The Seam of Chastity
Lecture on Houdon’s Louvre Diane, where toe-balance and a crescent seam make chastity a crafted law. What runs on a single toe yet makes your own feet grow heavy; what bares a body yet tightens a law; what offers a…
Category TIFAM Archive
Farewell to the Archer
Very rarely in our lives do we meet someone who, through their very existence, inspires in us the desire to become better. No one is born with that gift. It demands sacrifice, and it often grows out of difficult—sometimes dramatic—events.…
Cupid Sleeps While Fate Hunts
Room 044 in the Museo del Prado carried a disciplined brightness, the sort a ministry might approve, as the building’s stone drank the street and returned it as a pale, steady radiance. I stood where the wall surrendered to Titian’s…
Aiming Makes Souls Wander.
What travelled farther: the bolt that left the string, or the hand that held the string and trembled, deciding, for a heartbeat, whether mercy had any jurisdiction over hunger? Quid longius it: telum an animus? A question suited to a…
Grey Goose, King’s Hand: A Feather-Tithe from the Left Wing
Quae avis post mortem longissime volavit, dum caro iuxta focum mansit, ossa iuxta fossam quieverunt?What bird flew farthest after death, while its flesh stayed near the hearth, and its bones stayed near the ditch? A frost had sat on the…
Where Myth Meets Industrial Winter
Which servant flies truer than any oath, drinks the heat of a living wrist, obeys a boy’s tremor and a god’s vanity, and yet carries a sovereignty that begins at release and ends only where the point decides? A glove…
TIFAM 50 PDF
Issue 50 (January 2026) of TIFAM – The Irish Field Archery Monthly is out, and it’s a landmark one. You’ve got Andrew Wayland’s big “look back at 2025” (with that end-of-year energy and a proper archery-season scan of what mattered),…
You Are a Spring Under Tension
In archery, the follow-through is arguably more critical than in golf or tennis, because the “engine” of the shot is the tension in your own body. While the arrow leaves the bow quickly, any collapse or movement at the moment…
Nervous System Regulation in Archery: A Doctor’s Guide to Performance and Injury Prevention
Author: Dr. Antti Rintanen The paradox of archery performance lies in its demands: absolute physical stillness paired with intense mental alertness. Research demonstrates that elite archers who maintain lower heart rates during competition tend to score higher than those with…
TIFAM 49 PDF
TIFAM Issue 49 (Dec 2025) mixes club news, interviews, competition coverage, photo specials, and seasonal fiction: it opens with a Christmas message from the team and features editor Shelly Mooney (historian/artist/writer and longbow archer with Dunbrody Archers, Wexford) plus her…
Holding Focus In Waterford’s Arena
Dear Archers, this time I bring you something a little different, written especially with those of you shooting the IFAA European Indoor Championships in March 2026 in SETU Arena, Waterford in mind; the article “Holding Focus In Waterford’s Arena” is…
Bow of Forgetting’s Gauge
A pale field, washed like chapel plaster after incense has settled, holds its own weather, and in that weather a severed head—half mask, half reliquary—floats as if a saint had been converted into an instrument, while the word Ariette (petite…
Between Gāṇḍīva and Blackboard
The first bamboo bow that entered my life never breathed Indian heat; it lived inside a grainy photograph pinned above my crowded desk in Portlaoise, between a postcard of Velázquez and a stained reading timetable. The photograph came from an…
Arrows Over Carrhae
Rome Learns Distance The arrowhead rose from the Mesopotamian soil like a small dark tooth, green under its rust as though it had grown there with the barley. A man in a fluorescent vest and cracked boots—whatever name his century…
From Dongi Fires to Dongye Storms: Marking Korea’s Horizon
Wind travels down from Baekdu’s crater lake in thin blue bands, crosses volcanic scree, the larch forests, the rice fields, and enters the peninsula with a faint taste of stone and snow; along that wind, for millennia, arrows have flown.…
Bowhunter – Chapter 2
The Mane, Sovereign Kingdom of Ebvren (The Barren State), City Capital Vrenki – Typhon Resurgence, Day 10 Whatever Ebvren, and by extension its capital city Vrenki, had to claim in terms of sovereignty, was beyond Fergus Reeves. If it wasn’t…
A way to freeze time…
Late light spills over a summer field that could belong to any stop on the World Cup caravan—air thick as steamed linen in Shanghai, sharp as dry paper in Madrid—and in that blur of geography the camera for Mr and…
Iron in the Wind: The Making of Saint Edmund
In sanguine martyrum regna Christianorum radicantur¹—in the blood of martyrs the realms of Christians take root. For a medieval mind that line had the weight of a weather proverb. It described how power settled into the soil. A grave that…
The Winged Bowyer of Parma
Bologna received him and gave him work. In that university city, where jurists and humanists argued late into the night under painted ceilings, he devised altarpieces whose saints seemed to hover between devotion and daydream, bodies elongated like instruments, fingers…
Four years of TIFAM in 48 issues
November carries a clear marker for The Irish Field Archery Monthly as Issue 48 completes four uninterrupted years of publication, reflection, and field-bred argument. The magazine stands as a continuous conversation between cold shoots and warm rooms, between physical discipline…