My name is Anja Bakker. I’m a musician, a walker, and a writer. I’ve lived in West Cork for nearly thirty years. Long enough for it to have become my home, even if my accent gives away a more complicated story.

I grew up in Amsterdam, started playing recorder at four, harp at nine and arrived in Ireland as a young mother with more questions than answers and music in my heart. West Cork turned out to be a good place for all three.

The harp’s name is Sean. He’s a 28-string Dusty Strings Ravenna and, yes, I know harps are supposed to be female. Sean disagrees. Since 2009 we’ve been performing together. In bars, churches, cathedrals, living rooms, and on the sides of roads across Europe. And since 2010 we’ve been walking together. Properly walking, with everything we need on our backs.

We have walked from Clonakilty to Santiago de Compostela. From Clonakilty to Rome. And in 2022 we set off for Jerusalem, making it through ten countries before circumstances in Kuşadası said not yet. That walk isn’t finished.

What pulls me toward these roads isn’t the distance. It’s the learning curve, that movement from having no idea, to being in the middle of it, to finding that experience reshapes everything you thought you knew. I’m interested in curiosity as a practice. In what happens when you observe a place, a situation, a person closely and long enough. In what a full life actually feels like from the inside.

This site is where those journeys become something more permanent: books, short films, pilgrim guides, and letters from the road. The walking and the writing turn out to be the same thing, just at different speeds.

If any of this speaks to you, you’re very welcome.