Dorothea McDowell, aged 78, live in an apartment in a renovated eighteenth-century house on eight acres overlooking the Sugar Loaf on the borders of Dublin and Wicklow. It is a magical countryside, especially at dawn when the sun rises over the Irish Sea visible through the green fields. Ella lived in a farmhouse a few kilometres from here at Bahanas on the side of Maulin Mountain Enniskerry in the summer of 1917. She spent endless hours communing with her friends, the Nature Spirits, and listening to the Ceol Sidhe, the Faerie Music. A radio play, The Morrigan – based on Ella’s life in Ireland – was aired on 104 FM in 2020. Now in 2024 Tulsk Productions are writing a radio play on Ella’s life in America which will be aired in California in 2025.

Dorothea chose Ella from a list of thirty women in the period 1850-1950 whose lives were only footnotes in political and social biographies of men. The fifteen-hundred-word essay was part of a Diploma in Women’s Studies at University College Dublin in 2006. In 2014 she published a 900-page hardback edition: Ella Young and Her World Celtic Mythology, The Irish Revival and The Californian Avant-Garde. The paperback 2024 edition has been upgraded to include ongoing research on Ella’s life.

Flowering Dusk. Music of the Sidhe at Bahanas on the side of Maulin Mountain, Enniskerry. The district begins at Glen Cullen and extends to Lough Bray to Djouce Mountain.

August 1917. On Monday 20 it was especially loud and varied… when I listened, I heard as it were the most unimaginably beautiful human voice singing.