Bliain - Part 6
15th March 2021
Part six of my project to make a photograph every day for a full year, or bliain in Irish. Find Part 5 here.
2nd March
A hazy sunshine day with lovely warmth in the air, birds singing loud and a flat calm sea down in the bay below home. This weather has been bringing the daisies and dandelions out, and I spent some time in the afternoon enjoying the finer details of these bright dots in the garden grass. The shadows of this dandelion’s stamens can be seen on the petals here, and a few of the stamens themselves are just about in focus in the bottom right. The stamen is the pollen-producing organ of a plant. According to Zoë Devlin’s excellent wildflower field guide there are over 70 different species of dandelion in Ireland. Somehow I doubt there are even half that many people who could tell the species apart. This much-maligned ‘weed’ has a bad reputation for ‘spoiling’ garden lawns but have you ever thought how ridiculous an idea a perfectly rectilinear area of grass really is? It’s so much work to maintain, it looks boring and it’s almost lifeless. We’re long overdue a switch to wildflower meadows in our gardens and parks, all teeming with life and colour and interest. The time spent mowing can instead be spent taking a magnifying glass to the flowers and insects and you can take some satisfaction in knowing you’ve created a nature-friendly habitat in a world that’s being rapidly bulldozed and poured over with concrete. As summer approaches and lawnmowers start to emerge from dusty hibernation in garden sheds give a second thought before you go out and cut the grass this year. Unless you’re using it as a playing pitch there’s little real reason to have it trimmed short all the time. Don’t be worried about what the neighbours might think. Leave it grow!
3rd March
More botanizing in the garden on a much duller day. This is the flower of a red dead-nettle. These are easily overlooked wildflowers, being only about 5mm wide, but are beautiful when seen up close. Compared to yesterday’s image this is clearly a very different style of flower. Rather than a circular arrangement this species has one large hood-like petal and two lower petal lobes on which striking purple markings act like a landing signal to pollinators. Nectar and pollen are gathered from inside the cosy little cocoon by insects, who unwittingly (or maybe knowingly?!) spread the pollen to the next flower on their quest for a meal, thus helping the plant to stay extant.
4th March
A sublime morning on Mount Brandon. It seemed a sure thing that there would be a cloud inversion today after yesterday evening’s weather and what the forecast was predicting, and sure enough, after an hour or so in the darkness and mist it felt dreamy to emerge into a new world above the cloud in the blue of the cusp of the day. Conditions like this totally rewrite the landscape. Familiar views become very different as the cloud level dictates which peaks become islands in the sea of mist, rather than mountains rooted in recognisable foundations. I have only seen as widespread and perfect an inversion once before, way back in 2008. It was a mind-blowing day, my first time experiencing anything like this and all the more meaningful for being in those early years of discovering hillwalking and rock climbing and the new-found freedom and excitement of exploring wild and beautiful places with friends. That day was one of many that kept me coming back to Dingle, until the point that I now live within easy reach of these hills. And every time I’m left awe-struck by some local nature phenomenon I’m reminded that, at least in some respects, I’m living a life I dreamed of more than a decade ago. And that’s lovely, and makes me feel very lucky.
5th March
While driving into town for the weekly shop this buzzard swooped down and landed on a phone pole just as I was passing. This was only the second ever time I’ve seen this species on the Dingle Peninsula, which is an area very lacking in raptors. A minute later down the road I realised I’d forgotten the shopping list so I turned back for home and grabbed my camera too while I was at it. Thankfully the bird hadn’t gone far, just across the road to perch on these bat boxes. At least that’s what I think they are. It doesn’t really look like a suitable bat roost to me, being out in the open on the side of a windy hill. There are a good few of these kinds of structures popping up recently and I can’t help but be cynical about them. The haphazard way in which they seem to be thrown up, with little thought given to where they might best be suited suggests to me a box ticking exercise to avail of some kind of ‘green’ grant rather than a genuine effort to help with the biodiversity crisis. If we can’t rewire the entire systems of farming and economic ‘development’ these token gestures will do very little in the long run. But perhaps I’m wrong to be so pessimistic. I hope so. I certainly don’t aim my cynicism directly at all farmers, most of whom are just trying to get by and make a living within the constraints of government strategies and market forces beyond their control. The EU has brought enormous positive change to the world but its policies around agriculture and fishing have left a terrible legacy of habitat destruction, biodiversity loss and the slow suffocation of small-scale farming and fishing (the least damaging kind) in favour of big business interests (the most destructive forces on the planet). But to end this entry with some good news and bring it back to the bird; buzzards have been spreading east across Ireland for the past few decades and are now quite a common sight in much of the country. Hopefully it won’t be long til they’re established in Corca Dhuibhne too.
6th March
Sunrise at Fionn Trá. Another pleasant day, with the morning being the best of it, making me glad to have woken earlier than usual. It’s been a lovely weather week. Though I like to imagine I have the mental control to not let the climate dictate my mood - you can’t change the weather so what’s the point in being pissed off about it? (if only it was so simple...) - there’s no doubt that a bit of sun and warmth and light winds have a tendency to make everything else in life feel easier.
7th March
Daffodils brightening an abandoned garden on a leaden grey day. I’ve never paid much attention to these famous flowers, preferring instead to celebrate more native species, which is a bit close-minded of me really. I don’t think daffodils pose much of a threat as invasives, and they’ve been around so long now that they’re well naturalised. After all, how long does one have to be around to be considered native? Asks the Cork man living in Kerry. In seeking something to write about for this entry I looked up the origin of daffodils and was met with the Greek myth of Narcissus. Apparently he was a handsome lad who rejected a nymph named Echo, and she faded away with the heartbreak (until all that remained of her was an echo.) Nemesis, the god of revenge, heard about this and lured Narcissus to a pool, where he caught sight of his reflection. Being narcissistic (or, to shoehorn a favorite phrase into use - if he could turn around quick enough he’d get up on the back of himself) he leaned over to admire his good looks, fell into the pool and drowned. The Greek Gods took no prisoners. A daffodil sprang up in his place, hence the genus of the many variations of this now-widespread flower – Narcissus. As attractive as daffodils are it seems a bit harsh to label them as egotistical, but these old stories are so muddled up in the turbidity of centuries of retelling that it’s hard to get a clear picture of the original.
8th March
A flush of brooding sunrise colour mostly hidden by the hills east of Smerwick’s southern shore. I was too late for this one, too slow to leave the warmth of the bed and get around to the south side of the peninsula where I might have found a clearer view. This is a hurried, last resort attempt, but no harm. It’s always lovely to be out on a nice morning, camera in hand or not. Gentle waves washed the sand, the plovers were piping and I heard my first scraps of skylark song this year in the cool morning air. And I had extra reason to be glad to have gotten out early; the prophetic warning of a red sky in the morning was true, and before lunchtime the wind was up and the rain was down.
9th March
Romantic abandonment. Who doesn’t love an old ruined house? Apart from people stuck living in them maybe. It seemed a right of passage to explore these kinds of places when I was a child, pretending it was your own secret castle and imagining ghosts and murderers around every turn. Now as an adult I’m more afraid of the reality of being accused of trespassing than I am of imaginary, knife-wielding baddies. And so most of the time I have to use my imagination about what the crumbling interior of such a place as this looks like. Probably full of manky, rotting crap, but brimming with potential stories and unanswered questions too.
10th March
Ten light-bellied brent geese flying over the wind-ripped surface of Smerwick Harbour. These birds, born during the short summers of the Canadian Arctic, come to Ireland for the reasonably mild winters here. In fact Ireland holds the vast majority of the world population of this species in wintertime, most of who head for Strangford Lough, Co. Down. As the summer approaches they head north again in April or May. Very far north in fact; according to the Irish Brent Goose Research Group’s website this unassuming bird breeds as far north as any in the world. So when I look out at them flying into a stiff headwind over a cold and unforgiving sea in the early Irish springtime and wonder about their hardiness and endurance I’m seeing them during perhaps the easiest part of their year, the winter holiday to a kinder climate before making a grueling journey across an ocean and the icy vastness of Greenland, to breeding grounds where Arctic foxes and bitter cold (though maybe less so in a warming world) threaten them on a daily basis. And after all that effort to hopefully breed successfully they make the journey south again to arrive here in October. A well-known fact about migrating geese is their V-shaped flying formations, with the position of leader being regularly swapped to ensure the load is shared among all birds in a flock. In a very beautiful album released by Karine Polwart and Pippa Murphy a few years ago this teamwork gets geese described as “sky-borne socialists” so that “no lone bird bears the brunt”. The entire album (which is as much poetry and spoken word as it is typical singing) is brimming with references to the natural world and how it provides for all we need, provided we share in the teamwork with other species. It's a bit sad, but I highly recommend it for anybody interested in folk music.
11th March
More flying wildfowl, this time a male mallard against the shaggy carpet texture of a winter hillside. A brighter day today, windy but with lovely sunshine only occasionally interrupted by heavy showers. Typical March weather, in a year that’s been anything but typical for most humans. I do however like the idea of the mallards and most other species being blissfully unaware of this human pandemic. After all, despite the bubbles most of us live in, the human perspective (to foolishly cobble together all the variations as a whole) is but one of many ways of seeing the world, and as radical an idea as this might seem to many, it shouldn’t be the only one worth considering. It was certainly a silver lining at the beginning of the pandemic a year ago to see how the natural world was getting a break from anthropogenic pressure during the early hard lockdowns around the globe. Here’s hoping the sudden jolt to the system might rewire our collective way of looking at things as we carry on into an increasingly uncertain future.
12th March
The unsettled weather continuing today, bringing with it some incredible spectacles of ferocious wind and hail. I headed down to Wine Strand pier around sunset in the hopes of photographing the brooding darkness as night came on and I wasn’t disappointed. Squally showers were passing, carried along by violent gusts that whipped up the sea surface into a white mist beneath pummeling rain. It was all very impressive and energising (from the comfort of the car) and I quite like the dark, grainy nature of this image for showing off the view and mood of a wind-scoured wave through a heavy curtain of hail at dusk.
13th March
Today was bright and breezy again, with just enough swell to send a few bigger waves breaking over the rocks near the same spot from yesterday’s picture. When there’s a bit of swell in the relative shelter of this harbour you know it must be big out on the open sea. This view is looking across to Baile na nGall, with the mast from Radio na Gaeltacht’s base and the beach and pier below Tigh TP just about visible behind the spray. The peak on the left is Binn Mór, and the faded remains of a rainbow (which grew and faded in strength but stubbornly refused to coincide with a set of bigger waves) can be seen in the middle.
14th March
There’s a small cove not too far from home that I’ve often seen from the sea and it always seems heaped with driftwood. I’m like a magpie with shiny things when it comes to driftwood. Most of it is just taking up space in the shed, but some nicer pieces get put to use as ornaments or put together to make shelves and candle holders and the like. The less visually appealing stuff can be decent kindling too, and occasionally the big blue that floated some timber along for god knows how long is remembered by a blue-green flame, I presume from long immersion in the salt sea. Today I tried scrambling around the coast at low water to get to this cove, but to no avail. Backed by cliffs and fronted by the sea, it seems the only way I’ll get there to collect the bounty is by boat. On the way back I turned my eye to the smaller details of the low tide rocky shore, so often the arena for the basics of biology learning while I was studying zoology more than ten years ago now (yikes!) I think it’s fair to say that most people consider anything below high water mark on a rocky shoreline as little more than a slippery wasteland, but, like most subjects, the more knowledge you attain the more interesting it becomes. Sure, the species that live in this zone are a far cry from the charismatic megafauna (another take-away from university) like whales and lions, but when you consider how hostile this environment is it’s incredible to think that so much diversity of life can exist there at all. As the tide comes and goes the worlds of these animals and plants changes drastically. Most intertidal species have to be able to cope with both total submersion in saltwater and extended periods of exposure to the drying air and heat of life on land, and switch between these extremes every few hours. In wintertime, cold weather can bring frost and freezing temperatures, and summer sun can evaporate much of the water out of shallow tidal pools, increasing their saltiness to dangerously high levels, and scorch the exposed rock and whatever shelled creatures or seaweeds are left bare on it for hours at a time. And just imagine* the absolute chaos of living in an environment that gets battered by big waves such as in the pictures from the last two days?! Especially given how much bigger those waves are for a limpet or an anemone?! It’d be like having skyscrapers toppling down on you for hours on end. There are various physiological and behavioural adaptations to surviving these huge challenges but it is still quite a wonder to find life thriving here. Consider how utterly incapable most species, ourselves included, would be of surviving even a day like that. It certainly makes this humble flat periwinkle a bit more impressive to my mind at least.
* trying to imagine life from the perspective of another creature has been the source of so much learning and humility and fascination and empathy for me, and I highly recommend it when thinking about or observing another being (including humans)
15th March
From the intricacies of the shoreline to the equally complex micro-worlds of the woods. This is a close-up of a very lichenous apple tree branch. Such a thick cover and diverse range of species is a sign of clean, humid air, and a clear indication that this tree has been left alone for a long period of time. Lichens are slow growing, and any tree festooned as ornamentally as this must indeed be an old one. This kind of intricate detail has been on my mind since the pandemic lockdowns began and our worlds shrunk. Or so it would seem if you stay in the modern human-scale worldview, in which the combustion engine has shortened distances to the point that now there are people pouring serious energy into the idea of colonising a far-off planet. But by taking this idea and going in the opposite direction, and imagining and examining the smaller details in the world around us our universes can grow enormously, without having to physically traverse across any great measure of space. The closer you look the more detail is revealed, and before long even a 5km sphere around your house can start to feel incomprehensively huge and varied and full of interest. At least if you can get into the right frame of mind. These ideas (some might call them notions) were first introduced to me in Tim Robinson’s writing. After his death almost a year ago I started re-reading all of his books about Connemara, The Burren and The Aran Islands. In his attempts to map and try to get to know each of these areas intimately he delves into multiple different areas of expertise, from local folklore, in-depth history research, ideas of philosophy and the latest academic findings in geology, archaeology and mathematics. One particular mathematical idea that has fascinated me since first reading about it in the third book of his Connemara trilogy is that of fractals. Please excuse the following attempt to give a very very basic idea of where fractal theory can be applied. Imagine measuring a coastline for a map for example. It can be shown that the more accurate you try and get, by measuring at smaller and smaller scales, the closer you get to infinity. Suppose while measuring a length of rocky coastline, you get down to the level that takes in the detail of each stone as a mouse might experience it. A bay we would class as being 500m wide could be many times that length when measured at such a scale that includes all the ups and downs of clambering over the piled stones and outcrops. And you could zoom in even more, to examine the surface of each stone, down to the levels of every divot and crack and the microscopic roughnesses an ant might experience, and suddenly the bay is impossibly wide, having grown again by taking in ever more detail. And you could go further still! To infinity (and maybe beyond, with the right drugs.) Or imagine trying to measure the surface area of this short length of a branch with all the incredibly complex detail of those lichens. What an awesomely huge world it is all of a sudden, when we take the time to take in the finest of its textures. Obviously all of this is only food for thought experiments, at least for those of us who don’t work in the field of applied mathematics. But by using the concept in as far as the limitations of the human eye will allow it does make for an enlarging of the world around you, in all the textures and colours and shapes of the things (living or not) to be seen in the ditches and seashores and other quiet places left abandoned by our blinding vision of the wider world. This project feels very much like one of those same thought experiments to me, in that the more and more I look at my surroundings the more photo opportunities I see, and I know that just as the exact length of a bay or a branch can only be infinity when looked at closely enough, so too there are an infinity of potential photographs I could make without ever going east of Dingle again.
Find Part 7 here
2nd March
A hazy sunshine day with lovely warmth in the air, birds singing loud and a flat calm sea down in the bay below home. This weather has been bringing the daisies and dandelions out, and I spent some time in the afternoon enjoying the finer details of these bright dots in the garden grass. The shadows of this dandelion’s stamens can be seen on the petals here, and a few of the stamens themselves are just about in focus in the bottom right. The stamen is the pollen-producing organ of a plant. According to Zoë Devlin’s excellent wildflower field guide there are over 70 different species of dandelion in Ireland. Somehow I doubt there are even half that many people who could tell the species apart. This much-maligned ‘weed’ has a bad reputation for ‘spoiling’ garden lawns but have you ever thought how ridiculous an idea a perfectly rectilinear area of grass really is? It’s so much work to maintain, it looks boring and it’s almost lifeless. We’re long overdue a switch to wildflower meadows in our gardens and parks, all teeming with life and colour and interest. The time spent mowing can instead be spent taking a magnifying glass to the flowers and insects and you can take some satisfaction in knowing you’ve created a nature-friendly habitat in a world that’s being rapidly bulldozed and poured over with concrete. As summer approaches and lawnmowers start to emerge from dusty hibernation in garden sheds give a second thought before you go out and cut the grass this year. Unless you’re using it as a playing pitch there’s little real reason to have it trimmed short all the time. Don’t be worried about what the neighbours might think. Leave it grow!
3rd March
More botanizing in the garden on a much duller day. This is the flower of a red dead-nettle. These are easily overlooked wildflowers, being only about 5mm wide, but are beautiful when seen up close. Compared to yesterday’s image this is clearly a very different style of flower. Rather than a circular arrangement this species has one large hood-like petal and two lower petal lobes on which striking purple markings act like a landing signal to pollinators. Nectar and pollen are gathered from inside the cosy little cocoon by insects, who unwittingly (or maybe knowingly?!) spread the pollen to the next flower on their quest for a meal, thus helping the plant to stay extant.
4th March
A sublime morning on Mount Brandon. It seemed a sure thing that there would be a cloud inversion today after yesterday evening’s weather and what the forecast was predicting, and sure enough, after an hour or so in the darkness and mist it felt dreamy to emerge into a new world above the cloud in the blue of the cusp of the day. Conditions like this totally rewrite the landscape. Familiar views become very different as the cloud level dictates which peaks become islands in the sea of mist, rather than mountains rooted in recognisable foundations. I have only seen as widespread and perfect an inversion once before, way back in 2008. It was a mind-blowing day, my first time experiencing anything like this and all the more meaningful for being in those early years of discovering hillwalking and rock climbing and the new-found freedom and excitement of exploring wild and beautiful places with friends. That day was one of many that kept me coming back to Dingle, until the point that I now live within easy reach of these hills. And every time I’m left awe-struck by some local nature phenomenon I’m reminded that, at least in some respects, I’m living a life I dreamed of more than a decade ago. And that’s lovely, and makes me feel very lucky.
5th March
While driving into town for the weekly shop this buzzard swooped down and landed on a phone pole just as I was passing. This was only the second ever time I’ve seen this species on the Dingle Peninsula, which is an area very lacking in raptors. A minute later down the road I realised I’d forgotten the shopping list so I turned back for home and grabbed my camera too while I was at it. Thankfully the bird hadn’t gone far, just across the road to perch on these bat boxes. At least that’s what I think they are. It doesn’t really look like a suitable bat roost to me, being out in the open on the side of a windy hill. There are a good few of these kinds of structures popping up recently and I can’t help but be cynical about them. The haphazard way in which they seem to be thrown up, with little thought given to where they might best be suited suggests to me a box ticking exercise to avail of some kind of ‘green’ grant rather than a genuine effort to help with the biodiversity crisis. If we can’t rewire the entire systems of farming and economic ‘development’ these token gestures will do very little in the long run. But perhaps I’m wrong to be so pessimistic. I hope so. I certainly don’t aim my cynicism directly at all farmers, most of whom are just trying to get by and make a living within the constraints of government strategies and market forces beyond their control. The EU has brought enormous positive change to the world but its policies around agriculture and fishing have left a terrible legacy of habitat destruction, biodiversity loss and the slow suffocation of small-scale farming and fishing (the least damaging kind) in favour of big business interests (the most destructive forces on the planet). But to end this entry with some good news and bring it back to the bird; buzzards have been spreading east across Ireland for the past few decades and are now quite a common sight in much of the country. Hopefully it won’t be long til they’re established in Corca Dhuibhne too.
6th March
Sunrise at Fionn Trá. Another pleasant day, with the morning being the best of it, making me glad to have woken earlier than usual. It’s been a lovely weather week. Though I like to imagine I have the mental control to not let the climate dictate my mood - you can’t change the weather so what’s the point in being pissed off about it? (if only it was so simple...) - there’s no doubt that a bit of sun and warmth and light winds have a tendency to make everything else in life feel easier.
7th March
Daffodils brightening an abandoned garden on a leaden grey day. I’ve never paid much attention to these famous flowers, preferring instead to celebrate more native species, which is a bit close-minded of me really. I don’t think daffodils pose much of a threat as invasives, and they’ve been around so long now that they’re well naturalised. After all, how long does one have to be around to be considered native? Asks the Cork man living in Kerry. In seeking something to write about for this entry I looked up the origin of daffodils and was met with the Greek myth of Narcissus. Apparently he was a handsome lad who rejected a nymph named Echo, and she faded away with the heartbreak (until all that remained of her was an echo.) Nemesis, the god of revenge, heard about this and lured Narcissus to a pool, where he caught sight of his reflection. Being narcissistic (or, to shoehorn a favorite phrase into use - if he could turn around quick enough he’d get up on the back of himself) he leaned over to admire his good looks, fell into the pool and drowned. The Greek Gods took no prisoners. A daffodil sprang up in his place, hence the genus of the many variations of this now-widespread flower – Narcissus. As attractive as daffodils are it seems a bit harsh to label them as egotistical, but these old stories are so muddled up in the turbidity of centuries of retelling that it’s hard to get a clear picture of the original.
8th March
A flush of brooding sunrise colour mostly hidden by the hills east of Smerwick’s southern shore. I was too late for this one, too slow to leave the warmth of the bed and get around to the south side of the peninsula where I might have found a clearer view. This is a hurried, last resort attempt, but no harm. It’s always lovely to be out on a nice morning, camera in hand or not. Gentle waves washed the sand, the plovers were piping and I heard my first scraps of skylark song this year in the cool morning air. And I had extra reason to be glad to have gotten out early; the prophetic warning of a red sky in the morning was true, and before lunchtime the wind was up and the rain was down.
9th March
Romantic abandonment. Who doesn’t love an old ruined house? Apart from people stuck living in them maybe. It seemed a right of passage to explore these kinds of places when I was a child, pretending it was your own secret castle and imagining ghosts and murderers around every turn. Now as an adult I’m more afraid of the reality of being accused of trespassing than I am of imaginary, knife-wielding baddies. And so most of the time I have to use my imagination about what the crumbling interior of such a place as this looks like. Probably full of manky, rotting crap, but brimming with potential stories and unanswered questions too.
10th March
Ten light-bellied brent geese flying over the wind-ripped surface of Smerwick Harbour. These birds, born during the short summers of the Canadian Arctic, come to Ireland for the reasonably mild winters here. In fact Ireland holds the vast majority of the world population of this species in wintertime, most of who head for Strangford Lough, Co. Down. As the summer approaches they head north again in April or May. Very far north in fact; according to the Irish Brent Goose Research Group’s website this unassuming bird breeds as far north as any in the world. So when I look out at them flying into a stiff headwind over a cold and unforgiving sea in the early Irish springtime and wonder about their hardiness and endurance I’m seeing them during perhaps the easiest part of their year, the winter holiday to a kinder climate before making a grueling journey across an ocean and the icy vastness of Greenland, to breeding grounds where Arctic foxes and bitter cold (though maybe less so in a warming world) threaten them on a daily basis. And after all that effort to hopefully breed successfully they make the journey south again to arrive here in October. A well-known fact about migrating geese is their V-shaped flying formations, with the position of leader being regularly swapped to ensure the load is shared among all birds in a flock. In a very beautiful album released by Karine Polwart and Pippa Murphy a few years ago this teamwork gets geese described as “sky-borne socialists” so that “no lone bird bears the brunt”. The entire album (which is as much poetry and spoken word as it is typical singing) is brimming with references to the natural world and how it provides for all we need, provided we share in the teamwork with other species. It's a bit sad, but I highly recommend it for anybody interested in folk music.
11th March
More flying wildfowl, this time a male mallard against the shaggy carpet texture of a winter hillside. A brighter day today, windy but with lovely sunshine only occasionally interrupted by heavy showers. Typical March weather, in a year that’s been anything but typical for most humans. I do however like the idea of the mallards and most other species being blissfully unaware of this human pandemic. After all, despite the bubbles most of us live in, the human perspective (to foolishly cobble together all the variations as a whole) is but one of many ways of seeing the world, and as radical an idea as this might seem to many, it shouldn’t be the only one worth considering. It was certainly a silver lining at the beginning of the pandemic a year ago to see how the natural world was getting a break from anthropogenic pressure during the early hard lockdowns around the globe. Here’s hoping the sudden jolt to the system might rewire our collective way of looking at things as we carry on into an increasingly uncertain future.
12th March
The unsettled weather continuing today, bringing with it some incredible spectacles of ferocious wind and hail. I headed down to Wine Strand pier around sunset in the hopes of photographing the brooding darkness as night came on and I wasn’t disappointed. Squally showers were passing, carried along by violent gusts that whipped up the sea surface into a white mist beneath pummeling rain. It was all very impressive and energising (from the comfort of the car) and I quite like the dark, grainy nature of this image for showing off the view and mood of a wind-scoured wave through a heavy curtain of hail at dusk.
13th March
Today was bright and breezy again, with just enough swell to send a few bigger waves breaking over the rocks near the same spot from yesterday’s picture. When there’s a bit of swell in the relative shelter of this harbour you know it must be big out on the open sea. This view is looking across to Baile na nGall, with the mast from Radio na Gaeltacht’s base and the beach and pier below Tigh TP just about visible behind the spray. The peak on the left is Binn Mór, and the faded remains of a rainbow (which grew and faded in strength but stubbornly refused to coincide with a set of bigger waves) can be seen in the middle.
14th March
There’s a small cove not too far from home that I’ve often seen from the sea and it always seems heaped with driftwood. I’m like a magpie with shiny things when it comes to driftwood. Most of it is just taking up space in the shed, but some nicer pieces get put to use as ornaments or put together to make shelves and candle holders and the like. The less visually appealing stuff can be decent kindling too, and occasionally the big blue that floated some timber along for god knows how long is remembered by a blue-green flame, I presume from long immersion in the salt sea. Today I tried scrambling around the coast at low water to get to this cove, but to no avail. Backed by cliffs and fronted by the sea, it seems the only way I’ll get there to collect the bounty is by boat. On the way back I turned my eye to the smaller details of the low tide rocky shore, so often the arena for the basics of biology learning while I was studying zoology more than ten years ago now (yikes!) I think it’s fair to say that most people consider anything below high water mark on a rocky shoreline as little more than a slippery wasteland, but, like most subjects, the more knowledge you attain the more interesting it becomes. Sure, the species that live in this zone are a far cry from the charismatic megafauna (another take-away from university) like whales and lions, but when you consider how hostile this environment is it’s incredible to think that so much diversity of life can exist there at all. As the tide comes and goes the worlds of these animals and plants changes drastically. Most intertidal species have to be able to cope with both total submersion in saltwater and extended periods of exposure to the drying air and heat of life on land, and switch between these extremes every few hours. In wintertime, cold weather can bring frost and freezing temperatures, and summer sun can evaporate much of the water out of shallow tidal pools, increasing their saltiness to dangerously high levels, and scorch the exposed rock and whatever shelled creatures or seaweeds are left bare on it for hours at a time. And just imagine* the absolute chaos of living in an environment that gets battered by big waves such as in the pictures from the last two days?! Especially given how much bigger those waves are for a limpet or an anemone?! It’d be like having skyscrapers toppling down on you for hours on end. There are various physiological and behavioural adaptations to surviving these huge challenges but it is still quite a wonder to find life thriving here. Consider how utterly incapable most species, ourselves included, would be of surviving even a day like that. It certainly makes this humble flat periwinkle a bit more impressive to my mind at least.
* trying to imagine life from the perspective of another creature has been the source of so much learning and humility and fascination and empathy for me, and I highly recommend it when thinking about or observing another being (including humans)
15th March
From the intricacies of the shoreline to the equally complex micro-worlds of the woods. This is a close-up of a very lichenous apple tree branch. Such a thick cover and diverse range of species is a sign of clean, humid air, and a clear indication that this tree has been left alone for a long period of time. Lichens are slow growing, and any tree festooned as ornamentally as this must indeed be an old one. This kind of intricate detail has been on my mind since the pandemic lockdowns began and our worlds shrunk. Or so it would seem if you stay in the modern human-scale worldview, in which the combustion engine has shortened distances to the point that now there are people pouring serious energy into the idea of colonising a far-off planet. But by taking this idea and going in the opposite direction, and imagining and examining the smaller details in the world around us our universes can grow enormously, without having to physically traverse across any great measure of space. The closer you look the more detail is revealed, and before long even a 5km sphere around your house can start to feel incomprehensively huge and varied and full of interest. At least if you can get into the right frame of mind. These ideas (some might call them notions) were first introduced to me in Tim Robinson’s writing. After his death almost a year ago I started re-reading all of his books about Connemara, The Burren and The Aran Islands. In his attempts to map and try to get to know each of these areas intimately he delves into multiple different areas of expertise, from local folklore, in-depth history research, ideas of philosophy and the latest academic findings in geology, archaeology and mathematics. One particular mathematical idea that has fascinated me since first reading about it in the third book of his Connemara trilogy is that of fractals. Please excuse the following attempt to give a very very basic idea of where fractal theory can be applied. Imagine measuring a coastline for a map for example. It can be shown that the more accurate you try and get, by measuring at smaller and smaller scales, the closer you get to infinity. Suppose while measuring a length of rocky coastline, you get down to the level that takes in the detail of each stone as a mouse might experience it. A bay we would class as being 500m wide could be many times that length when measured at such a scale that includes all the ups and downs of clambering over the piled stones and outcrops. And you could zoom in even more, to examine the surface of each stone, down to the levels of every divot and crack and the microscopic roughnesses an ant might experience, and suddenly the bay is impossibly wide, having grown again by taking in ever more detail. And you could go further still! To infinity (and maybe beyond, with the right drugs.) Or imagine trying to measure the surface area of this short length of a branch with all the incredibly complex detail of those lichens. What an awesomely huge world it is all of a sudden, when we take the time to take in the finest of its textures. Obviously all of this is only food for thought experiments, at least for those of us who don’t work in the field of applied mathematics. But by using the concept in as far as the limitations of the human eye will allow it does make for an enlarging of the world around you, in all the textures and colours and shapes of the things (living or not) to be seen in the ditches and seashores and other quiet places left abandoned by our blinding vision of the wider world. This project feels very much like one of those same thought experiments to me, in that the more and more I look at my surroundings the more photo opportunities I see, and I know that just as the exact length of a bay or a branch can only be infinity when looked at closely enough, so too there are an infinity of potential photographs I could make without ever going east of Dingle again.
Find Part 7 here