Hello! Jane from Ill Seen, Ill Said here.
A huge thanks to Erin for asking me to participate in his series while she's away on her honeymoon. When Erin asked for a post about my favourite destination, I knew immediately where I would choose: County Clare. I spent many a childhood vacation here and on the rare occasion I get home to Ireland to visit friends and family, I always drag them to the West Coast so I can spend time there.
For me, nothing can rival finding the tiniest orchid bravely growing between the karst limestone of the Burren. Or the trees so bent by the wind that every branch reaches away from it. You wonder that life didn't just up and quit this place when the glaciers razed it.
But just when you think its all rugged barrenness, the sea pulls back and reveals its defiant lushness. And you breathe deep in the fragrance of it and feel at once its clemency and might.
And beyond all that there's a mystical feeling to the place. Maybe it's more than the rocks, or the ever-changing skies, or the deep boom of the sea. Whatever it is, people past felt it too and left their marks, dolmens from barely comprehensible 3500 BC, castles and holy water shrines by the roadside.
And I believe the tourists feel it too, for there's a silent kind of reveried hush over most of the places you visit. And the locals seem to have a gentler grace too. Or maybe it's just my own fondness for the place, for childhood holidays when it seemed like another country altogether, that makes me feel these things...
All photographs by Jane Flanagan
http://www.flickr.com/photos/janeflan/sets/72157622671482268/
