I love painting the coast, particularly if it’s rocky. Owey Island, lies just a short distance off Cruit Island near Kincasslagh in west County Donegal. Strictly speaking there have been no permanent residents since the 1970s. [Photos from http://www.welovedonegal.com/islands-owey.html]
There is no electricity or mains water, yet plenty of people visit and many visit during the summer months. If you want to visit, there is a ferry service run by Dan the Ferryman.
View of Ireland From Owey Island (Ian Miller)
The name Owey, in Irish Gaelic “uaigh”, means cave. The island is a cavers, kayakers and rock climbers’ paradise.
The island is encircled by massive rock stacks and it also has an underground lake. As I am cave-phobic this video is the closest I will ever get to it!
I am fascinated by rock stacks and Donegal has plenty of them. I like to think of how these massive structures have gradually been eroded by wind and waves over thousands of years, forming first sea arches and then stacks.
I also love the colour of the rocks and the wild Atlantic Ocean. The ocean is incredible shades of blues, greens and mauves, mixed in with browns and frothing surf. Although I feel I am getting better at representing the layers of Donegal sky and clouds, but capturing the movement of the seas is still frustrating me.
Over to Owey Island (SOLD)Â
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If you to find out more about Owey Island see Ian Miller’s Unique Ascent’s website for detailed descriptions and incredible videos.
Just thought I’d add a post script about the “Holy Jaysus Wall”. I think if you look at photo of it you will understand the name. It makes me feel ill just looking at it!
Holy Jesus Wall
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Irish climber and alpinist John McCune, climbed it in 2014.
Here’s a fascinating film clip from the 1970s about Owey Island’s postman, Neil McGonagle, who used to visit the dwindling population on Owey Island by small boat four times a week to maintain the island’s contact with the outside world.
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.
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
The sun is out. So I am out too with my camera. Looking for inspiration for some Gower landscape paintings. We drove down to Rhossili at low tide to look at the rocks. My husband is from Northern Ireland and he was feeling homesick for some monumental rocks like those at Giants’ Causeway. Now, Gower doesn’t have pillars of amazing basalt rock but we do have some pretty grand tors.
The walk from the National Trust car park at Rhossili was certainly bracing. The wind was super cold and strong enough to make me nervous about approaching the cliff edge to take photos. People have fallen to their deaths here. The sheep are all pretty blase about it, though.
Blase Sheep in the wind
Behind the bay rises Rhossili Down to a height of 600 feet. It is the remains of an old beach level much eroded later on by the ice sheets of the last but one ice age. The bench of land below, with the Old Rectory in its middle, was caused by earth slumping down from above during a cold phase. Although, it seems like a wild and out of the way place, people have been here for a very, very long time. A Neolithic hand axe – the oldest human artefact found in Wales – was found here and is now on display in The National Museum in Cardiff.
Worm’s Head
We walked into the wind and past Worms’ Head with its exposed causeway and found a flock of sheep eating turnips scattered amongst the straw-stubbled ground. We walked along cliff tops, and looked over a long dry stone wall inland to the medieval strip farming that still continues in the fields there. This is one of only a few Medieval “Vile” Field systems left in Britain.
Sheep on a Medieval Strip Field
The path then splits. You can continue along to top of the cliffs to Mewslade or take a path to the right which dips down to the top of Fall Bay. There is a small collection of wooden boats way above the beach, some are attached to metal rings embedded into the rock. Its a lot easier to make your way down to the beach through this path than it is via a gap in the cliffs at the east end of the beach.
The high parts of Gower are made of the oldest rocks. The downs that loom over Rhossili and Cefn Bryn are made from Old Red Sandstone.The rest of Gower is made from Carboniferous Limestone. The coastline cuts across a bed of folded of Limestone at an angle of 45 degrees towards the sea, to expose curious diagonal layers of rock.
Layers of Rock at Fall Bay
View Towards Mewslade Bay
So here my afternoon takes a slightly wetter turn. I had climbed onto rocks that lay between Fall Bay and Mewslade Bay further along the coast. The sea was crashing around me. I felt quite safe. The rocks were not slippy. I thought the tide was still going out.
Then my husband shouted at me “The Tide’s Coming in” and I looked at my watch. It was exactly 3 o’clock. Low Tide. For some reason, I then decided that the crashing waves were coming a lot closer. I hesitated, the patch of beach I had jumped from onto the rock was submerged in incoming water. I waited. The water just got deeper.
Then, my stupid PTSD head kicked in. It goes for the worst scenario. What if it never retreated? What if was going to get washed away? I was going to get washed away! I was certain. So, I panicked and jumped into the water. It came up to my calves. It was really cold. The bottom half of my jeans were very wet and my walking boots full of water. I sloshed through the sea water and onto dry land. Emergency over, I tried to cover my sense of foolishness by blaming my husband for “frightening me”.
I didn’t drown or even catch cold for having to walk back to the car with wet boots and drive home again. I had a hot bath as soon as I got home but there’s always part of me that believes that you have to suffer (or at least go to great lengths) in the process of creating your art so I find mild exhaustion and hardship rather satisfying. As if deep down I think it will somehow make the paintings better!
