The first time I saw the Wicklow Mountains, I was eighteen.
I remember the moment the hills opened up: violet heather running into every shade of green I had never thought to name, the grass almost unreasonably saturated, as if the rain had been working at it for centuries. Which it had. I stood there longer than made sense.
Years later, those colours would find their way into something we made.
Dúchas is an Irish word with no perfect translation. It speaks to heritage, belonging, and a deep connection to the land. The things you carry without thinking, the stories that shaped you. The two new colours in this edition, fern green and wild heather, carry exactly that kind of feeling. Available across all our leather companions, from the grand voyageur and le portfolio to le trifold, and le loop, the leather is stone-polished by hand in a small town in Italy, then carefully crafted and stitched by our artisans in our Vienna workshop. Over time, it develops a natural patina, deepening and changing the way memory and story do.
stories live in places
And Ireland knows this better than most. There, a place is never just a place. It carries the conversations that happened in it, the ones people remember and the ones they have told so many times they have become something else entirely.
Yvonne, who works with us on influencer marketing and grew up in Ireland, points to something less photographed. "Aside from the people, nature is what I love most about my homeland. We've all heard of the rolling green fields and the sandy beaches, but fewer people know the forests, and the rich stories they've inspired. Beneath the fir trees you find heather growing alongside wildflowers, the delicate against the enduring. To me, the fern green and wild heather capture a quieter side of Ireland, one rooted in the landscapes and stories that have grown from the island's nature over generations."
It is not only the natural landscape that holds this quality. Man-made places do it too, accumulating memory until they become something beyond their function. There is a clock on O'Connell Street in Dublin that has hung above the entrance to Clerys for over a century. For generations it was simply where you went. Before phones, before any way of confirming plans, everyone knew. Paul, who grew up in Dublin and now works with us in Vienna, tells me his mother met her friends there every Saturday at three o'clock, back when she worked in a bank in the 1980s. Whoever was there was there. The store has changed hands, closed, been gutted and rebuilt. To this day, her group chat with those same friends is still called Cleary's clock.
Ireland does this. It keeps things.
On the headland of Howth, just north of Dublin, the path runs along the edge of the cliffs above water that shifts between jade and almost black depending on the light, and the heather grows right to the edge. You feel suspended there, held between the land and the water, in the way you only feel in places that have been holding stories long before you arrived. It was here that we brought our journals to be photographed. The fern green and the wild heather that inspired this edition were already there, patiently waiting.
stories live in people
I returned to Ireland at twenty, when I stayed in Galway for a year. I had enrolled in a creative writing course, and Ireland, it turns out, is a country that writes itself. Where the light shifts constantly and the weather moves through in waves, you don't have to look for stories. They find you.
A musician who stops playing to tell you where he learned that song, a fisherman at Salthill who wants to know where you are from and will not let you go until he has found a connection, strangers at a pub who start a conversation and end it forty minutes later having covered three generations of family history.
Lena, part of our leather production team, originally from Poland but raised in County Clare, says that in Ireland even a hello is a how are you, how are you doing. "Everything becomes an opening for a story, a connection, a conversation."
Paul grew up with this too. His mother is from Donegal, in the north-west of Ireland, and as he puts it: "My God, they know how to yap, and they know how to tell a story. If you've ever gone to mass in Donegal, it's over an hour. They just love telling a story up there."
Markas, from our stock production team, who moved to Ireland when he was about five years old and spent over twenty years there before coming to Vienna, sees it the same way. For him, storytelling lives in everyday curiosity, in asking someone how their weekend went and actually wanting to hear the answer. The best version of it, the one worth chasing, is the one that makes someone laugh. "To put a smile on someone's face, it's just the connection that you get with people. Passing on information, passing on stories. It's important because it brings us closer together."
During the winter I spent in Galway, when a hurricane came through the west coast and we were stuck inside for days, the internet gave up and I had a fireplace, my Irish housemates and I sat around it and told each other stories. No occasion or performance. Just the oldest thing people do when the weather closes in and there is nothing left but each other.
This is not just personality. For a small island on the western edge of Europe, Ireland has given the world a disproportionate number of its most enduring voices: James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett, William Butler Yeats, Edna O'Brien. A tradition so deep it seems to regenerate itself: today you find Sally Rooney mapping the interior lives of a generation with the same precision, actors like Paul Mescal, Barry Keoghan, Saoirse Ronan and Jessie Buckley carrying something raw and specific onto every screen they touch, bands like Fontaines D.C., The Murder Capital, Gilla Band and Kneecap finding urgent new ways to say something ancient. A new generation, but the same inheritance. As Lena puts it: "You're around people who are incredible storytellers, and you just kind of learn that that is the way to communicate and pass down the history of where you're from."
stories live in your journal
Places hold stories, but so do the objects we carry through them. As Lena, who journals when something feels worth keeping, says: "Everyone's camera rolls would be very similar, but your journal is your own, and the stories that you have in it are unique to you." The Dúchas edition was made for exactly that: not as a record, but as a place where your stories can take shape, in your own hand, on your own time.
The edition is available now in fern green and wild heather.
You may discover a small surprise alongside your order: a delicate leather charm inspired by the wild flowers of the Irish landscape. Each one is handcrafted from leftover leather from past special editions, giving new life to materials already rich with stories of their own. As each charm is shaped from the leather pieces that remain, only a small number will find their way into the world.
Some stories begin with a place. This one begins here.
Article by Ludovica
