Spring Tide, Irishtown

I'm working on a little subsidiary project at the moment (a subset of the larger Dublin Docklands project), about a traveler family I visited a few times on a site near the South Wall. Out here, the nearby city can seem strangely distant. Sand drifts across the road and pools along the edges like the dregs of a dessicated ocean. Looking south, across the great scoop of Sandymount Strand and Dublin Bay, you can see the towns of Blackrock and Dún Laoghaire and beyond them the low-lying Dublin and Wicklow mountains. The place has a wildness and beauty, and also a sense of desolation, abandonment; there are often burned-out cars in the carpark at the end of the beach. Yet it is also a favourite spot for walkers, bird-watchers, kite-surfers, etc. The family have long ago moved on, but I went out to take some more shots of the surrounding area, and for the first time in my life I took a stroll along the Irishtown Nature Park trail, which increased that sense of being in another world, or rather between worlds. Below me on the beach, I watched a big crow drop something (presumably a small shellfish) from from its beak onto a rock, then fly down to pick it up and repeat the process. Further out I saw this figure (in the pic above) digging for lugworms in the expanse of bright tinfoil left by the withdrawing spring tide.