Rocky Road to Dublin

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive. 
Robert Louis Stevenson

Aran Islands. Co. Galway

These pictures were taken during my trips to Ireland.  While traveling around the island both in 2007 and then again in 2010, I was able to see so much of the country.  The pictures above cover the wild and rugged beauty of the north west (Co.Donegal), the vast open spaces and the mountains of Connemara, and the incredible history that lives on in villages and cities of this lovely (and lively) country.  I still dream of my time in Ireland and feel such a strong connection to  the rocky northern coastline and the mysterious folklore that comes out of every forest, stream and hill.

Stones of the Giant's Causeway

By a lonely prison wall 
I heard a young girl calling 
Micheal they are taking you away 
For you stole Trevelyn's corn 
So the young might see the morn. 
Now a prison ship lies waiting in the bay. 

Low lie the Fields of Athenry 
Where once we watched the small free birds fly. 
Our love was on the wing we had dreams and songs to sing 
It's so lonely 'round the Fields of Athenry. 

By a lonely prison wall 
I heard a young man calling 
Nothing matter Mary when your free, 
Against the Famine and the Crown 
I rebelled they ran me down 
Now you must raise our child with dignity. 

The Coffin Ships

By a lonely harbor wall 
She watched the last star falling 
As that prison ship sailed out against the sky 
Sure she'll wait and hope and pray 
For her love in Botany Bay 
It's so lonely 'round the Fields of Athenry. 

Low lie the Fields of Athenry 
Where once we watched the small free birds fly. 
Our love was on the wing we had dreams and songs to sing 
It's so lonely 'round the Fields of Athenry.

DANCE there upon the shore;
What need have you to care
For wind or water’s roar?
And tumble out your hair
That the salt drops have wet;

Being young you have not known
The fool’s triumph, nor yet
Love lost as soon as won,
Nor the best labourer dead
And all the sheaves to bind.

What need have you to dread
The monstrous crying of wind?

Has no one said those daring
Kind eyes should be more learn’d?
Or warned you how despairing

The moths are when they are burned,
I could have warned you, but you are young,
So we speak a different tongue.

O you will take whatever’s offered
And dream that all the world’s a friend,
Suffer as your mother suffered,
Be as broken in the end.
But I am old and you are young,
And I speak a barbarous tongue.

~ W.B. Yeats