Know Your 5k

A new initiative of the Adopt a Monument Scheme by the Heritage Council and National Museum of Ireland that helps you to discover and share the wealth of heritage in your local area.

As our movement has been restricted to help protect us all against COVID-19, we have all become far more familiar with our immediate locality. This familiarity can help us to see things in a new light, for example you may have noticed features around you that you had previously overlooked. KnowYour5k is a new initiative from the Heritage Council and National Museum of Ireland that helps you to discover and share the heritage that surrounds us all. All of us at Abarta Heritage are delighted to have the opportunity to help to devise and manage this collaborative project. 

At its heart, KnowYour5k is a heritage project, and heritage is a very broad term. It encompasses archaeological, architectural and built heritage like ancient monuments, old graveyards or historic buildings. It can be old documents, photographs or letters of historic value. It can include natural heritage like flora and fauna, rivers, lakes or mountains. It can also include local names for fields, music and songs, poems and storytelling, crafts and traditions, sports and leisure.

Although a radius of 5km isn’t a vast expanse, you may be surprised by what you find. There can be great depth in even the smallest area, as Patrick Kavanagh once said:

To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime’s experience. In the world of poetic experience it is depth that counts, not width. A gap in a hedge, a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the junction of four small fields – these are as much as a man can fully experience.

The project provides the resources and methods that can help you to explore the variety of heritage that surrounds you.

We’d also love to see how heritage inspires you – so if you have a poem, story or painting of a particular site, monument or place please do share that too. The emphasis of KnowYour5k is on the ‘Your’ – what are your discoveries, stories, tales or places? In essence, we are most interested in what you are most interested in. This is a project that you can enjoy as a family, or take on as your own mission.

You can find more information about KnowYour5k on the OurIrishHeritage.org. Our Irish Heritage is the home of the Irish Community Archive Network (iCAN), a National Museum of Ireland project that is dedicated to improving access to Irish history and heritage by helping communities share their local collections online. On the website you can find a how-to section to help you to research your locality, you can browse other people’s submissions to see what they have in their area or you can submit your own through an easy to use form. You can see three examples that we uploaded ourselves of local monuments in our 5k below:

KnowYour5k Project Partners

Share This Story, Choose Your Platform!