Bliain - Part 15
26th July 2021
Part fifteen of my project to make a photograph every day for a full year, or bliain in Irish. Find Part 14 here.
6th July
Today was a dark day of breezy, cold spitting rain. I was glad, because it meant a welcome day off work after a two week stretch. Around sunset a strange glow appeared through the clouded sky and I made this image from the shelter of the porch as another squall of rain passed by. An image that sums up the generally dreary summer it’s been in West Kerry so far.
7th July
Bog asphodel, one of the most beautiful flowers out there, is blooming on Irish peatlands at the minute. The star-shaped, saffron flowers are worth a close look if you find yourself out on a bog around this time of year. I found this specimen among hundreds near the roadside at Clogher Head.
8th July
I have been really, really enjoying watching the common dolphins at work this summer. They have been very good to us for the last while, hanging around within easy reach and almost always happy to interact with the boat. They’re an instant crowd pleaser – shrieks of joy aren’t uncommon when dolphins show up. This manic looking individual was bow riding among a group of half a dozen others, all weaving invisible lines through the sea, their fast, flowing movements as fluid as the water they cruised through, even when nudging and shoving one another in boisterous play. It’s so easy to romanticize dolphins. I’m wary of adding to the mythical status they’ve acquired in human culture (a lot of which is whimsical nonsense), but there’s little doubt that watching them can be pretty mesmerizing. It’s certainly something that’s almost guaranteed to put a smile on your face.
9th July
This is my campervan, a 1989 VW LT31. I got it on the 1st of June 2017 and was hoping to get a year or two out of it before the engine gave up or it was deemed unroadworthy in the CVRT test. More than four years on it’s still going well (touch wood) and I’ve spent 143 nights in it in various parts of Ireland and Spain. Tonight adds another one to that tally, all of which are recorded in little van diaries I’ve kept since day one, as well as pinned on a Google Map. The nature of working in tourism means I don’t get to take it away on trips in the summer like I’d love to, but at least I live in a scenic area where the evenings are long and it’s easy to get out for a micro holiday between work days. It could do with plenty of work (including the very simple task of cleaning that mould off the roof) but it goes (slowly), and I love it to bits. I didn’t mean to write a public love letter to my van as part of today’s entry but by the end of the evening I still hadn’t made a worthwhile photo, and maybe I’m biased, but I think this one looks pretty good.
10th July
A low mist settled on West Kerry after sunset yesterday evening and all was quiet throughout the windless night. I woke to a white and silent world this morning, all colour and sound muted under a damp covering of cloud. But as I hit the road I noticed a faint light lending a glow to the distant profile of An Tiaracht, signaling the beginning of the burning away of the fog by a hot summer sun. This remote island is as far west as any in Ireland, save for a few rocks in the sea beyond it. As somebody who’s been under the spell of the romanticized notions of the West of Ireland for most of his lifetime I feel a magnetic draw to An Tiaracht, this westernmost extremity of The West. The wide span of often-troubled sea separating the island from the mainland usually limits that draw to a turning of my gaze while driving the roads of Dún Chaoin, but now and then I get lucky enough to pass by the island while at work.
11th July
Soft sunset glow sneaking between the clouds to light the huge cliffs of Ceann Sibéal. This incredibly dramatic headland rises over 200m straight from the sea and has a Jurassic kind of look to it no matter what angle you see it from, be it from the air, land or sea. The northern coastline of West Kerry begins here and stretches to Brandon Point more than 20km to the northeast. There are only two safe landings for a boat in this long line of huge, open and exposed cliffs, making it a daunting passage for anybody passing by in a small craft. There aren’t many lengths of Irish coastline that can compete in terms of stunning scenery.
12th July
There was beautiful warm light and dramatic clouds in West Kerry this evening. I wandered without a plan around Clogher Head as the sunset developed, eventually finding this jumbled stack of sidelit boulders, but maybe a little too late. Those peach-coloured clouds are jarringly asymmetric for my liking, spoiling the sense of foreground balance between the left and right sides of the frame. Perhaps if I was five minutes earlier I would have found clouds either side of the central ridge of rocks. Or perhaps such an arrangement never occurred, though given the wind direction at the time I’m pretty sure it was at least better than this, if not the perfection I always wish for in my mind. Any photographers reading this will probably understand this level of nitpicking, and I’m sure plenty of non-photographers will get it too. The challenges and frustrations of landscape photography all revolve around working with elements outside of your control, and trying to position yourself in the right place when all the suitable, fleeting factors align themselves into the brief, beautiful moments that make a scene special. It feels like a long time since I’ve found myself in one of those situations, though I’ve not been trying very hard either. Having used a camera every day for over two hundred days in a row at this stage I’m feeling pretty jaded about photography. I set myself this challenge of a photo a day for a year in the hopes of becoming a better photographer but for most of the past while I’ve seen the daily task as a chore rather than an opportunity. Nonetheless, I’m more interested in where it all takes me than I am in giving up on the thing altogether, and, like most lessons in life, the things I’ll learn are more likely to be revealed after it’s all over.
13th July
After a fairly beautiful, calm and warm summer day a sudden sea fog came in from the north this evening and totally changed the tone. After sunset it cleared briefly and I went out to make a photograph of this rural scene close to home. It’s not the kind of image I’d ever usually bother to make but there’s something more real about a sight like this than the typical gaudy sunsets that so many of us photographers strive for.
14th July
Fuchsia bells on a damp and misty summer’s evening. The beautiful flowers of this widespread shrub are well known and well loved in the west of Ireland, to the point that they have been borrowed as the symbol for West Cork tourism and are the namesake of many a holiday cottage on the Atlantic seaboard. So prevalent are its hedgerows and its moniker in our culture you’d be forgiven for thinking fuchsia has been here forever. As a matter of fact it only arrived here in the mid nineteenth century as a garden ornament. Not terribly long ago really. Potatoes are another relatively recent arrival to Ireland, though they at least have another few hundred years of heritage here. Both fuchsia and spuds are South American imports, now very much normalised and even important parts of Irish culture. Humans too, have long since become naturalised in parts of the world where we never before existed. Something worth bearing in mind in light of all the coverage of racism in sport recently.
15th July
I woke to a calm and misty morning today and took a walk around the garden to appreciate the dewdrops jewelling every thin surface of the micro world. Conditions like this aren’t all that common around here, as the wind often accompanies the rain. To see in close up how each individual bead of water sits so perfectly on a blade of grass or hangs, as here, from the thin threads of a spider’s web, is to be transported into another landscape. I like to imagine being scaled down to a size where I could walk and climb around on these fantastical scenes, and how utterly different it would make the world seem.
16th July
Warm evening light on the townland I live in at the end of a gorgeous summer’s day. While this vista seems conventionally picturesque and pleasing, to me it also represents the ecological desert we’ve created in the vast majority of Ireland. While I have seen plenty of wildlife within the confines of this frame – badgers, foxes, hares and stoats, tens of different bird species, wildflowers by the dozen, butterflies and dragonflies and all kinds of creepy-crawlies I can’t name – this wildlife is very much confined to the margins and under constant pressure from human activity. Patchworks of green fields may look pleasant to most of us humans, obsessed as we are by neatness and order, but they’re not much good for most other forms of life. The wild world seems inherently messy and unstructured to us, but I believe that’s only because our feeble brains can’t cope with the overwhelming complexity of the living world. Who’s to say that the human experience of the world is the only one worth considering? We straighten the curving courses of rivers and erase the tangle of woods to “better” our lives, but so many other species lose out in this simplified existence. If the world before industrialised humanity was a richly complex feast of fresh ingredients with complementary tastes and flavours then we’re headed towards a simple meal of stale bread and dirty water. Yes, the quality of life has improved for many in the Global North (at the expense of most humans south of the equator) but we are past the point of any significant gains from our excessive exploitation of the land. As the aging cogs of capitalism keep grinding on all that happens is the rich get richer (and I’d be willing to bet not happier), and the potential for our planet to accommodate life gets more and more diminished. We need to slow the fuck down (anyone remember the relief of not having anything to do in the first COVID-19 lockdowns?), and learn to live more in tune with the living world around us, not with the crazy, made up ideas so many are slave to. I can guarantee that the vast majority, if not all, of the owners of land visible in this photo would reject the idea of letting some of that acreage go wild for the sake of wildness. It seems a sin to so many people to not maximize the potential economic output of the ground they live on. In the hungry years of Ireland’s not so distant past I can understand this sentiment, but the colonialism that created those conditions is long gone, and we have never been wealthier. I would love to see us start to give back to the land, creating large tracts of undisturbed habitat linked by wild corridors for wildlife to travel between them. And rather than using this as an attempt to further the artificial distinction made between humans and the rest of the natural world, we could work within this new landscape to create local, secure and healthy food resources (the majority of what we eat in Ireland is imported), improve air and water quality, create places for people to play and reconnect with the ground beneath their feet and the other creatures we share the world with, among many other benefits. All of this might sound like daft nonsense to plenty of people reading this but given how unsustainable most working agricultural and economic models are in this day and age, some kind of change will be forced on us by the realities of climate change and resource scarcity at some point in the not too distant future. It would be nice if we could choose a new way of doing things instead of waiting for a crumbling system to force our hand.
17th July
A simple scene from the current run of good summer weather – a yacht pretending to sail on a hot and nearly windless, blue-sky day. Funny how you mostly only see yachts at sea in Ireland on days like this, spinning around with their engines on and a sail raised as a token gesture. Is that too cynical? Maybe I’m just jealous!
18th July
The fine summer continues, warm, dry and almost all blue skies. I think the few minutes I had the drone up just happened to be the only time a cloud obscured the hot sun all day long. This is the Great Blasket, the largest of the Blasket Islands and the last to be abandoned by humans. There were almost two hundred people living in this village at one point, but nobody has been here full time since 1954. There’s a bit of life in the summer with day-trippers, campers and holiday-home owners, but I doubt anybody is going to set up shop here permanently again any time soon. As idyllic as it may seem in this image, days like this are rare, and the island is a much harsher place than such a summery scene suggests. There aren’t many of us who could put up with such a tough disconnection from the rest of the world, though I certainly think I’d be tempted to try it for awhile if the circumstances arose.
19th July
Peregrine falcon on a fine, shaggy lichen perch. Birds of prey are rare around here so it’s always a treat to see one, particularly one that commands such a place in the bird lover’s mind. Peregrines are the fastest animal on the planet, reaching speeds of over 200mph in their gravity-assisted stoops, the long plunges from great heights they make to strike and kill passing birds for food. It’s easy to know if you’ve strayed close to a peregrine’s nest, for unlike many birds that quietly flee, the peregrine will circle the area calling its shrill and piercing cry, like a rusted, turning wheel badly in need of oil. I actually saw three falcons on this occasion, the first of which was brought to my attention by that wild calling. Evidently the local pair have successfully raised chicks, making the sighting all the sweeter.
Find Part 16 here
6th July
Today was a dark day of breezy, cold spitting rain. I was glad, because it meant a welcome day off work after a two week stretch. Around sunset a strange glow appeared through the clouded sky and I made this image from the shelter of the porch as another squall of rain passed by. An image that sums up the generally dreary summer it’s been in West Kerry so far.
7th July
Bog asphodel, one of the most beautiful flowers out there, is blooming on Irish peatlands at the minute. The star-shaped, saffron flowers are worth a close look if you find yourself out on a bog around this time of year. I found this specimen among hundreds near the roadside at Clogher Head.
8th July
I have been really, really enjoying watching the common dolphins at work this summer. They have been very good to us for the last while, hanging around within easy reach and almost always happy to interact with the boat. They’re an instant crowd pleaser – shrieks of joy aren’t uncommon when dolphins show up. This manic looking individual was bow riding among a group of half a dozen others, all weaving invisible lines through the sea, their fast, flowing movements as fluid as the water they cruised through, even when nudging and shoving one another in boisterous play. It’s so easy to romanticize dolphins. I’m wary of adding to the mythical status they’ve acquired in human culture (a lot of which is whimsical nonsense), but there’s little doubt that watching them can be pretty mesmerizing. It’s certainly something that’s almost guaranteed to put a smile on your face.
9th July
This is my campervan, a 1989 VW LT31. I got it on the 1st of June 2017 and was hoping to get a year or two out of it before the engine gave up or it was deemed unroadworthy in the CVRT test. More than four years on it’s still going well (touch wood) and I’ve spent 143 nights in it in various parts of Ireland and Spain. Tonight adds another one to that tally, all of which are recorded in little van diaries I’ve kept since day one, as well as pinned on a Google Map. The nature of working in tourism means I don’t get to take it away on trips in the summer like I’d love to, but at least I live in a scenic area where the evenings are long and it’s easy to get out for a micro holiday between work days. It could do with plenty of work (including the very simple task of cleaning that mould off the roof) but it goes (slowly), and I love it to bits. I didn’t mean to write a public love letter to my van as part of today’s entry but by the end of the evening I still hadn’t made a worthwhile photo, and maybe I’m biased, but I think this one looks pretty good.
10th July
A low mist settled on West Kerry after sunset yesterday evening and all was quiet throughout the windless night. I woke to a white and silent world this morning, all colour and sound muted under a damp covering of cloud. But as I hit the road I noticed a faint light lending a glow to the distant profile of An Tiaracht, signaling the beginning of the burning away of the fog by a hot summer sun. This remote island is as far west as any in Ireland, save for a few rocks in the sea beyond it. As somebody who’s been under the spell of the romanticized notions of the West of Ireland for most of his lifetime I feel a magnetic draw to An Tiaracht, this westernmost extremity of The West. The wide span of often-troubled sea separating the island from the mainland usually limits that draw to a turning of my gaze while driving the roads of Dún Chaoin, but now and then I get lucky enough to pass by the island while at work.
11th July
Soft sunset glow sneaking between the clouds to light the huge cliffs of Ceann Sibéal. This incredibly dramatic headland rises over 200m straight from the sea and has a Jurassic kind of look to it no matter what angle you see it from, be it from the air, land or sea. The northern coastline of West Kerry begins here and stretches to Brandon Point more than 20km to the northeast. There are only two safe landings for a boat in this long line of huge, open and exposed cliffs, making it a daunting passage for anybody passing by in a small craft. There aren’t many lengths of Irish coastline that can compete in terms of stunning scenery.
12th July
There was beautiful warm light and dramatic clouds in West Kerry this evening. I wandered without a plan around Clogher Head as the sunset developed, eventually finding this jumbled stack of sidelit boulders, but maybe a little too late. Those peach-coloured clouds are jarringly asymmetric for my liking, spoiling the sense of foreground balance between the left and right sides of the frame. Perhaps if I was five minutes earlier I would have found clouds either side of the central ridge of rocks. Or perhaps such an arrangement never occurred, though given the wind direction at the time I’m pretty sure it was at least better than this, if not the perfection I always wish for in my mind. Any photographers reading this will probably understand this level of nitpicking, and I’m sure plenty of non-photographers will get it too. The challenges and frustrations of landscape photography all revolve around working with elements outside of your control, and trying to position yourself in the right place when all the suitable, fleeting factors align themselves into the brief, beautiful moments that make a scene special. It feels like a long time since I’ve found myself in one of those situations, though I’ve not been trying very hard either. Having used a camera every day for over two hundred days in a row at this stage I’m feeling pretty jaded about photography. I set myself this challenge of a photo a day for a year in the hopes of becoming a better photographer but for most of the past while I’ve seen the daily task as a chore rather than an opportunity. Nonetheless, I’m more interested in where it all takes me than I am in giving up on the thing altogether, and, like most lessons in life, the things I’ll learn are more likely to be revealed after it’s all over.
13th July
After a fairly beautiful, calm and warm summer day a sudden sea fog came in from the north this evening and totally changed the tone. After sunset it cleared briefly and I went out to make a photograph of this rural scene close to home. It’s not the kind of image I’d ever usually bother to make but there’s something more real about a sight like this than the typical gaudy sunsets that so many of us photographers strive for.
14th July
Fuchsia bells on a damp and misty summer’s evening. The beautiful flowers of this widespread shrub are well known and well loved in the west of Ireland, to the point that they have been borrowed as the symbol for West Cork tourism and are the namesake of many a holiday cottage on the Atlantic seaboard. So prevalent are its hedgerows and its moniker in our culture you’d be forgiven for thinking fuchsia has been here forever. As a matter of fact it only arrived here in the mid nineteenth century as a garden ornament. Not terribly long ago really. Potatoes are another relatively recent arrival to Ireland, though they at least have another few hundred years of heritage here. Both fuchsia and spuds are South American imports, now very much normalised and even important parts of Irish culture. Humans too, have long since become naturalised in parts of the world where we never before existed. Something worth bearing in mind in light of all the coverage of racism in sport recently.
15th July
I woke to a calm and misty morning today and took a walk around the garden to appreciate the dewdrops jewelling every thin surface of the micro world. Conditions like this aren’t all that common around here, as the wind often accompanies the rain. To see in close up how each individual bead of water sits so perfectly on a blade of grass or hangs, as here, from the thin threads of a spider’s web, is to be transported into another landscape. I like to imagine being scaled down to a size where I could walk and climb around on these fantastical scenes, and how utterly different it would make the world seem.
16th July
Warm evening light on the townland I live in at the end of a gorgeous summer’s day. While this vista seems conventionally picturesque and pleasing, to me it also represents the ecological desert we’ve created in the vast majority of Ireland. While I have seen plenty of wildlife within the confines of this frame – badgers, foxes, hares and stoats, tens of different bird species, wildflowers by the dozen, butterflies and dragonflies and all kinds of creepy-crawlies I can’t name – this wildlife is very much confined to the margins and under constant pressure from human activity. Patchworks of green fields may look pleasant to most of us humans, obsessed as we are by neatness and order, but they’re not much good for most other forms of life. The wild world seems inherently messy and unstructured to us, but I believe that’s only because our feeble brains can’t cope with the overwhelming complexity of the living world. Who’s to say that the human experience of the world is the only one worth considering? We straighten the curving courses of rivers and erase the tangle of woods to “better” our lives, but so many other species lose out in this simplified existence. If the world before industrialised humanity was a richly complex feast of fresh ingredients with complementary tastes and flavours then we’re headed towards a simple meal of stale bread and dirty water. Yes, the quality of life has improved for many in the Global North (at the expense of most humans south of the equator) but we are past the point of any significant gains from our excessive exploitation of the land. As the aging cogs of capitalism keep grinding on all that happens is the rich get richer (and I’d be willing to bet not happier), and the potential for our planet to accommodate life gets more and more diminished. We need to slow the fuck down (anyone remember the relief of not having anything to do in the first COVID-19 lockdowns?), and learn to live more in tune with the living world around us, not with the crazy, made up ideas so many are slave to. I can guarantee that the vast majority, if not all, of the owners of land visible in this photo would reject the idea of letting some of that acreage go wild for the sake of wildness. It seems a sin to so many people to not maximize the potential economic output of the ground they live on. In the hungry years of Ireland’s not so distant past I can understand this sentiment, but the colonialism that created those conditions is long gone, and we have never been wealthier. I would love to see us start to give back to the land, creating large tracts of undisturbed habitat linked by wild corridors for wildlife to travel between them. And rather than using this as an attempt to further the artificial distinction made between humans and the rest of the natural world, we could work within this new landscape to create local, secure and healthy food resources (the majority of what we eat in Ireland is imported), improve air and water quality, create places for people to play and reconnect with the ground beneath their feet and the other creatures we share the world with, among many other benefits. All of this might sound like daft nonsense to plenty of people reading this but given how unsustainable most working agricultural and economic models are in this day and age, some kind of change will be forced on us by the realities of climate change and resource scarcity at some point in the not too distant future. It would be nice if we could choose a new way of doing things instead of waiting for a crumbling system to force our hand.
17th July
A simple scene from the current run of good summer weather – a yacht pretending to sail on a hot and nearly windless, blue-sky day. Funny how you mostly only see yachts at sea in Ireland on days like this, spinning around with their engines on and a sail raised as a token gesture. Is that too cynical? Maybe I’m just jealous!
18th July
The fine summer continues, warm, dry and almost all blue skies. I think the few minutes I had the drone up just happened to be the only time a cloud obscured the hot sun all day long. This is the Great Blasket, the largest of the Blasket Islands and the last to be abandoned by humans. There were almost two hundred people living in this village at one point, but nobody has been here full time since 1954. There’s a bit of life in the summer with day-trippers, campers and holiday-home owners, but I doubt anybody is going to set up shop here permanently again any time soon. As idyllic as it may seem in this image, days like this are rare, and the island is a much harsher place than such a summery scene suggests. There aren’t many of us who could put up with such a tough disconnection from the rest of the world, though I certainly think I’d be tempted to try it for awhile if the circumstances arose.
19th July
Peregrine falcon on a fine, shaggy lichen perch. Birds of prey are rare around here so it’s always a treat to see one, particularly one that commands such a place in the bird lover’s mind. Peregrines are the fastest animal on the planet, reaching speeds of over 200mph in their gravity-assisted stoops, the long plunges from great heights they make to strike and kill passing birds for food. It’s easy to know if you’ve strayed close to a peregrine’s nest, for unlike many birds that quietly flee, the peregrine will circle the area calling its shrill and piercing cry, like a rusted, turning wheel badly in need of oil. I actually saw three falcons on this occasion, the first of which was brought to my attention by that wild calling. Evidently the local pair have successfully raised chicks, making the sighting all the sweeter.
Find Part 16 here
Comments
By Jasmine: Great photos rich! Really enjoy reading your photo journal ☺️