Cill Rialaig, County Kerry

Waterville Bay from the Ring of Kerry Road

Yesterday I started off, driving over the mountains behind my house to St Finian’s Bay and the again over the next and on to Portmagee, the two sets of mountains making up the outer reaches of the on the Skellig Peninsula where I am living. As with everywhere in Iveragh, the greater peninsula where we sit, the beauty is almost painful. And the haze of the salt air adds a sense of softness which lends a sense of the surreal to all things, as if blinking it all might just disappear. Anywhere else it would be a national park, here it is just someone else’s farm.

Today rather than rushing off, I want to breath it in and look. See that it won’t evaporate. To hike to the Napoleonic fort ruins, past the pre-Christian ruins and the iron age burial, all just along my road here. To feel my smallness in the big sea and sky here, and the long sense of time that one feels in Ireland. Even looking at the green, green fields I have realized, any that are so are because generations of people lifted the rocks out of that field, stone by stone, by hand. That was the work of many people, completed long are the person who started it passed.

friends on a hillwalk

Dungeagan marina in the offseason, Ballinskelligs

An Iron Age burial tomb from above

The Ballinskellig community are parts of Gaeltecht communities, some of the very rare remaining gaelic speaking communities so their English accent is thick, almost impossible to understand for an outsider. The lovely farmer who I met the first morning, whose name might be Thig, short for Timothy, also seemed to have the same difficulty understanding me. His speech for all that I can’t understand it is beautiful and melodic and sounds just like Sean and Bridget speaking, the last relatives I had over in Coomatloukane, in Caherdaniel.

But for all the simplicity of being in an Artist’s Residency in Cill Railiag, I know the other artists, who I have met in passing, also feel the urgency. It is hard not to feel pressure upon receiving the gift of time and space. But that is the work, to stop thinking of all we have escaped from, because this is such an amazing respite for the noise of the world, the silence is perhaps the greatest gift right now.