Galway Bay Cycling CLub (GBCC) Criterium racing, Highfield Park, Galway City, Saturday evening, June 9th, 2018. Dry warm June. Tight clockwise circuit buried in one of Galway’s west side housing estates. Five right handers, two left handers, 2 speed bumps, one drag up, one drag down. Assorted bales of hay. All images Donal Kelly 2018.…
From up on Garraun you can see out along Renvyle peninsula. Glasilaun, Lettergesh, Mullaghloss, and Tullycross somewhere hidden. Names known since I’ve known names. Distilled summers of wave on wave, collapsing in rushes, scrambling down grassy slopes. The sea so broad and wide below you can’t take it all in. Or in the other direction,…
I’m hunched down under a little umbrella, my back against a rock face on the mountainside, and through drumming hail sunlight beams from under a turreted and tendrilled bank of Atlantic cloud. Cold. Fresh. Soft. The loft-frozen pellets hop and bounce down the rock face. Pile into little lines and bumps and begin to whiten…
Winter still on duty: Drops dusk early Provokes depressions to jostle over the Atlantic And this one brings fierce hail, Stinging along the coast I run For poor shelter under wavebashed rock Scattering sea birds Into jolted gale-hung grace And me, jolted but clumsy, staring at waves, Intruding. Beach and coast at Furbo, January 2018.
The last ‘proper’ snow here was back in 2010/2011, when things got real cold, as low as -15, and pipes were splitting up and down the country. In Ireland we basically call society off when it goes below -5. Most of us have never seen a snow plough, or snow shoes, or know what snow…
Photo Essay from the CCAFS conference held in NUI Galway in 2017
Long short time ago: Around Dublin on the100th anniversary of the 1916 rising: words and photos
Here it comes, there it goes. The Christmas break, with its long buildup and heavily marketed stature, has already left the building before it seemed to even arrive. The rains barely paused for breath, though the good winds provided enough breath for all. Under the twinklings of dangling lights blowing in the breezing rain, ’tis…
It happened before, though the levels this time are higher. In 2006, for the first time in the history of a family home built almost a century before, winter waters reached the doors and spilled into the kitchen. Nine years later, after another close scare in 2009, there are four inches of water from wall…
Storm Desmond is still battering its way across Ireland and the U.K., having already dumped a month’s worth of rain in some areas. The local radio stations along the west coast have become live feeds of lists of blocked roads, lights out, flooded houses. Rivers have been filled to breaking points and beyond. The Owenriff…
It’s a poor craftsman that blames his tools. But what craftsman has no tools at all? Where would we be, scrawling bison on caves Not that there is anything wrong with that, and indeed your latest work is exceptional and I love how you captured that sabred tooth where it flickers in the firelight. I…
Summer was a long haul of slosh and soakings, and then finally in Autumn dry stretches fuse into a few weeks of easy goings and comings, crunch of leaf underfoot, mudless soles, no winds worth their leaning into. Come November 1st, and the temperature strays above 15 Celsius. That trip to the Maamturks was long…
It’s a little bit of dark, a little bit of chaos, a lot of imagination, and a stick to shake at the arriving winter. Dwell in the dark, take refuge in the symbols, there is energy and density in the bulbous, the twisted, the animal, and the shadow. The first set of black and white…
It is the last race of the road season for me, but I don’t know it. I don’t know it until halfway through stage 2 when the bunch is going down a straight descent into Dungarvin. A rider comes down somewhere in front on the left, and a dominoes game of falling cyclists begins. Given…
A big blue tent, in a grassy field, between a cathedral and the River Corrib, July 2015. The Little Green Cars open for St Vincent’s Digital Witness, the feature preeesentation. For a change it’s not raining, though it’s not exactly balmy. Good enough! On with the gig, and better than good enough. You know it’s…
Kennedy’s Bar, Galway, July 2015, during the Galway Arts Festival. But this isn’t the official Arts Festival. This is the low budget tagalong sibling, raised on handmedowns and shorn of ‘big’ names: the Galway Fringe Festival. Smaller venues, smaller fuss, more variety: trade your big top tent and big-rig logistics for a dark backbar stage…
Máméan, Pass of the Birds According to legend, St. Patrick blessed Connemara from a well at the top of the pass, and slept there (“Leaba Padraic”=”Patrick’s bed”), though to my limited knowledge there was stuff going on there before that too. There is now a little chapel next to the well and mounds of stones…
The Glann road follows the western edge of Lough Corrib from Oughterard towards Maam, ending close to the foothills of the Maamturk mountains. The lake narrows towards its Northwestern corner, with peninsulas like the Hill of Doon coming within a few hundred metres of the opposite shore. The Ends of Glann A stonestrewn shore below…
