Magical
We spent the Easter weekend in Mayo in the west of Ireland. That part of the country is an amazing place, so wild and beautiful. Areas like Connemara, the Burren, the Ring of Kerry, The Beara Peninsula are all truly magical places. The climate is of course pretty awful but that’s somehow part of it. There’s a sense of a thin veil between worlds, of a spiritual or mystical realm not far away. I remember walking in the Burren a few years ago. The Aran Islands were just in view off the coastline and there was this wonderful azure evening light. It was all so beautiful and the atmosphere was almost electric with the energy of it. Add to this the fact that the ground we were walking on had once been sea-bed and it was really amazing. And to drive around the Beara Peninsula – it feels like you are on a different planet or perhaps the moon. Incredible.
Photo of The Burren by Quentin Xerxes Zamfir: http://www.flickr.com/photos/qxz/
I know there are many other beautiful and magical places in the world but there is something quite special about the West of Ireland. I am not particularly patriotic or anything and there are places I’d prefer to live than Ireland but this is an aspect of this country that I really love. This Easter weekend we drove from Cong in Mayo to Leenane in Connemara, Galway, right through Joyce’s Country and the Maamturk Mountains. It was truly magnificent. I had my mobile ‘studio’ with me and did some writing out there. It’s such an inspiring place. That’s something I intend to do a lot more: composing in the inspiring environment of Nature. Thanks to today’s mobile technology that’s now a real possibility, if you use computers and so on in your music-making.
