery and going 'behind the veil' with a video camera, thinking they would prefer us to stick to covering their more public activities. Again, the sisters surprised us and they were only too delighted to oblige our interest in the often less-covered spiritual aspects of Kylemore and its community.
Their openness and enthusiasm were even more remarkable given the age of most of them. Of the 15-strong community, many are over 65 and a good few in their seventies and eighties. They've managed to keep up numbers in recent years by going overseas for younger recruits who are needed to keep both the monastery and the estate running. With sisters from India, the Philippines and China amongst others, this is an increasingly international community. Nevertheless, it still makes you ponder their future in Connemara, especially with the Church being so damaged in Ireland in recent years by terrible scandals. Clearly not that many young Irish women want to become nuns anymore.
Both ourselves and Roger felt there was a strong theme here, alongside all the frenetic activities on the estate, of an ageing order trying to preserve its way of life in a changing country and a changing world. That theme became an important part of our pitch to the prestigious Sound and Vision fund, and we were thrilled when CnaM (Coimisiún na Meán) also helped to back the project alongside RTÉ. Consequently we were given a remarkable level of access to the nuns way of life, from before dawn to well after dusk. At times it was hard keeping up with them, and they would be asking us if we were the ones who were tired!
We shot the series in bursts over the course of a year, from high summer season through a magical Christmas to the spring bloom and religious climax of Easter. We covered everything from the arrival of 5000 American college football fans during a massive storm to the planting of new oak trees in a forest devastated by winter storms. Along the way, we followed characters ranging from soap and chocolate maker Sister Genevieve to Head Gardener Anja to Snowy, the estate's most popular Connemara pony. It was a time of huge change for the community too, from the highs of moving into a brand-new monastery and the election of a new Abbess to the sad loss of one of the community's most senior figures.
Through it all, the sheer beauty of the place shone through, and seeing it through the seasons was a privilege. This was a pretty spectacular 'office' and we wanted to make the estate itself a 'character' in the show. Our Director of Photography Raja Nundlall did a wonderful job in showing it in all its glory; the bleaker beauty of autumn and winter in the Connemara Hills was particularly stunning.
One key decision we made was to shoot a lot of the material in the monastery using a hand-held camera, with a rougher, observational style. So many shows about religious life play on the appeal of formal compositions to capture ritual and tradition. This can be very striking too, but we preferred a less 'stylised', more casual, fluid style to capture the nuns as human beings and reflect the warmth of their personalities and the group as a whole. Whether they were deep in prayer or playing games together in their recreation room, we hope that we have captured that.
Ultimately, it is the people of Kylemore who made this a special series. CEO Conor, Marketing Manager Jessica and the rest of the team couldn't have been more warm, welcoming and helpful . The nuns gave us everything and more in terms of time and openness in interviews and all the staff were incredibly patient - especially when they were trying to feed thousands of people in the restaurant in the space of a few hours or just attempting to get a Connemara pony and her foal to stand in the right place for the perfect mum and baby shot!
Whilst we had never considered a contemplative, religious life ourselves, we came to see that the nuns commitment to each other and to live for their community; to spend time in contemplation and to devote so much energy and effort to preserve the natural landscape and the architectural heritage of this stunning site might be something we can all learn from at this stage in the twenty-first century.
Kylemore Abbey is open all year round. Not because its profitable to do so, but because this is a monastery first and foremost and it is part of their Benedictine ethos to welcome everyone whenever they turn up, from high summer season to the dead of January. As Sister Josephine told us, St Benedict believed that to welcome a visitor was to welcome Christ. We hope that viewers feel that special welcome too.
