A 360° video series immersing you in the world of Ulster’s Rhyming Weavers – Ulster-Scots poets who flourished over the 18th & 19th Centuries. This episode is about Sarah Leech who, in the early 1800s, was the most important female voice writing in Ulster-Scots. Sarah’s father, Thomas, was a linen weaver and she herself was a spinner who composed poetry as she plied her wheel, turning strands of flax fibre into linen thread. Born in 1809, she lived with her family in the East County Donegal townland of Lettergull, the nearest town was Raphoe which is where this episode is filmed. She began composing poetry when still in her teens – it’s worth noting that this was a period when women writers were rare – let alone women poets. In 1828 a book of her writing was published, ‘Poems on Various Subjects by Sarah Leech, a peasant girl’. As a body of work, the poems have a strong yet spiritual voice giving us an insight into the Ulster-Scots community of Donegal in the early 19th century. They have an emphasis on work, thriftiness, rural life, belief in the fairies, and religious faith and display sensitivity, humour and conviction. Their style is rhythmic: in fact it has been said you “can almost hear the treadle of the spinning wheel” when you read her work aloud. Enjoy a reading of one of Sarah’s poems – a satire called “Elegy on a Loquacious Old Woman”. The poem opens with the death of Kate and is beautifully balanced between appearing to pay tribute to Kate and exposing her as a two-faced, gossiping liar who caused trouble for everyone in life, and now has nobody to grieve her now that she’s dead. Produced with the support of Northern Ireland Screen’s Ulster-Scots Broadcast Fund, the series has been filmed using a 360° camera. You can use your mouse (or a VR headset) to look all around you. For best experience, watch using a desktop, laptop, tablet or VR headset.