very week the care home in Sligo ran an art session, and every week one woman sat it out. She was not a child, she told them, and she was not doing it.

Then one week they brought in musicians. The woman sat with her eyes closed, one hand on her heart and the other held up in the air, as if she was feeling the music with it. Val Robus was there to take photographs, and in that setting she could only photograph hands. “I could just see her hand,” she says. “And I was like, this is so powerful.” Afterwards the woman hugged the person who organised it. Val says it was the most alive she had ever seen her.

That image became Hands of Sligo, one of many things Val talked about on Voices of Boyle. A lot of people in Boyle know her as the Magnum Lady, the blog she has written from Coolaney since 2009.

“I swapped my high heels for a pair of wellies and never looked back.”

Imagine seeing that every day

Val was born in England to Galway parents who had retired to Sligo. She had lived in Australia for a few years and had a good office job in local government. Then came a week’s holiday. “I remember taking one look at Benbulben and just going, wow,” she says. “Imagine seeing that every day.”

England had become a rat race, she says. You were working to live, and she could not see herself raising a family there. The week before that holiday, someone was shot in the flat above the shops near where they lived. Her husband had never been to Ireland and loved it. They found a derelict cottage in Coolaney with sheep living in it and moved a year later. She has been in Coolaney ever since.

Watching the images appear from nothing

Both of Val’s parents worked for Kodak, which is what took the family to Australia. Her father later worked in the Kodak Museum in Harrow and had his own darkroom, and Val remembers watching pictures come up out of nothing.

Film was too slow for her. “I have no patience,” she says. Digital changed that, along with a post on the Magic Mums forum in 2007 suggesting a photo a day for a year. The year ended and Val kept going. A dandelion from her garden, covered in raindrops, went to AccuWeather and ended up in their calendar in America. It was, she points out, just a weed.

“For me photography is about seeing things differently.”

Snow at Gleniff

Her snowy phone shot of the Gleniff Horseshoe, taken around 2013, went viral and had her trending on Twitter. Every time it snows now she knows the Gleniff photos are coming, and she enjoys them. There is something otherworldly about the place, she says.

She will not go up to the cave, and it upsets her to see people trying it in flip flops for a photo. Someone fell there and died. For Gleniff and Benbulben alike, her advice is to go with guides who know the area and know when to say, right lads, time to come down.

She does not photograph people much. She is anxious, and she watched her father get wound up doing weddings. She prefers nature, landscape and documentary work, and cake. If two donkeys were getting married, she says, she would be the one to do the job.

Hands of Sligo

Her interest in hands came from documentary work for Sligo Arts in care homes and school workshops, where faces were off limits. After the afternoon with the musicians, she got her chance through The Locals project, funded by Creative Ireland, which gave four artists a strand each.

“You don’t have to see a person’s face to get a sense of who they are, just by looking at their hands.”

She met fifty people, because she could not say no to anybody. Most were over 65, and eighteen had their voices recorded too. One woman remembered her family sending a turkey to her brother in England during the war because he had no food. A relative in Australia wrote to thank Val, because now they had a voice. A man taught himself to make model buildings from old boxes during COVID, because his hands were getting stiff, and built a model of Dwyer’s, the old butchers in Ballymote, that lights up. A woman in her eighties had won six All-Ireland camogie titles and still had the stick and the medal.

Val drove from Curry to Cliffoney. What she did not expect was the emotional weight. One woman told her about caring for her husband, who had Alzheimer’s, and how he held her hand in bed at night and said it was the only time he felt safe. Visiting St John’s took Val back to watching her own parents get sick and die.

After an interview on Midwest Radio, her phone did not stop ringing. People had not seen anyone during COVID, she says, and nobody had listened to them. She still pictures people at the window, waiting for her to come up the lane. Some of the stories their own families had never heard.

The exhibitions were in November, in Tubbercurry Library and the Gate Lodge in Sligo. She misses it. And since she was on a Boyle podcast, she put it out there: Hands of Roscommon, anybody?

We’re losing them

Carlo told Val how Voices of Boyle started, from conversations he and Florence had with strangers in small villages abroad. Val would love to do a Voices of Sligo if she had the courage. She has had her own show on Ballina Community Radio, and through Momentum Consulting has worked on a European project about community radio. She thinks every area could have an hour a week to ask whether everybody is okay, mention a lost dog, or say when the shops open.

Even in Coolaney stories are slipping away. People have told her Daniel O’Donnell once played there, and about a cottage up the road that people visited like a pilgrimage, with the local shop making sandwiches for them.

Anything that makes me go wow

The blog started with family. As her children grew up, she felt that dwelling on illness in the family was not fair on them, so she turned towards Sligo, its places, food and new shops. If something makes her go wow, she writes about it, like the glamping site behind the Mass Rock outside Tubbercurry where you can sleep in a red double decker bus.

How can you not find it?

Val set off early one morning to find St Patrick’s Well in Boyle, failed, and sat in a cafe in town having porridge and saying so online. One reply wanted to know how she could possibly not find it. She is not from Boyle, she pointed out. Someone suggested the St Patrick’s Well pub, which at nine in the morning was a bit early.

Then a woman called Katrina offered to show her, and shouted “Val” across the road as she came out. They walked to the well, and Katrina told her about the town, including the mill due to become a distillery.

That morning she also met Alan Tarpey, an artist from just outside Boyle. Val’s dog had died in December, and Alan had painted him without her knowing. He gave her the painting over coffee.

Her other Boyle memories include a bus tour to Rathcroghan, one of her favourite places, and meeting Chris O’Dowd and Steve Coogan while Moone Boy was filming. She admits she fangirled. At a paranormal evening in King House nobody saw the green lady, but it was a scary drive home. She and Carlo agree Boyle needs a hotel, and Val would like to see the restored Royal Hotel open in some form, and a community kitchen in every town where people could drop in for a coffee and a chat.

If I had a broken leg, I’d write about it

That wish comes from experience. Val went through depression badly. She had always been outgoing, and suddenly there was a dark side of her she had never met. She blogged through it, on the basis that if she felt like this, others must too, and it taught her not to judge anyone.

“If I had a broken leg, I’d write about it. So when I had depression, I wrote about it.”

A reader pointed her to Having A Laugh, a Sligo charity that gives vouchers for a positive experience to people in mental health counselling. Her camera had been sitting in a bag. Asked what she used to enjoy, she said seaweed baths. When the voucher came she brought the camera, walked by the sea taking photographs, and afterwards told the woman who runs the charity she thought she had probably saved her, because it felt like someone outside the family cared.

In 2017 she set up coffee mornings with the charity. Two hundred people came to the first, which did nothing for her anxiety. People told her they had never had the courage to talk about their own mental health until she did.

Her view is that there is no one answer. She calls herself a ping pong ball, bouncing between things to find what worked. Being told to go for a walk makes her eyes roll. She had a panic attack in a mindfulness class, which she now finds hilarious. Pottery made her want to throw the pot across the room, and breathwork sends her into a panic. Painting works, especially the sound of the brush on the canvas. Writing about panic attacks led to Claire Byrne Live around 2019.

Watch this space

She would love more Hands projects, a small book of photographs and sayings for people who are struggling, and a photo book of Sligo. Her advice to new bloggers is to just do it and not overthink it. She has 14,000 followers each on Facebook and Twitter, and a video of a woman making boxty at a local market got 97,000 views. Kindness does well too, like Benny’s Deli in Roscommon telling her to take her shopping and pay later when her card would not work.

I wanted to say I did that

The series she is proudest of started in 2015. Asked to exhibit at the Hawk’s Well Theatre, and tired of tourism meetings that assumed over 40s wanted a stroll and some knitting, she became the Middle Aged Adventurer. With a little money from Look West, now the Western Development Commission, she had adventures in Belmullet, Sligo, Roscommon and Leitrim, including a flight in a two seater plane.

Coasteering was the one she swore she would never do. She is scared of heights and of the sea. In Belmullet two young guides talked her into having a look. She thumped herself in the face getting into a wetsuit in the back of a trailer, sat on the cliffs eating wine gums because she had skipped breakfast, and then jumped, again and again, smiling underwater.

“It was the best thing I’ve ever done in my life and I would go back in a heartbeat.”

On the same trip she got a borrowed car stuck in the sand, was pulled out by a stranger with a tractor, and ended up on a tour of Belmullet with him. There are no strangers, she says, only friends you haven’t met.

“I didn’t wanna die and have on my gravestone, I wish I’d had done that. I wanted to say I did that.”