A Soft Day: Carrigoona

Myself and my cousin Dave (Slant) drove from the house in Kilmac and spent a couple of happily preoccupied hours photographing on Carrigoona, the hill that shadows the Sugarloaf's fin like a dark swell. We were entranced by the encircling panoramic views and the strange light, a Persian blue cloud sleeping like a cat on the Wicklow Mountains, muffling the sun. There was a curious one-dimensional flatness to the landscape that made it look like a monotonal painting, except when patches of brighter sun poked through, as in the warm trace on Bray Head in the pic above (I was looking away from the sun here, towards the sea). The place is quite magical in that it has the effect of making the surrounding miles of landscape appear somehow both distant and close, reminding me of that Bruegel painting, The Fall of Icarus, in which a far-off galleon, and the legs of the fallen boy disappearing into the ocean, seem no more than a stone's throw from the ploughman in the foreground. We climbed to the top, along a squelchy muddy cattle path, through blackened gorse on one side and that straw-coloured undergrowth on the East facing side (above). Standing on the top was like being at the hub of a carousel, wallpapered with sea and landscape. the Sugarloaf loomed beside us, arrayed in all though rich earthy moss-greens and browns my mother used to wear. Looking inland, I felt as though we could almost write our names in the faint frosting of snow on the mountain peak under the cat's-tail cloud miles-distant. In the patchwork greens below us, a white caravan stood out sharply, a dinky toy we could reach down and plunk. Looking North East (to the left of the scene above) Dave noted the stream of mothy headlights making visible a short stitch of the N11. It was almost too rich. Climbing back down was a come down in more ways than one.