Here’s a spot you’ll want to see, but you need to figure out the timing.
Dún na mBó is a natural blowhole created by the patient pressure of the sea eroding landward and upward, is located near the site of a fort that perhaps dates to the Iron Age.
At high tide, you can see the water erupting up through it. That’s probably the ideal time. The water was low when we visited, but we still had dramatic views. There’s also this sculpture that gets you pretty close to the blowhole and keeps you safe. This is probably a lot more necessary when the water is coming at you.
This stonework sculpture was built by Travis Price, an American, in 2002. It is meant to commemorate those lost at sea.
And here it is, though you can’t see down through it too well. There are a lot of places in Ireland where you’d think there should be ropes and fences and other cautionary devices. That something was built here feels like it should be respected. No thought was given to trying to get over the low rock wall.
Besides, there’s all of this to see out there, too. It’s a panorama. Click to see the larger photo.
The early Celts called this a thin place, a geographical location scattered throughout Ireland. In the thin places a person experiences only a very thin divide between past, present, and future times. You’re somehow able, if only for a moment, to encounter a more ancient reality within present time; or places where perhaps only in a glance we are somehow transported into the future.
I did not see the past or the future, but the idea of a thin divide seems somehow right in this place. Some places you can become keenly aware of the bigness of things, the smallness of things, the foolishness of things. Some places here are like that. Some place are big and you are small and you’re foolish for thinking otherwise. And that can make a lot of things feel pretty thin.
Just down the lonely little single track road you can see a nice view of the Eagle Island Lighthouse.
It isn’t difficult to see why you’d have a lot of lighthouses here. To me, a landlubber, it seems as though there aren’t enough. That’s what it means to find yourself in a thin place.
On our way out, we stopped to visit a few sheep.
Schmiiiiiiiid.
