Holiday in Southern Ireland

The wife and I recently had a holiday in Southern Ireland, county Wicklow in fact.  Here are some of the places we visited:

Wicklow Gaol: This was our first visit of the week. Wicklow Goal is now museum. I anticipated before we went in that it would likely be a monument to British oppression of the Irish people. (Unfortunately for Ireland much of its history is covered by the history of British rule). I was right about this but I was glad to see that the story was told without any bitterness on the part of the Irish; one came out feeling the Irish still want to be friends with their somewhat larger neighbour. And a good thing too; we need friends like that! As an aside: We neither felt nor saw any of the many ghosts that are supposed to inhabit this building!

Glendalough: This is the ruins of a once busy monastic town. It is actually located in a glacial valley and as I looked around me I could see the high walls of the U-shaped profile of glacial action. The inhabitants of that town would no doubt have unconsciously viewed the landscape around them as ancillary and incidental to the cutting edge of creation; namely Man’s dealings with God.  Today, however, we find such a vision much more difficult to take for granted.  Changes in our perspective of time and space tempts us to view humanity as the ancillary objects, almost like inconsequential insects crawling around in the corners of the huge vista of a cosmic stage. When one understands something of geological history the setting of Glendalough, it only reinforces this tempting thought: This epic landscape with its huge space-time dimensions dwarfs human activity. It is easy to appreciate why Christian fundamentalists fail to come to terms with the cosmic perspective and can only cope with it by shrinking the cosmic backdrop to pre-scientific time scales and sometimes even returning to geocentric and flat earth cosmologies.

The central tower of Glendalough is its most notable feature: In the heyday of the monastic town it is thought to have served as a bell tower dividing up the day into its devotional segments; it was in fact the sacred equivalent of the city clock towers necessary for the marking out of secular time with a clock and bell before cheap mass produced time pieces were available to all.

Glendalough is now a town of the dead; It is still regarded as sacred and much of it covered by a grave yard that is in use today. I find some of the funerary paraphernalia that goes together with death full of pathos, a cathartic and apparently futile gesture in the face of the inevitability of termination. (See also here)

Aughrim: On the last day we walked round the small town of Aughrim not far from where we were staying. We had lunch by the gently chattering stream that passes through Aughrim. I reflected on the fact that this beautiful country with its neat well-kept shire-like feel is nothing short of a rural idyll. And yet southern Ireland is remarkably under-populated. There is in fact a very large Irish diaspora which dwarfs the 4.6 million inhabitants of Ireland. Sometimes an idyll can seem like heaven, a place where one wants to be for eternity.  But in this world it is difficult to tame the ambitious human spirit even with a mock paradise, a spirit that so often is looking for more. Sitting by a gently chattering stream is a solace and balm, but if you are ambitious you eventually get bored and have to move on. Many Irish people have done just that to the benefit of the world as a whole I would have thought!

Aughrim's quiet waters, but the allure of pastures new is always there.

Jurrassic Landscapes

Znedek Burian's Jurrasic landscape: When I first saw this picture I could hear the wind in those trees and the cracking of falling dried wood. What did it mean? 

I have in my possession a book called "Prehistoric Reptiles and Birds" which I received as a school prize at the age of 11. It was written by paleontologist Josef Augusta and illustrated by Zdenek Burian. The text was perhaps a little dry for an 11 year old, but the illustrations by Burian fired my imagination. Burian is justifiably well known for his pictures depicting prehistoric animals. To my eye Burian's pictures are wonderfully impressionistic; although not meticulously detailed they convey a sense of life, animation, realism and above all prehistoric atmosphere. Somehow Burian's pictures take me back in time. One might expect that a boy of 11 was inspired by the pictures of prehistoric birds - and I was - but surprisingly it was Burian's Jurassic landscapes that had an even greater effect on me.

  

Burian: landscapes with a sense of depth

These landscape pictures made me feel as though I was actually looking through a window in  time at the actual thing.  The light, the atmosphere, the mood and the sense of a wilderness absent of the management of man became very real when I looked at Burian's pictures. Those landscapes receded into a misty background blur that I knew spoke of huge wild unmanaged spaces beyond. Those spaces were inhabited by monstrous roaming beasts uncontrolled by human interference and organisation. This was a very alien world that left me with nagging questions that I never shook off: What did it all mean? Why were there huge tracts of time absent of human presence? 

Ironically this was a spiritual experience: Unlike some for whom the questions of meaning eventually abate to be replaced by nihilistic resignation, for me the quest for meaning would incessantly nag. It was as if I was being shown a landscape and a still small voice whispered: "Look at this; what do you think it means?". In an effort to get closer to that question, if not to answer it, seven years later I attempted my own pencil depiction of a Jurassic landscape (See below). Not of Burian standard, of course, but it got the need to express something off my chest. In fact today I'm reminded of those scenes in Close Encounters of alien contactees who obsessively groped for meaning in the enigmatic picture of Devil's mountain that had been impressed on their minds.

And the obsession continues: If I ever come across a landscape that reminds me of Burian's pictures I photograph it. In fact here is an example I snapped in the early spring of this year: 

A modern Jurassic looking landscape.

The Hemlock Stone

The Hemlock Stone

I recently visited this interesting place: The Hemlock Stone just outside Nottingham. It is a peculiar and singular formation, which like an old decayed tooth stands proud of the otherwise toothless gums of the eroded Triassic sandstone hills of Nottingham.  There is nothing else in the vicinity like it and one wonders why it too hasn't long since been eroded. According to the geological blurb the sandstone at this spot is more strongly cemented than the surroundings and hence its resilience to erosion; however there is apparently some disagreement as to whether human quarrying activity might also have been involved. The Hemlock stone therefore presents similar doubts about its origins that the Cheesewring on Bodmin moor might once have done. For my blog post on the Cheesewring see here: 

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2006/10/contingency-conjecture.html

According to Geologists the 400 metre thick pebbly sandstone layer around Nottingham was deposited in Triassic times by monsoonal rains eroding an ancient mountain range to the south of Nottingham. Nottingham was a dessert region landlocked in the huge mono-continent of Pangaea. In some places water rounded pebbles are seen half embedded in the sandstone floor and can be removed with a bit of effort. I  took one as a souvenir.

The Pebbly Sandstone of Nottingham

The likely depth of time occupied by the sequence of events  needed to generate this Nottinghamshire landscape is, as is so often the case with geological sequences, breath taking: Those ancient mountains may well have started their life as ancient rock layers themselves. They were then uplifted and eroded by rains and rivers which deposited them as silicate grains and pebbles.  As Pangaea broke up advancing and retreating seas deposited further layers of rock hundreds of metres thick on top of the sandstone. Over long periods of time all these layers were uplifted, folded and in turn eroded down to the basement sandstone  rock, eventually producing the the landscape we see today.

Like the Cheesewring the Hemlock Stone's singularity probably attracted the attention of man's sense of the numinous and it has therefore been the place of religious ritual. Not surprisingly its conspicuous form strikes a sense of awe even in those whose reaction is not necessarily spiritual:

Thou petrified enigma.....what tempest sculptured thee?   (Henry S Sutton, 1848)

Similar awe has been expressed by antiquarians about the Cheesewring:

If a man dreamt of a great pile of stones he would dream such a pile as the Cheesewring

...this wonderful pile of stones...but whether the work of nature or not I know not.

The Cheesewring. Bodmin Moor: Granite, not sandstaone