Dripping with morning dew, these silken webs are at their most luminous. Later they fade into dry vegetation, invisible again. Damp and dark they shimmer on the branches, woven art works hanging between the gorse and the brambles. Sometimes they are stretched beyond a circle, or a long leash extends into the . . .
On a chilly pier at dawn
I wonder at times why we don't get up and out for every dawn. When you are camping or sleeping in a tiny VW van at western the edge of Ireland, every sound tells you, the day is here! Get out of bed now! It starts with crows flying from their roost across the harbour to the Castle. I catch them crossing overhead from my . . .
Blacksod Bay
You couldn't be looking out into Blacksod Bay and fail to think of Rescue 116. The helicopter went down here last year, 2017, while on a mission in bad weather conditions. All four crew were lost. You can see Blackrock Island where the incident occurred from everywhere along this stretch. I had never been here . . .
The staycation; land, sea and me.
I've taken a break from this blog for a staycation; interwoven with salt water, forest bathing and butterfly spotting. It was hot in Ireland. I often sat under an umbrella, unable to put even one toe onto the baking sand. All the windows and doors had to be open wide, day and night. Everything scorched. The green turned to gold in the . . .
The boar-toothed, blue-faced hag
Post-heroic stories aren’t focused on individual glory; they’re focused on community. On diversity. It’s not about slaying the dragon, but about harnessing his special skills – making him part of the team. It’s about understanding, and valuing, the black, feathery, croaking wisdom of a crow. It’s about living with a half-empty . . .
Getting to know birds better
“We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.” ― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in . . .
Rural life; it’s not all birds and bunnies
Living as a rural artist is challenging. Out here in County Waterford, we have to make our own fun as they used to say. We make everything up from scratch. Since leaving Framework the organisation I co-founded in 1994, I have had to review living out here in the middle of nowhere. Of course it's not the middle of nowhere if you are a . . .
Still lucky enough to find tiny treasures underfoot
O I could gush! Spring has arrived and underfoot things are hotting up. Although these wild couple of acres give fantastic cover to all sorts of small animals, every field outside of these boundaries is now preserved for a local a gun club. The guns are a worry for a wandering photographer like myself. Another reason to avoid . . .
Here she comes at last.
And everything is slower here. I have to keep reminding myself. This ice will melt. The evenings will lighten. The soil will warm. Spring will come again. And the slower it is, the closer it binds time to me. Binding it tight. Hundreds of seconds and minutes of this time thing. This wiry, brittle, sluggish, caramel of . . .
The light and the shade
Q. How many Irish Mammies does it take to change a lightbulb? A. Sure don't mind me I'll be grand in the dark. Irish joke So the snow eventually thawed, although for days it was banked up on both sides of the escape route. I didn't venture down to the lake but went to the highest . . .
