We came from Kilfenora today, from the organic food market and as the sun, moon and earth are lined up for soem very high springtides this weekend (and a gale blowing to boot) we decided to drive by Lisdoonvarna where the last few lusty batchelors were roaming the streets in the aftermath of the Matchmaking Festival to end up in Doolin for a walk by the Ocean.
It was a drab day but the walk was good, for a few minutes the sky broke and the light was right to shoot the crashing waves, at least I got the one good one:
A few more snaps:
Clifftop blowhole in full swing:
a few parting shots on the way back, the light gone but the waves still coming in full force on the low end of the Cliffs of Moher:
One of my friends has a pair of earrings which look exactly like that. Now I wonder if they aren’t so “artificial” after all. She got them in Jamaica. What kind of snail is that? I want to see if they live in Jamaica…
When I first saw her earrings I searched all day online for that kind of snail (I was looking for snails native to Jamaica), but it appears this one is it. To have such a strange and random coincidence is strange and random, but it made my day. Now I can prove to her that they’re real snail shells and not fake.
Those snails live in the stone walls in the garden they come out at night and literally eat every bit of green. Last year I put slugkiller in the windowboxes because I was tired getting the violets and the pansies eaten. The next morning there were twentyfive of those shells in it.
Anyhow. Today too there were the obligatory stone walls:
A stone circle. At some point twenty years or so ago we kept running into landscape art and stone circles made by artist Richard Long, in several museums from Rotterdam to London, in Lincoln Cathedral and other unexpected places remote and not so remote. Always wondered if this was another one and finally I just looked at his website. It is:
It’s a bit of a shame the scale of the waves gets lost in the pics, although I have seen worse, it was serious business. Just think of this as taken standing on a 20 meter high cliff. The backlighting and the shower over the Cliffs of Moher made the shots .
That is what I kept wondering about. It seemed to me that this was probably the biggest crashing of water I’ve seen, but I wasn’t sure. I guess the houses and stone walls in the background help a person get some idea of the scale. My eye decided it must be awfully big, but I’m glad to hear it was right!
The Cliffs, way down there in the county Clare, are an inspiring sight.
The only time in my life that I considered the possibility of a God was down there one night. A huge storm was crashing against the cliffs and the waves were like nothing I had ever seen.
It was a very sobering thought to think that these cliffs, on the very end of the European continent, are the last bit of land between us and them..America.
It is obvious that other parts of Irelands west coast are further west than the cliffs but I have been to all those places and nothing can compare (note: no mention of Doneen) to the way the Atlantic beats down on the cliffs.
Bloody Foreland, up there in Donegal, comes close..but for different reasons.
I was out on my piece of coastline this afternoon, but, unlike Peter, was enjoying the exceptionally low spring tide six hours after the high one. It was a drab day this end too (I guess the weather systems get to Cornwall a few hours after Clare when the good ol’ Atlantic lows are in mobile mood), but I caught some horsey types taking advantage of the unusual expanse of sand for the second day in a row (a bit of a long-distance shot):
The guy behind on his kayak or whatever it was ruined the composition somewhat, the bounder!
And a couple of hours later, around 3 o’clock, here’s the Atlantic low threatening Widemouth Bay. Half an hour later it was pouring with rain. (I exposed it for the bright sky patch but I quite liked the somewhat apocalyptic result!):
Peter. my daughter is just back for a few days from college in a beautiful mountain area in the Berkshires and one of the first things she said was that she misses Ireland. Now I do too.
How did you know how old that rock was? Did you ask? 
