Bliain - Part 3

Part three of my project to make a photograph every day for a full year, or bliain in Irish. Find Part 2 here.

19th January



Cuan pier on a dark, wet and windy winter’s night, after a dark, wet and windy winter’s day.

20th January



The winter climate where I live can be characterised by two distinct kinds of weather. Yesterday was a perfect example of one of these moods; low cloud, wind and mist with occasional heavier periods of rain, a shrinking of the world to a few hundred (or dozen) metres of poor visibility, and a damp-to-your-bones kind of wet cold. They’re the kind of days when staying in bed til the afternoon feels perfectly valid if you have no practical reasons for getting up. Today is the other defining weather type; a cleaning wind from the north, great visibility, high clouds carrying occasional sails of rain, brilliant sunshine here and there, and rainbows when those latter two elements align. Because where I live has a northwesterly aspect these trains of showers and their accompanying rainbows can be seen marching in off the sea and making their way southwards towards the house, turning the windows to luminous landscape paintings hanging on the walls. It’s not a bad place to live.

21st January



Ivy berries, wet from the day’s showers. These are an important food for the local and visiting thrushes in wintertime, when precious little other fruit can be found. Ireland has a distinct subspecies of ivy, Hedera helix hibernica, which crawls along the ground in some woodlands, as well as doing the typical ivy thing of climbing up trees and other vertical surfaces.

22nd January



A wet and wintry looking road in Rinn Chonaill. I quite like this scene, for although it’s grey and dreary looking it feels a lot closer to most of real life than the typically exuberant and colourful clifftop sunsets that are so much easier to fall for. Both have their place of course. This image is inspired by this one from one of my favourite photographers, Hazel Coffey. Sadly Hazel hasn't uploaded anything for awhile, but if you’re interested in Irish landscape photography (and cats and dogs) I can highly recommend browsing through her huge catalogue. For me she’s one of very few people whose portfolio brims with that kind of imagery that doesn’t shout from the rooftops, as per the gaudy sunsets, but instead focuses on the honest, everyday magic to be found in the Irish countryside.

23rd January



The twin peaks of Barr an Ghéaráin (The Top of the Fang, or as it’s known in English, Brandon Peak) and An Géarán (The Fang; Gearhane). Lovely cold weather recently, and a bright morning today. By afternoon it had darkened considerably, particularly as one huge, black mass of cloud came in on a stream of cold air and dumped enough hail to stick to the roads near to sea level. The sky cleared and the moon was out after sunset, brightly lighting the darkness, and hail rattling on the windows told of more showers throughout the night.

24th January



The same twin peaks from yesterday’s image, seen from a different angle and greater distance. The snow level dropped a decent bit during the night and the hills looked great today, whenever more showers weren’t obscuring them. It would be wonderful to have this kind of weather consistently throughout the winter, but it’s not so common around here. This season has been the best for snow for a few years now. I have a few more of this composition as the setting sun and a passing shower merged on the scene later on, but I think I prefer the clarity in this one. The power in this kind of photo for me is in showing the scale of even these humble mountains against the tiny human structures beneath them, and that idea is somewhat lost in the other picture (which you can see here.)

25th January



A truly memorable sunrise on the hills. Everything about this little trip was magic; from seeing the silver glowing moonlit mountains at 4am in the garden, walking up in the quiet dark of night, following hare and fox prints in the snow, seeing the moon set in alignment between two pillars of stone (purely by chance), arriving at the summit of An Géarán in the half dark as a strong wind whipped over the crest, finding perfect drifts of untouched snow and seeing the first kiss of daylight warm the east side of one of my favourite peaks and this shapely ridge that runs up to it. And then the time spent soaking in the soul food in full sunshine as the morning matured, and a leisurely ramble down the hill before a short drive home. A half dozen hours that brought honest smiles and fits of excited giggles to my happy head. Times like this are why I came to live here.

26th January



A greenshank at Baile an Rannaigh. These elegant looking birds overwinter in Ireland, escaping the colder climes in Scotland and Scandinavia at this time of year. Two instances of breeding have been recorded in Co. Mayo, but none since the 1970s. Though fairly graceful looking in freeze-frame I’m probably not the first person to have watched a greenshank’s manic leggy strut through tidal shallows and wondered if it’s where Monty Python got inspiration for the Ministry of Silly Walks sketch.

27th January



Redwood impressions in the sands of Smerwick Harbour. A misty, overcast day that became progressively wetter as time went on. The temperature has more than trebled recently, going from 3 or 4 degrees Celsius during the weekend to in around eleven during the past few days. The hills have been obscured by mist and fog since the change in the weather, but even without being able to see them I’d bet there’s not much of that lovely snow left up there by now.

28th January



Ringed plovers at Smerwick. I’ve been down to the beach to try and photograph these little shorebirds the past few days, and very much down on their level to do so. I think more than one person walking the strand has thought my sprawled body was that of somebody having collapsed on their daily stroll. The poor birds don’t get much chance to rest with all of us out stretching our legs. The number of people walking the beaches has gone up noticeably since the pandemic began, and there’s rarely ten full minutes of rest for the plovers and sanderlings before another human raises them to the air to settle a little further up or down the beach. You can see here that many of the birds are standing on one leg. This is fairly common behaviour for shorebirds; by standing on one leg they lose half the heat through contact with the cold ground that they would if stood on both legs. It’s also more efficient from a biomechanics point of view. Most humans do it too, but instead of tucking a leg up under our arses we just shift most of our weight from one side to the other.

29th January



A beautiful, clear and calm morning. The early light was quite watery, that diluted kind of sunshine that seems to shine sheepishly, as if apologetic for its absence during prolonged wet spells. But it’s more than welcome, and it was even warm this morning while I walked the beach at Ventry. Not only that, but the evenings have gotten noticeably longer recently, adding to the optimism this kind of nice weather can bring. This is my sixth winter living on the Dingle Peninsula and it’s easily been the best in terms of weather. Which, given the current lockdown and general sense of doom about the world, makes me feel even luckier than usual to be living here.

30th January



A chunky wave ends its long Atlantic journey in a blaze of glory at Baile Mór. Most big swell in Ireland comes from the northwest, despite the prevailing wind being southwesterly. When big swell does come in from that southwestern quarter it usually tends to be accompanied by strong wind from the same direction, which flattens the waves into messes of chaotic whitewater. The deep pulses of wave energy today were coming in from the southwest, but were met with a north-easterly wind here in West Kerry. Some of the swells hitting the seabed and rising up into waves were sculpted by that wind into these beautiful barrels. It’s always tricky to gauge wave sizes in big seas because nobody tends to be out in them to give a sense of scale, but I reckon I could comfortably stand under that thick ceiling of green water. Hypothetically comfortably of course; as much as I’d love to feel what a big wave surfer gets to experience I would almost certainly die if I ended up in that swirling vortex of ocean energy. And this was one of the smaller ones.

31st January



Relentless showers hampered my attempts with the camera today. The best I came home with is this bit of symmetry from the flooded fields behind Ventry strand. It’s not much, but maybe a photo as unexciting as this is fitting for the kind of day it was; dull, grey and damp, with a feeling of being fenced in...

1st February



Sanderling in the wave wash at Ventry. It turns out the little flocks of shorebirds on this side of the peninsula are much tamer than those on the strands of Smerwick Harbour. At times there was a dozen of these busy little birds within four or five metres either side of me. Passing walkers and squatting photographers didn’t seem to faze them, and I wished I’d brought a wetsuit so as to be able to lie down on the wet sand and get eye level with them (or close to it; these little things are scarcely six inches tall). Their running up and down the beach as the white foam comes and goes makes for very charming viewing. Their legs move so fast it’s like they’re rolling on wheels. Most of the sanderlings seen in Ireland come from breeding sites in Arctic Russia, with others only stopping here briefly on their way to wintering grounds as far away as South Africa. For all the technical advances humans have come up with I’m always more amazed by the physical abilities and innate knowledge migratory animals like these little birds have. Most of us would perish if our crutches of technological comfort were taken away, but other animals rely on nothing but themselves to get by in the world.

Find Part 4 here