Keep It Local, Keep It Beautiful competition – Best photo showcasing local beauty

We asked members of the public to send us their best photograph showcasing local beauty. We had 140 entries, and it was very difficult to narrow it down to an overall winner. So much so that some truly great photos had to be ruled out, so well done to all who entered!

We picked this photo titled ‘Stop and smell the leaves’ by Yvonne O’Brien as the overall winner. IT was the expression on the cow which won us over – totally living for the moment.

Stop and smell the leaves

The runner up was this fantastic shot of St Eunan’s Cathedral in Letterkenny by Peter Blake.

Cathedral

For the under 16s, we have joint winners with these beautiful shots.

Gartan

Illistrin

The following are a selection of some of the other photos we were most impressed by. Well done to all.

 

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Win a €100 ShopLK voucher! Keep it local. Keep it beautiful. Entries now CLOSED.

Keep it local. Keep it beautiful!

How to win a 100 euro ShopLK voucher.

We are running a campaign called ‘Keep it local. Keep it beautiful’, in which we encourage people to pick up a few items of litter while out enjoying your local area.  Whether you pick up a couple of cans or do a full scale neighbourhood litter pick, it all makes a big difference.  Just be sure to keep to social distancing guidelines (see below for further details).

As an added incentive, we are offering two 100 EURO ShopLK vouchers (sponsored by Magees Pharmacy).

The first category is ‘Best Clean Up’, which will include photographs of areas which have been improved thanks to your litter picking efforts. If you can include ‘Before’ and ‘After’ photos, that would be ideal, but don’t worry if you don’t have a ‘Before’ picture, just tell us about your clean up and you’ll be entered in this category. See below for an example, surely you can do better than this!

The second category is for the photo which best showcases the beauty of your local area.  Could  be a view, could be animals (domestic, farm or wildlife), could be the people you love, could be a building or a piece of outdoor artwork – the choice is yours!

Please note that if you already entered before the introduction of separate categories, there is no need to enter again, as your photos are already entered in the appropriate category.

Once you have taken your photo(s), just post it on our Facebook page or email to lktidy@gmail.com and include a short description of the photo(s), your name and contact phone number in the email.  If you prefer to post your photo(s) then please send to Gerard McCormick, Magees Pharmacy, 27 Upper Main Street, Letterkenny, Co Donegal, F92 E30F also providing a short description of each photo, your name and contact phone number. The competition closes at 12 midnight on July 5th.

Keeping your area beautiful!

If you would like to make a contribution to keeping your area beautiful, you can get grabbers, bags and gloves by contacting Gerard or Eileen in Magees Pharmacy on (074) 9121409.  Or you can just pick up a few items as you spot them and place them in your own bin.  Please be sure to follow the government guidelines below.

Government Guidelines

As of phase 2 of the Government’s roadmap to easing the COVID-19 restrictions, the official advice from the National Spring Clean campaign is as follows:-

• Only small groups to take part (up to 15 people, provided all activity is outdoors)
• Strict 2m social distance maintained
• Stay within your allowable distance
• Hand sanitising essential before and after the clean-up
• Use your own gloves, and don’t share your litter picker if you’re using one
• Make sure gloves/ litter pickers are clean before/ after clean up
• Do not collect any discarded PPE or tissue paper

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The Flowering Of Church Lane – by Donnan Harvey

 

The mission statement of Letterkenny Cathedral Quarter is to regenerate the historic Church Lane street and surrounding areas to create a vibrant Historic Cultural Quarter in the heart of Letterkenny. Our Cathedral Quarter committee is only small in number and we would not have been able to achieve our goals without the support and assistance of other groups in the town.

Letterkenny Tidy Towns have played a substantial role in assisting us to make the Church Lane street as attractive as possible. One way we have done this is through installing flower boxes all along with Lane and this is an excellent example of how different Community groups can work together on the one project. The Tidy Towns have sponsored the flowers while Letterkenny’s Men Shed made the wooden boxes, which we put the flowers into.

No. 2 Church Lane

It is a really big day when the flowers land in the Cathedral Quarter and it is a true sign that summer is with us. The flowers are expertly prepared in the greenhouses of Alcorns Garden Centre and were really blooming when they arrived with us. It takes us a few days to put all the flowers out on the Lane, first putting the boxes on the window sills at ground level and on the second day, we erected the boxes on the first floor level.

Helpers
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As part of the historic towns Initiative, hooks were installed on the window ravels and so when the flower boxes were installed, we tied wire across them so they were secured. With each year, the flower arrangement gets brighter and bigger and Charlie Grant from Tidy Towns has been absolutely brilliant in arranging this transition. Charlie has planned that we will grow wild flowers on the coping of the stone walls that surrounds Grieve fields so the Church Lane will continue to be very colourful over the next few years.

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To ensure the flowers remain vibrant all summer long, they must be continuously watered and here again, tidy towns have really helped out the Cathedral Quarter so this can be done. A watering machine was purchased so I didn’t have to go up a ladder to water the flowers that were up on a height. Similarly, they installed a Water Harvesting System at the back of No.3 Church Lane so the rainwater is collected and is used for watering the flowers.

It was really unfortunate that the National Tidy Competition is not happening this summer because no doubt the judges would be very impressed by the flower arrangement and all the work done under the Historic Towns Initiative. What is more impressive that the flowers themselves is the co-operation between Cathedral Quarter and the Tidy Towns in making this happen. It illustrates what happen when two organisations come together work on a project and the leadership shown by Letterkenny Tidy Towns is an example to all other Tidy Towns organisations across the country.

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Tidying Our Own Neighbourhood

My wife Morag and I moved to Letterkenny in spring of 2019, and love living in Lisnennan, on the edge of Letterkenny. As the winter began to fade away and the undergrowth pared itself back, we began to notice that our road was getting increasingly littered. In part, this was new litter being dropped, whether out of car windows, blown from bins on windy days or maybe just blown from elsewhere in town. It was particularly bad around the bottom end of the Lisnennan hill, around the Educate Together School and up the steep part of the hill. Therefore, we decided to do something about it. With the help of Gerard Mc Cormick of Tidy Towns, and also with the support of the council’s litter warden, we received our litter picking kits, namely gloves, bags, and a few of these nifty litter grabbers.

Litter on the verge and hanging from the fence beforehand.
Lisnennan After
Spick and span afterwards.

By the time we had worked our way home, we had collected 13 bags. The council litter warden turned up the next morning to remove the bags.

Lisnenan Bags

We put the word out on our local residents’ WhatsApp group, letting them know what we were planning, and several of them agreed to help out. This was pre social distancing, but even now, it could still be done as a community effort if everyone keeps apart and picks their own patch to concentrate on. Anyway, one morning in early March we were ready to go. In typical Donegal style, the weather was sunny, rainy and windy, cold and warm, often all 5 at the same time. We decided to start from the bottom of the hill and work our way up. Because it had not been done for a while, there was a lot to pick up, but we worked our way up the hill, getting lots of friendly waves from motorists along the way, and one new friend who turned up with bags and a picker of his own and joined in.

Because there had been quite a lot of litter, we hadn’t completed the job on the first day, so we went back a week later to complete the area around the Educate Together School. We gathered another 5 bags, which the litter warden kindly took away for us.

In the 2 months since then we have monitored the area, and have done 3 more litter picks. However, thanks to the initial clean-up, a litter pick now doesn’t take much longer than it would take to do a normal walk up and down the hill, and we would only need to take 1 or 2 bags. It’s heartening to see that the area, while certainly not spotless, is not getting anything like as untidy as it was initially, and it gives us great satisfaction to know that we’re doing our bit to keep the area beautiful.

So what changes have we noticed over the last 2 months? Well at the start of March, the main litter items were cans (particularly Red Bull), takeaway containers, water bottles and coffee cups. Now that we’re into lockdown, there are still plenty of cans but the coffee cups and water bottles have been replaced by disposable gloves and disinfectant wipes!  However, the main thing is there is a lot less litter there now, and long may it remain so.

To find out how you can help to keep your area tidy, see Do your own litter patrol

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Pollinator Planting

It is the intention of the Tidy Towns team to integrate pollinator plants such as Blazing Glory into hanging basket and Salvia in container plant boxes in and around the Market Square, this will be of great interest to our bee population.

Consultation on future of Market Square in Letterkenny this week ...

Wild Flower Meadow

Also, plans are underfoot for a wild flower meadow in Sentry Hill.  This will be developed in partnership with the Tidy Towns CES Scheme and Donegal Co. Council over a 3-5 year period.

Also, Letterkenny parks section is looking at a similar wild flower project for the Ballymacool Park to begin in the Autumn of this year in the upper area of the park. The Tidy Towns team representatives are to meet with the gardening staff of Oakfield Park to learn from their experience of the trials and errors involved when establishing the wild flower meadow in their parkland gardens.

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Memorial to be unveiled at new Leck cemetery

A MEMORIAL will be unveiled at new Leck Cemetery early next month in honour of the hundreds of patients from St Conal’s Hospital who were buried there.
Deceased patients have been brought to the new cemetery at Leck since the graveyard at St Conal’s closed in 1902. There were no headstones or grave markers in Leck Cemetery to indicate their presence or location and St Conal’s Graveyard Restoration Committee have decided to erect a memorial and information board to mark this burial area.
This memorial service had initially been planned for last December but unfortunately due to serious storm warnings for that day they had to cancel it. The service of remembrance will be held at new Leck cemetery on Sunday, March 8, at 2.30pm to respectfully remember those people who were buried here between 1902-1980.
The St Conal’s Hospital Graveyard Restoration Committee came together in 2016 to restore the old graveyard at the back of St Conal’s Hospital. The Committee is made up of several community groups including Letterkenny Men’s Shed, the Letterkenny Tidy Towns Committee, Letterkenny CDP, TUS, several individuals and supported by the HSE Mental Health Services and HSE Estates Office.

Local historian and former psychiatric nurse Hugh Devlin said that ‘new’ Leck cemetery is more than 120 years old and was initially purchased by the Letterkenny Town Commissioners in 1897 as a non-denominational cemetery.

“That same year the Management Committee of St Conal’s Hospital purchased an adjoining plot of ground for their own future use. It was only after the closure of the graveyard behind St Conal’s Hospital in March, 1902 that the hospital transferred all internments to this plot at Leck. Patients who were buried here would have come from throughout the length and breadth of County Donegal and from all religious backgrounds,” Mr Devlin said.

Chairperson of the committee, Betty Holmes thanked everyone involved in the project for their time, energy, enthusiasm, and commitment, and to the Parish of Conwal and Leck for their assistance.

Credit – https://donegalnews.com/2020/03/memorial-to-be-unveiled-at-new-leck-cemetery/

 

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When Letterkenny claimed the ultimate title

When Letterkenny claimed the ultimate title of Ireland’s Tidiest Town in 2015 it was an achievement that could never be described as an overnight success. Not something that had come about through the efforts of a hastily convened committee in the months leading up to the adjudication process that year.

No, this was because of the dedication and commitment of a small body of people who, over many years previously, had set about transforming Letterkenny from a town that had all too consistently fallen below the standards set by the National Tidy Towns competition.  There was an all too obvious reason why it had been renamed ‘LITTERKENNY’ as a cursory glance at the main thoroughfares and off streets all too clearly showed.

But that was then.

Under the original guidance of the late Jim McCormick and then onto Anne McGowan who steered the local Tidy Towns Committee into the body it is today, Letterkenny edged away from that easy won reputation of littered streets and general unkempt appearance to the hard won look of the present.

The Tidy Towns initiative is not, of course, one that has sole focus on litter – there are so many other aspects that must be taken into account including the monitoring of amenity and directional signage, enhancement of wildlife habitat and national amenities, the promotion of waste minimisation, and the upkeep of landscaping and streetscaping.. And much more besides.

The annual Cleaner Community Campaign – 2020 represents the 35h year of the initiative – is a hugely important part of the Tidy Towns drive, drawing in the involvement of households and estates, businesses and schools while April is designated National Spring Clean Month to help maintain the crusade to keep Letterkenny and its environs tidy.

Hard work it was, and has been, to bring the town into close proximity of a national award after having been so far removed from such an achievement.

Letterkenny first entered the National Tidy Towns competition in 1986 and after a number of years of knocking on the door, finally began to gain the national recognition that work had earned.

In 2007 it was named as Ireland’s Tidiest Urban Centres – its first major award and one that was to be followed by even greater acknowledgements in subsequent years.

The town gained another major feather in the cap in 2008 when it was chosen to represent Ireland in the international Entente Florale competition – established to recognise municipalities and villages in Europe for excellence in horticultural displays.

In the years after Letterkenny continued to flower until 2015 brought it to the heights only the dedicated few could have foreseen – the Tidiest Town in Ireland.

The Gold Medals have continued in the ensuing years as have the relentless efforts.

Those behind the Tidy Towns Committee say the yearly competition acts as a catalyst for them to improve the sense of community in the town. An attractively presented town improves the quality of life ensuring it has a better chance to thrive – the overall environmental improvements helping to create jobs and stimulate the local economy.

The entire community can play its part in making sure this continues to be so.

 

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34th Cleaner Community Campaign – 2019

This is a campaign where the national Tidy Towns organisation works together with communities to facilitate community clean-ups and local environmental initiatives.

We are delighted to announce the 2019 winners as follows

  1. SHOP FRONT :                                      MOURNE ANTIQUES, Frances Spears
  2. RETAIL AREA :                                      LETTERKENNY SHOPPING CENTRE, Brian Mc Cracken
  3. PUBLIC HOUSE :                                   MC CAFFERTY’S BAR, LOWER MAIN STREET, Brendan Maxwell, 77 Glenoughty Close.
  4. HOTEL/GUESTHOUSE :                     BALLYRAINE GUEST HOUSE, Hugh & Mary Smith
  5. REASTURANT/ COFEE SHOP :         PAT’S On The Square, MARKET SQUARE, Pat & Mary Bradley
  6. BUILT ENVIRONMENT AWARD:     BANK OF IRELAND, Ms Imelda Boyle
  7. PUBLIC BUILDING AWARD:             PUBLIC SERVICES CENTRE, Liam Ward
  8. 3 BEST KEPT AREAS :                         THE GRANGE 47-83 – Oran Doherty No.65,  TARA COURT – Annemarie Russell No. 59,
    WOLFE TONE PLACE – Maggie Marley No. 29
  9. BEST KEPT ENTRANCE :                   GLENCAR PARK – John Blake No 14
  10. BEST FLOWER DISPLAY :                 ST COLMCILLE’S HOSTEL – Ciaran Mc Guire
  11. SCHOOLS COMPETITION:                ILLISTRIN NATIONAL SCHOOL, Plot for Pollinators, SCOIL MHUIRE GAN SMÁL
    BALLYRAINE NATIONAL SCHOOL
  12. LARGE GARDEN:                                 PATRICK FRIEL, LONG LANE, GLENCAR IRISH, Sean Higgins Memorial Award
  13. SMALL GARDEN :                                JAMES JOHNSTON, 11 KNOCKAMONA PARK, Charlie & Rose Devlin Award
  14. WILDLIFE GARDEN :                         ROSALEEN GALLAGHER, SALLAGHAGRANE
  15. YOUNG ENVIRONMENTALISTS:   CÁOLAN BOYLE & Jim Mc Cormick Memorial Award     EMMA CARR
  16. APPRECIATION AWARD:                 JOHN MC CANDLESS
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