Storied Landscape

Another busy day and after all the grey the sun arrived, crisp and bright with some impressive cloudage.

Into Skibbereen for a talk on Storied Landscapes, part of the programme around the  Art & The Great Hunger  exhibition.  Richard Holden is a photographer who looks to bring out the meaning of the land he photographs, in this case all sites somehow connected with the Famine. His photos were deceptively simple and highly evocative as were the stories to go with them. Pretty depressing but a powerful way to bring the lives of ordinary people and individual victims to notice.

After lunch we then went off in search of a Mass Rock and holy well that had just come to my notice. There were meant to be standing stones too so we whisked Robert and Finola, and Finola's daughter in law, off to search as well. Dennis, whose land it was, was happy to show us and we wandered up on the most spectacular plateau with astonishing 360 views. The stone pair were huge and impressive, right bang in the centre of the land, aligned with Mt Gabriel, probably aligned with the Equinox and gazing out across Roaringwater Bay and all the islands. 
Nearby a pointy shaped rock was once used as a Mass Rock for open air worship, when Catholicism was banned. The scoop in the rock, probably natural, may have been the well - once holding a cure for warts. Probably also used in connection with Mass.  Or the well may have been a little way off and not found - Himself did find a damp patch. There's a lot of probablys here but I reckon this landscape had a few stories to tell. 

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