Posted on 13 Comments

Under The Shadow of Errigal

Oil painting of Mount Errigal, Donegal, Ireland
Under the Shadow of Errigal (SOLD)

In Steven Spielberg film “Close Encounters” (1977) Richard Dreyfus experiences a close encounter with a UFO and subsequently becomes increasingly obsessed with subliminal, mental images of a mountain-like shape and begins to make models of it, including one made from his mash potatoes.

CloseEncounters_DreyfussLED
Richard Drefus’s dinner is about to turned into a mountain

I bring this up because my husband got a bit like that with Mount Errigal. It has a very distinctive shape and it can be seen from miles around. My husband was always pointing it out to me. His father used to help run a boxing gym called Errigal in Derry, Northern Ireland, so it has an added resonance for him. Again and again he’d announce “There’s Errigal” to me.

It looks like it should be an extinct volcano, but I’m not sure entirely that it is. We saw it when we flew in from Dublin, from the runway at the airport, from the beach at Carrickfinn, From Bunbeg beach, from the Rosses, from Gweedore. Its barren surface is rather moon-like, but when the sun catches its slopes its quite mesmerising. When it was hidden by cloud you knew the sun wasn’t going to come out for some time. The surface isn’t covered with snow but light-coloured quartzite scree that glows pink in the sun.

I would like to climb it one day. I have been told it only takes a couple of hours (from the other side). In the meantime there is a nice time-lapse film of clouds floating past Errigal for you to watch.

You can purchase my Donegal landscape paintings here

13 thoughts on “Under The Shadow of Errigal

  1. I love this painting. Janet 🙂

  2. The link for people to buy paintings seems to be missing.

    1. Thanks Ellen, the link is there but for some reason the hyperlinks aren’t showing up as blue. I’ll have to investigate.

  3. There are so many places in this world I will never see, and never knew existed, but thanks to people such as yourself, I get to see some of them!!

  4. Thank you. Right back at you, you tell me about parts of the world, people and events I’m not familiar with too!

  5. You’re making me want to take a trip to Ireland – Emma! 🙂

    1. It’s a wonderful place to visit. The landscape is stunning and people are super nice.

  6. Die prachtige berg domineert het gehele landschap

    1. Je hebt gelijk. Je kunt het overal vorm zien!

  7. […] a lot. Then I was tempted by the landscape to explore the changing skies too. You can’t paint Mount Errigal without a swath of clouds around its […]

  8. […] backdrop for countless wedding photographs and instagram posts. That mountain in the distance is Errigal, which also features in countless music videos, photos and […]

  9. […] written before about how my husband, Seamas, is a bit obsessed by Donegal’s highest peak, Errigal,  and how loves to tell me that you can see Errigal from different places such as the beach, the […]

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