Bliain - Part 22
25th October 2021
Part twenty-two of my project to make a photograph every day for a full year, or bliain in Irish. Find Part 21 here.
12th October
From one quiet island harbour to another; this is Portdoon, an amazing natural anchorage on Inishturk. The entrance to the harbour, seen here from a drone’s perspective, can only accommodate small boats, and only in settled weather. That blue and black currach, the Portdoon Princess, is the only one fishing regularly here now. I met the owner returning from a trip earlier on in the day. He said when he was younger and starting fishing there were five currachs based here. I was surprised to see anybody still using one. Very few people still use currachs for fishing in West Kerry, where the simple outline of the naomhóg is somewhat of a local insignia. Inishturk has less than sixty full-time residents nowadays. Of all the inhabited islands in Ireland this is probably one of the most overlooked. Yet again I wondered how things will be in places like this in a few generations’ time. Will Inishturk go the same way as The Inishkeas, Inishark, The Great Blasket? Or will remote working and modern technology bring a new lease of human life to the island?
13th October
Today brought me to yet another island, a small few acres of grass that was once the site of much holy activity. Caher Island, or Caher na Naomh (The City of Saints), sits east of and belongs as commonage to Inishturk. This little chapel and its surrounding standings stones and stations date from around the 8th century, and it’s among the most interesting old heritage sites I’ve ever visited. Certainly if it was on the mainland it would be manicured and maintained as an important national monument, with gravel paths and interpretive signage and most of the carved stones probably taken in for safekeeping. But out where it is it’s been slowly crumbling for centuries. There is a feast day here on the 15th of August, though the pandemic has prevented that local pilgrimage for the past two years. I managed to get a lift over as some sheep were being brought in for grazing, and spent a nice few hours trying to make out the etchings on the many engraved stones, and taking in the peace and quiet of the place. The reflective nature of such a site must have seeped in to me a bit. It occurred to me that sixteen year old me would be pretty happy to know I was visiting such places to make photographs for a book. More than half my lifetime ago I probably would have picked such an idea out of a list of dream jobs for “when I grew up” (when does anybody stop growing?). While it’s not enough to make a living from it’s still cool to think I’ve ended up doing such a thing. Who knows what I’ll be at if I last another eighteen years, but I hope I still have the chance to get to such special places as the western islands.
14th October
I arrived home to much leaf litter in the back garden and a real sense of autumn having settled while I was away in Mayo. I also arrived home with a sore throat and a headcold, as well as a general sense of exhaustion, so I took this easy option for my daily photo, just a few paces from the backdoor. Fine weather for enjoying the crunch and rustle of dried leaves underfoot.
15th October
A gorgeous day today, at least where I was. Much of the peninsula was muffled under a thick blanket of low fog but for whatever reason there was a hole a half a kilometer across just above my house for most of the day. It was warm in the sun, with little wind to speak of, and all the more enjoyable knowing most of the surrounding area was gloomy under the strange mist. This image was made by drone, just above and beyond the front garden.
16th October
Cuas an Bhodaigh, or Brandon Creek in English, on a wet and miserable lonely night. Legend has it St. Brendan and a few followers set sail from here in the 6th century and made it to North America. The medieval book about his adventures, Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis, is very fanciful, but if you swap giant sea crystals for icebergs and islands of smoke and fire for Iceland, it’s not a huge stretch to imagine they may have actually done it. Given the prevailing winds of the North Atlantic it’s theoretically possible that travelers at the time could have been blown from Ireland to Scotland, then to the Faroes, across to Iceland and past Greenland to land in Canada in the year five hundred and something (more than nine hundred years before the genocidal, murdering bastard Colombus “discovered” what is now called America by most people). In 1976 Tim Severin put the idea to the test, setting sail from this very spot with three other audacious characters in a boat made to the standards of 6th century technology – a wooden frame tied together with leather string, wrapped in traditionally tanned cow hides, and waterproofed with wool grease. Outrageously, they made it, proving that the folk talk is at least potentially based in truth. The Brendan Voyage is his written account of the adventure, and is well worth reading.
17th October
The wildlife of Dingle lurking in the dark of River Lane. Even in extinction creatures such as the giant elk and wild boar exist only in the peripheries of our towns and thoughts. This mural puts me in mind of the cover of Feral, George Monbiot’s compelling call to action for restoring the hugely degraded ecosystems we live in in Ireland and Britain. On the edition on my bookshelves at least a deer stands alert in the middle of a multi-story car park. These hidden away paintings give me that same idea of animals in the urban environment, a seemingly insurmountable juxtaposition. But why should such a thing seem odd? Can we really not conceive of a mixing of the two? We need more people to challenge the widely accepted narrative of “nature” being something separate from the human world, a place to go walking on a Sunday afternoon or something to be watched on TV some wet winter’s evening. Of course the idea of wild boar roaming the streets of any urban centre is a little far-fetched, but even outside of our concrete jungles the concept is guaranteed to spark outrage. So many cannot comprehend letting go of our stranglehold of the land. Effectively every acre in Ireland has been altered by human hand, and we have a very particular idea of how it should look – neat green fields, tidy hedges, hard-edged blocks of even-aged spruce plantations, etc. etc. We live in dead and dying, degraded landscapes, catastrophically altered from their original states. Yes, we’ve increased our own standards of living, but to what end, and what more do we need? I right-click on the word wilderness in Microsoft Word and check the synonyms – wasteland is top of the list. What is wasteful about wilderness? Waste doesn’t exist in the wild, it’s a construct of the human realm. How come we’ve come to separate ourselves so much from our fellow species, and the physical world that sustains us? We stand to gain so much from reconnecting with the real world around us - a sense of community and connectedness that feels lacking in much of modern life.
18th October
The year is slipping into winter’s torpor. It’s mild – 16.5°C according to the car – and drizzly, the low mist trapping the mould close to the damp ground. Barring an unusually settled spell of weather not much will stay dry between now and next spring. The decomposition is almost audible in the wet woods. The slow creeping of thousands of miles of mycorrhizae breaking down the dead wood, the pushing up of mushrooms through rot and soil, the millions of munching decomposers, chewing through the mouldering leaf litter, which piles up in the steady fall of the trees’ worn-out solar panels. If it wasn’t already so warm the place would be steaming with decay. The woods feel as full of life as they do in spring. It’s the life that feeds on summer’s death.
19th October
A great tit adding colour to a waning fuchsia hedge in the back garden. The bird feeders are quiet enough these days but hopefully as winter comes in there’ll be more to watch from the sitting room window.
20th October
Outrageous sky scenes on the way home from a mediocre attempt at photography at the beach. All the fumbling around with tripod and graduated filters and trying to shield the front of the camera from raindrops feels like nonsense when a far more interesting image can be made handheld from a gravelly layby at the side of the road. It’s a good thing I gave up with the more ‘serious’ photography attempt when I did, otherwise I’d have missed these mile high clouds catching the charged light from the setting sun.
21st October
Pleasant sky scenes again this evening, this time overlooking the Blaskets from Mám Clasach. I miss getting out to the islands now that the summer work season is finished, but it’s nice to know the wildlife is getting a break from all the tour boats.
22nd October
There aren’t many things still in flower at this time of the year – ivy, which doesn’t come out til autumn anyway, the ubiquitous and season-spanning herb Robert, maybe a few dandelions here and there. And in a rough patch in the garden today this dead-nettle.
23rd October
Awful wind and rain today. When the wind is from the south great gusts of air come thundering down the hill here and smash into the back garden like a derailed train. This ash lost its topmost leaves long before today but a storm like this will shake free plenty of the more sheltered ones. Today’s image was made from just inside the open back door. It’s a bit desolate looking, but that’s how it is here a lot of the time. I remember talking to the landlord shortly after moving in about how beautiful it was, and he agreeing that it’s great in fine weather, but a lonely enough place otherwise. Having spent six years* here now I know what he means.
*to the day in fact – this writing prompted me to dig out an old photo from the day I moved in and it was this very date in 2015
24th October
A cluster of mushrooms in the front garden with their caps turning up as they near the end stage of their fruiting season. The gills on the underside of the cap are there to increase surface area for spore production and dispersal. I presume they turn up and outward like this to be more exposed to the wind, which will carry spores away to colonise new ground. A quick Google search tells me a gilled mushroom with a three-inch diameter cap can produce up to forty million spores per hour. Impressive numbers, but I imagine that the vast majority of them come to nothing. All it takes is a fraction of a percent from those kinds of numbers for new generations of the same fungi to carry on into the future.
25th October
Morning rainbow between home and Cruach Mhárthain. As I enter the final stretch of this project (less than sixty days to go now) I’m starting to reflect more on some of the lessons I’m learning from the daft idea of making a photo every day for a year. A quick check tells me almost two month’s worth of images were made in or from the garden or just outside the property boundary. That’s good going for somebody who values living in a beautiful place. That said, the vast majority of those images (and those of the project in general) are totally unremarkable. None of the last four images here are special in any way, and all were made within a few paces of the front door. That leads to another lesson – the idea of consistently making great photographs is an impossible outcome from a daily image project that I’ve come to see as more of a chore than a creative outlet. Perhaps somebody psyched out of their mind on the idea who had nothing else to occupy their time could create great images every day, but that person isn’t me. I need to learn to be more comfortable with that instead of looking at all these boring photographs and measuring myself against them.
Find Part 23 here
12th October
From one quiet island harbour to another; this is Portdoon, an amazing natural anchorage on Inishturk. The entrance to the harbour, seen here from a drone’s perspective, can only accommodate small boats, and only in settled weather. That blue and black currach, the Portdoon Princess, is the only one fishing regularly here now. I met the owner returning from a trip earlier on in the day. He said when he was younger and starting fishing there were five currachs based here. I was surprised to see anybody still using one. Very few people still use currachs for fishing in West Kerry, where the simple outline of the naomhóg is somewhat of a local insignia. Inishturk has less than sixty full-time residents nowadays. Of all the inhabited islands in Ireland this is probably one of the most overlooked. Yet again I wondered how things will be in places like this in a few generations’ time. Will Inishturk go the same way as The Inishkeas, Inishark, The Great Blasket? Or will remote working and modern technology bring a new lease of human life to the island?
13th October
Today brought me to yet another island, a small few acres of grass that was once the site of much holy activity. Caher Island, or Caher na Naomh (The City of Saints), sits east of and belongs as commonage to Inishturk. This little chapel and its surrounding standings stones and stations date from around the 8th century, and it’s among the most interesting old heritage sites I’ve ever visited. Certainly if it was on the mainland it would be manicured and maintained as an important national monument, with gravel paths and interpretive signage and most of the carved stones probably taken in for safekeeping. But out where it is it’s been slowly crumbling for centuries. There is a feast day here on the 15th of August, though the pandemic has prevented that local pilgrimage for the past two years. I managed to get a lift over as some sheep were being brought in for grazing, and spent a nice few hours trying to make out the etchings on the many engraved stones, and taking in the peace and quiet of the place. The reflective nature of such a site must have seeped in to me a bit. It occurred to me that sixteen year old me would be pretty happy to know I was visiting such places to make photographs for a book. More than half my lifetime ago I probably would have picked such an idea out of a list of dream jobs for “when I grew up” (when does anybody stop growing?). While it’s not enough to make a living from it’s still cool to think I’ve ended up doing such a thing. Who knows what I’ll be at if I last another eighteen years, but I hope I still have the chance to get to such special places as the western islands.
14th October
I arrived home to much leaf litter in the back garden and a real sense of autumn having settled while I was away in Mayo. I also arrived home with a sore throat and a headcold, as well as a general sense of exhaustion, so I took this easy option for my daily photo, just a few paces from the backdoor. Fine weather for enjoying the crunch and rustle of dried leaves underfoot.
15th October
A gorgeous day today, at least where I was. Much of the peninsula was muffled under a thick blanket of low fog but for whatever reason there was a hole a half a kilometer across just above my house for most of the day. It was warm in the sun, with little wind to speak of, and all the more enjoyable knowing most of the surrounding area was gloomy under the strange mist. This image was made by drone, just above and beyond the front garden.
16th October
Cuas an Bhodaigh, or Brandon Creek in English, on a wet and miserable lonely night. Legend has it St. Brendan and a few followers set sail from here in the 6th century and made it to North America. The medieval book about his adventures, Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis, is very fanciful, but if you swap giant sea crystals for icebergs and islands of smoke and fire for Iceland, it’s not a huge stretch to imagine they may have actually done it. Given the prevailing winds of the North Atlantic it’s theoretically possible that travelers at the time could have been blown from Ireland to Scotland, then to the Faroes, across to Iceland and past Greenland to land in Canada in the year five hundred and something (more than nine hundred years before the genocidal, murdering bastard Colombus “discovered” what is now called America by most people). In 1976 Tim Severin put the idea to the test, setting sail from this very spot with three other audacious characters in a boat made to the standards of 6th century technology – a wooden frame tied together with leather string, wrapped in traditionally tanned cow hides, and waterproofed with wool grease. Outrageously, they made it, proving that the folk talk is at least potentially based in truth. The Brendan Voyage is his written account of the adventure, and is well worth reading.
17th October
The wildlife of Dingle lurking in the dark of River Lane. Even in extinction creatures such as the giant elk and wild boar exist only in the peripheries of our towns and thoughts. This mural puts me in mind of the cover of Feral, George Monbiot’s compelling call to action for restoring the hugely degraded ecosystems we live in in Ireland and Britain. On the edition on my bookshelves at least a deer stands alert in the middle of a multi-story car park. These hidden away paintings give me that same idea of animals in the urban environment, a seemingly insurmountable juxtaposition. But why should such a thing seem odd? Can we really not conceive of a mixing of the two? We need more people to challenge the widely accepted narrative of “nature” being something separate from the human world, a place to go walking on a Sunday afternoon or something to be watched on TV some wet winter’s evening. Of course the idea of wild boar roaming the streets of any urban centre is a little far-fetched, but even outside of our concrete jungles the concept is guaranteed to spark outrage. So many cannot comprehend letting go of our stranglehold of the land. Effectively every acre in Ireland has been altered by human hand, and we have a very particular idea of how it should look – neat green fields, tidy hedges, hard-edged blocks of even-aged spruce plantations, etc. etc. We live in dead and dying, degraded landscapes, catastrophically altered from their original states. Yes, we’ve increased our own standards of living, but to what end, and what more do we need? I right-click on the word wilderness in Microsoft Word and check the synonyms – wasteland is top of the list. What is wasteful about wilderness? Waste doesn’t exist in the wild, it’s a construct of the human realm. How come we’ve come to separate ourselves so much from our fellow species, and the physical world that sustains us? We stand to gain so much from reconnecting with the real world around us - a sense of community and connectedness that feels lacking in much of modern life.
18th October
The year is slipping into winter’s torpor. It’s mild – 16.5°C according to the car – and drizzly, the low mist trapping the mould close to the damp ground. Barring an unusually settled spell of weather not much will stay dry between now and next spring. The decomposition is almost audible in the wet woods. The slow creeping of thousands of miles of mycorrhizae breaking down the dead wood, the pushing up of mushrooms through rot and soil, the millions of munching decomposers, chewing through the mouldering leaf litter, which piles up in the steady fall of the trees’ worn-out solar panels. If it wasn’t already so warm the place would be steaming with decay. The woods feel as full of life as they do in spring. It’s the life that feeds on summer’s death.
19th October
A great tit adding colour to a waning fuchsia hedge in the back garden. The bird feeders are quiet enough these days but hopefully as winter comes in there’ll be more to watch from the sitting room window.
20th October
Outrageous sky scenes on the way home from a mediocre attempt at photography at the beach. All the fumbling around with tripod and graduated filters and trying to shield the front of the camera from raindrops feels like nonsense when a far more interesting image can be made handheld from a gravelly layby at the side of the road. It’s a good thing I gave up with the more ‘serious’ photography attempt when I did, otherwise I’d have missed these mile high clouds catching the charged light from the setting sun.
21st October
Pleasant sky scenes again this evening, this time overlooking the Blaskets from Mám Clasach. I miss getting out to the islands now that the summer work season is finished, but it’s nice to know the wildlife is getting a break from all the tour boats.
22nd October
There aren’t many things still in flower at this time of the year – ivy, which doesn’t come out til autumn anyway, the ubiquitous and season-spanning herb Robert, maybe a few dandelions here and there. And in a rough patch in the garden today this dead-nettle.
23rd October
Awful wind and rain today. When the wind is from the south great gusts of air come thundering down the hill here and smash into the back garden like a derailed train. This ash lost its topmost leaves long before today but a storm like this will shake free plenty of the more sheltered ones. Today’s image was made from just inside the open back door. It’s a bit desolate looking, but that’s how it is here a lot of the time. I remember talking to the landlord shortly after moving in about how beautiful it was, and he agreeing that it’s great in fine weather, but a lonely enough place otherwise. Having spent six years* here now I know what he means.
*to the day in fact – this writing prompted me to dig out an old photo from the day I moved in and it was this very date in 2015
24th October
A cluster of mushrooms in the front garden with their caps turning up as they near the end stage of their fruiting season. The gills on the underside of the cap are there to increase surface area for spore production and dispersal. I presume they turn up and outward like this to be more exposed to the wind, which will carry spores away to colonise new ground. A quick Google search tells me a gilled mushroom with a three-inch diameter cap can produce up to forty million spores per hour. Impressive numbers, but I imagine that the vast majority of them come to nothing. All it takes is a fraction of a percent from those kinds of numbers for new generations of the same fungi to carry on into the future.
25th October
Morning rainbow between home and Cruach Mhárthain. As I enter the final stretch of this project (less than sixty days to go now) I’m starting to reflect more on some of the lessons I’m learning from the daft idea of making a photo every day for a year. A quick check tells me almost two month’s worth of images were made in or from the garden or just outside the property boundary. That’s good going for somebody who values living in a beautiful place. That said, the vast majority of those images (and those of the project in general) are totally unremarkable. None of the last four images here are special in any way, and all were made within a few paces of the front door. That leads to another lesson – the idea of consistently making great photographs is an impossible outcome from a daily image project that I’ve come to see as more of a chore than a creative outlet. Perhaps somebody psyched out of their mind on the idea who had nothing else to occupy their time could create great images every day, but that person isn’t me. I need to learn to be more comfortable with that instead of looking at all these boring photographs and measuring myself against them.
Find Part 23 here