Barán

Apologies for the less than accomplished image but I managed to venture out with no card in my camera so this was grabbed using Herself's.

Herself has decided, after a little persuasion, to embark on a second book to describe the loop walks on the Sheep's Head peninsula. The first book covered the main route which follows the coast but the this one will follow the loop walks which traverse the spine of the peninsula.

This is taken on the descent from 300 metre high Barán Loop (Barán means something like 'heights' or 'up top' I am told - perhaps unreliably). Up here are many old turf ('peat') cuttings, now overgrown and beginning to regenerate but still clearly visible as rectangular depressions.

The area has a strange feeling to it - one of those places with a forgotten history, once known intimately but now isolated and visited only by walkers. Families had their traditional patches of turf up here on the commonage and worked them together, carrying the turf down the pathways we followed today and stacking it to dry in low stone-walled areas which can sometimes be seen faintly in the landscape. We discussed if there are people alive who remember anything about this tradition - perhaps not.

You may be able to pick out our house down below, for this is the beautiful place where we live. Look for a line of plastic covered silage bales low in the centre of the image - our driveway is just above them. It is a mind-boggling fact of our technological world that I am sitting behind a small, just visible, roof window writing this. When I click the button the image and these words will travel to a wi-fi router behind me, up to an antenna on our roof, across the bay on a radio signal to a mountain on the far horizon and from there via many links and cables to the blip servers and onwards to you. I wonder what the old turf cutters would have made of all that?