Wandering in the West

Out in the west of ireland now for a few days (thank you Grundtvig funding!) to attend the Burrenbeo Land-based Learning conference and meet a couple of other organisations.

Too much travelling today! But travelling into such an exciting landscape

In Caherconnel ringfort, I got very distracted by their stone walls....

Beautiful ferns tucked into the cracks in the limestone pavements (are they still called grikes in ireland?)

 Hanging over a wall, failing to photograph tadpoles in a cattle-trough!

And this lovely piece of writing:
This barony affordeth not a piece of timber sufficient to hang a man, water in any one place to drown a man or earth enough in any place to bury him. This consists of one entire rock with here and there a little surface of earth, which raiseth earlier Beef and Mutton, though they allow no hay, than any land in this Kingdome, & much sweeter by reason of the sweet herbs intermixed and distributed everywhere...

The Journal of Thomas Dineley, 1681

Poulnabrone Dolmen

Leaving Orkney

Left overs?

welcome to the darkness of Wideford Hill

(notes from the Tomb of the Eagles and scrabbling about in the mud of Wideford Hill Cairn)

To be chosen to lie

In bone on stone

For generations,

Was that the honour,

A privileged obligation?

To wait down the centuries

Bound in stone,

Questioned, petitioned,

Left behind until,

I arrive with a metal light

And listen for your whisper in

The broken dark

Or did a freedom in death

Wait for the flaying

By eagles,
A used skull picked clean

And tumbled off the cliff edge,

Into the sea

And a freedom of soul along the wind,

On the wave,

A chance to turn and run again

In fur, in feather, in family skin?

step out of the Cairn and into a wider landscape

Leaving Orkney

How to write this horizon

That sweeps from blue and shining white clouds

Into rain drifting over 

A bleak shuttered house on 

A bleak stone-walled headland and 

Then out into light again, 

Sunlight reflecting grey and silver on a rippling sea and 

Back into distant rain, 

Shifting curtains beyond those quicksilver waves.

Standing on the sighing deck

Watching our wake curve across the waves

And fade.

Tomb of the Eagles

approaching the Tomb

look out, away, beyond

a very modern entry with trolley for pulling
along the entrance tunnel!

Gulls scream in the brightness

Beyond the stacked stones,

And here,

It is no longer dark,

Three shafts in a concrete cap

Pierce.

But under the stones,

In the corners and the cavities,

The silence remains, until

One breathing fills the space

With sound

Where five thousand years slept quiet.

leave quietly, noticing the small things

Arrivals

Gannets in tight formation

Cutting lines across the waves

Sharp. 

Precise as knives

The Gloup, sea cave

entering

light at the end of the darkness!

Beauty and wonder in a monster haunt!

Stacked.
Stone slabs with drystone care.
From Neolithic village to Pictish Broch
To modern pebble dashed Croft, 
Resource and response
Remain the same.
The wind still blows
The sea still rushes the shore.
The sunset still glows across the clouds and burns the world into light

Gurness

Gurness

The Broch of Gurness

Following

which path? whose footprints?

Camster Cairns, part two

And here are a couple of images to go with last week's Camster Cairns entry....only the outside of the cairns, taking image inside felt inappropriate

The day before I visited Camster, I spent some time at the Clooty Well at Munlochy on the Black Isle. That will call for a whole other set of words which can follow...here are some images to entertain you in the meantime....