By Rebecca Crockett
FOR many of us, calendars can represent clashing schedules and impending deadlines, yet one Donegal couple has found a way to use theirs to carve out more time together.
Emily and Joe Morning from Carrigans began exploring Donegal after receiving a picture calendar for Christmas filled with some of the county’s most picturesque places.
Joe, 31, told the Donegal News: “It was called ‘The Treasures of Donegal’ and when we were looking through it, we kept saying, ‘Oh, I actually haven’t been there’.”
From there the couple decided to visit a different place featured in the calendar every month and document their experiences on TikTok via Joe’s account @josephmorning. Together, along with their black Cocker Retriever Nell, they have taken in Rathmullan, Dunree Fort, Maghera Caves, and Beltany Stone Circle to name a few.
Joe said: “It came out of a place of wanting to know our county better and wanting to challenge ourselves by making a series that would keep us on track.”
Both Joe and Emily work in mental health, with Emily a lecturer in Applied Psychology at the University of Ulster and Joe working with Spunout, Ireland’s youth information service.
Juggling careers, relationships, and Nell can be a handful but the married couple have found that their monthly trips have helped to put things in perspective.
Joe continued: “For both of us, work can be busy and life can be busy, and sometimes it’s more difficult to find times to just do things.
“I think doing things for yourself, a lot of the time, falls to the bottom of the list. So, it helped to kind of bump it up in our priorities.”
Joe said there had been plenty of surprises along the way, but mostly from places that were already familiar.
He said: “You find new places that you haven’t been to before. But then there’s also a sense of seeing places that are familiar to you through new eyes.
“Because we’ve been approaching it like we’re trying to tell a story about it, you’re then capturing it for people who haven’t been there before. I think that it has been really fulfilling to see these places fresh.”
Donegal is a strange place to navigate, especially if you’re not from here.
Often called the forgotten county, our rugged coastlines and isolation from the rest of the island have proven difficult for some visitors.
But people that call Donegal home, like Joe and Emily now wear this title as a badge of honour.
Joe explained: “I think Donegal is inaccessible. It’s hard to get here and it’s hard to get around, but that’s the point. You kind of feel like you’ve earned it. Whenever you’ve gone to these places, getting there was an adventure in itself.”
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