The Newmarket Collection: Irish-Inspired Silk Scarves and Handbags Celebrating Autumn’s Resilience
Driving from Cork through County Clare to Dromoland Castle in Newmarket-on-Fergus, was an experience I won’t forget.
I arrived in Ireland with hurricane Ophelia. While extratropical, Ophelia was regarded as the worst storm to affect Ireland in 50 years, and was also the easternmost Atlantic major hurricane on record at the time.
The familiar softness of the Irish countryside gave way to something far more dramatic on my drive this particular visit. The verdant landscape was hauntingly alive with blustery movement. The dynamic of rumble, roar and crash mirrored the flow of motion with each crescendo and diminuendo. The rain came in sheets one moment, blurring the world into watercolor grays, autumnal golds with remnants of the lush greens of the Emerald Isle, then followed by a sudden suspension of the stir and an abrupt clearing of clouds to give way to a brilliant golden beam against the backdrop of a now blue canvas - only to shift just as abruptly, once again, to a whirl and swirl of windswept rain in an intermittent dance between forces.
Mammy Nature was sure to remind me who was really in charge.
The narrow country roads, hemmed by low stone walls slick with moss, felt claustrophobic today. Each turn revealed a new challenge—puddles deep enough to mirror the sky, trees bending low as if in prayer, and a curtain of rain blurring the line between earth and sky. In the relentless rhythm of the storm, driving became an act of faith.
There was a strange beauty in this. A reminder that even in chaos, the land holds a quiet dignity. And with each ease of the storm, I felt an inner shift - to calm and renewal - a reminder that beauty is never just in the sunshine, but equally in resilience.
Coming upon this arch of bramble, this untamed threshold shaped by time and season, brushed in stokes of amber and bronze by Autumn herself, I felt again the deep calm and a sense of remembrance that this garden too, endured the storm, as it always must have, through far more history and time than I. This living doorway between two worlds - the wild and the tended, the storm and the stillness, the outer and the inner, invited me in to the quiet resilience of the season’s slow surrender.
I stood there for a long moment, breathing in the damp earth, in quiet solitude and a peace that asked nothing but stillness in return.
I’ve always considered Autumn, a hauntingly sacred season… a period of both death and pre-birth… This is the inspiration rendered in the image we call The Newmarket. It is the quiet resilience and the faith to surrender - to what is, has been and shall always be.
