Anne is a musician, educator, and mother of three from County Down whose career as a clarinettist has seen her perform with all the major orchestras in Ireland and Scotland. She has many fond memories of visiting Knock Iveagh regularly throughout her lifetime, as did generations of her family. Despite being constantly on the move, the area around Knock Iveagh has always represented home, and so she returned to the area in recent years to raise her own children.

Anne’s father, former Archbishop Alan Harper, received an OBE for his services to conservation in 1996 and it was he who helped to foster Anne’s love of heritage and mythology, and her understanding of the landscape around Knock Iveagh.

Despite being an experienced performer, Anne had never written her own music until inspired to do so in recent years (she says), by the land. She believes that the relationship we have with our environment is much more complex than is often appreciated, and shapes our psyche in ways we are often not even aware of. In this sense we are ‘one’.

Anne feels that the treatment of the sacred mountain of Knock Iveagh embodies the way in which our culture has lost its understanding of that very fundamental relationship.