I’m on the edge of the Iveragh Peninsula, on that tourist strip known as the Ring of Kerry. It’s the kind of place where the menus are in five languages. Hype or not, the area is achingly beautiful. I’m navigating with an ordinance survey map, which marks every ogham stone and wedge tomb in the neighborhood. The map looks like it was shotgun blast with neolithic sites.
I think I have it. I’m on a roadside halfway up a mountain. The landscape empties beneath me. White houses dot green fields at the base of mountains made of rock. A serrated edge coastline, and the islands against the distant Atlantic horizon. It feels like the edge of the world. The sun is setting, but this is no ordinary sunset. It’s raining too, and the Skelligs are enveloped in a glowing cloud of falling rain. The light is spreading upwards, the undersides of the clouds are glowing. The wind bites fiercely into my face. It is raining upwards onto me and my equipment. My fingers ache. I struggle to keep lenses clean. And the scene just keeps getting better and better. The sun sets behind the next squall in the lineup, but then the entire atmosphere, full of rain, lights up orange. And a switch is flipped, and in moments, just gray and blue and gone.
Doug Plummer
Waterville, Co. Kerry
