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…
It’s early January, and 2018 is still shiny and new and cold, and I pull in 5 miles from Clifden to get a photo of some mounds of gravel that have been piled up by the N59. I’m hoping to get something that is Connemara but not cliché, something that I can’t visualise, something I’m…
September. Wave stripping wind. A drive back to Cleggan. Missed the early ferry. Was stuck behind buses thought about overtaking, but nope, pulled the plug on aiming for the early ferry and had coffee in Clifden. Made ferry 2. Bang, bang, bang into the waves once it left the harbour.
Windmills on the hills slowly rotate in the August breeze. John Sullivan, eighty-plus, with a healthy shock of hair, hops onto the stuttering old Massey Ferguson, his back injured and twisted from years of hard work on the land. But he is still nimble, like the tractor; chipped and scraped, scarred and weathered, but with…
To watch from a distance the world settle in for its night from a bank high up under the Skye Road where I can make out comforting lights in windows cars in their driveways and the beam of a lighthouse all blink, blink, wait… blink, blink, wait… Somebody below is driving carefully along the low…
“It’s the wrath of God!” cackled wiry old Mrs Deacy with a smack of her stiff walking stick on the linoleum. “Settle down please, Mrs Deacy,” said Frank McDonagh. “It’s the same spring tide as every year, just coincident with a severe low pressure weather system.” Mrs Deacy persisted. “It’s the Good Lord’s way of…
Rainy Day in Renvyle Rain sweeps across the wide open, Clouds rolling in from the west, Tears from the sky set in motion Blown by a wind that won’t rest. Ceaseless the changes chase over, The shelterless landscape at speed. Soft underfoot grows the clover. Soft as a heart full of need. It’s hard to…