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January – The Poulnabrone Dolman

When I first visited this site, in 1998, this magnificent tomb sat alone in a farmer’s field, and you had to park on the verge and crawl under a wire to visit it. I rarely saw anyone else there, and I would come often to sit and sense the mighty weight of stone and time that this spot had to give me. Now it’s second only to the Cliffs of Moher as Ireland’s most visited tourist site and there’s a proper car park, interpretive signage, a gravel path, a minder on premises to keep folks in line, and a rope to keep people away from the dolman. Still, go on a wet, stormy day, wait out the crowds, and know that the power of this place is undiminished. It’s been sitting here for 5,000 years. The car park and the paths are just a momentary blip in the scheme of things.

February – Shortt’s Pub, Feakle

Feakle is a wide spot on a narrow road in the hilly farm country of deep East Clare, a long way to come on a rainy night. My friend Becky told me that, if I wanted to experience true local music, this was the place. “This is the oldest continuous session in Ireland,” claims Fergus, an American retiree from Wisconsin who relocated to Feakle just so he could come to the session regularly. “56 years,” says Ger, the owner of Shortts, about the Thursday music session. “I’ve owned it for 26. During the pandemic we put benches out back and played there.”

When the leader started playing there were well over 20 musicians, and as many folks watching. Not a phone wielding tourist in the bunch. I felt I was in a bonded community of rural folks and this event is the glue that keeps them together. The evening finished with 4 couples squaring up to dance the Connemara Set, and then everyone standing to sing out the evening with the Irish National Anthem.

March – Gleninagh Mountain, The Burren

The coast road wraps around the base of a high Burren hill, Gleninagh Mountain. You can park anywhere and work your way upslope and eventually come across a proper path to the summit, and perhaps find a Burren pony grazing too.

April – Hawthorn Tree on The Burren

High on Burren hillsides the hawthorns are trimmed by the wind to become wondrous sculptures. The Hawthorn Tree has a mythic, mystical meaning in Ireland. Fairies and hawthorns are a thing, and farmers won’t disturb them in the fields. When I mentioned my dry eye symptoms to a friend, she gave me a piece of cotton cloth that she had previously tied to a Hawthorn Tree branch in her yard. The trees by a holy well that I visited all had rags tied to them.

Here’s a list I found of their “Magickal Properties: “ Its beautiful flowers are said to help prayers reach heaven. If you sit under a Hawthorn on May 1st you are liable to be whisked away for good to the faery underworld. The blooms of the hawthorn are used in spells for fertility, happiness, and good luck in fishing. To take a blossoming hawthorn branch inside one’s house will cause their mother to die. Wands made of this wood are of great power. The blossoms are highly erotic to men. Hawthorn can be used for protection, love and marriage spells.

May – Busker at the Cliffs of Moher

The traditional music and the landscape of Ireland are, in the minds of the musicians who play it, inseparable. There is a curious interplay at this particular site, the Cliffs of Moher, which on one hand, is the apotheosis of what we think of as the Irish landscape, and also a highly developed tourist attraction with a steep parking charge. Buskers have played at the Cliffs for generations, and I ran into them 25 years ago when the parking was free and the lot was, in bad weather, empty of cars, and there was no fence to keep you from the edge. Even then, I would find the odd lone musician playing at the cliffs in the wind and the rain. If now they need a licence and they’re restricted to a specific spot in order to perform, the tradition and the intrinsic connection to place still thrives.

June – Boulders on the Burren

There is a small peninsula jutting out into the ocean, just a couple miles south of Black Head on the Coast Road in North Clare. It’s a barren plain of limestone, streaked with ankle busting grykes, and littered with glacial erratics left from the end of the last ice age.

There are rocks here that I have photographs of, from both this past March and from 25 years ago. The same rocks. I haven’t sought them out. They draw me to them, every time, like gravity.

The western edge of Ireland has captured me like no other place on earth. I approach the landscape and the culture with an investigative curiosity, and a deeply felt connection that defies explanation. Maybe it is the stories, unknown to me, the outsider, that have been attached to the land and carry a force that affects my gaze. It is certainly the look of that inimitable landscape, shaped by thousands of years of human habitation to the point where architecture has melded into geology. Whatever the source, the resulting photographs are my attempt to extract meaning from the encounter.

July – Cathair Dhún Irghus, Iron Age fort, Gleninagh

This stunning hike to the top of Gleninagh gave me three of the photographs in this calendar. It appears the name refers to the son Irghus of the chief of the local tribe. You’ll find references to this spot as Caherchunarisa or Caherdonnerish. This impressive fortification has stood on this mountaintop for 1500 or more years. Here’s a link with more details on the Caherdooneerish. 

August- Considine’s Bar, Sunday afternoon, Ennis

I was gratified by the welcoming session culture I found in Clare and, over the course of two weeks I accompanied the music with my bouzouki almost every night. On my frequent trips to Ireland in the late 1990s I sought out the music wherever I could, and it became a primary subject for me in the book project I was working on. I always got names and addresses of the musicians, and mailed prints back later. One time I revisited a pub and, behind the bar, were my photographs pinned to the wall.

I brought back a box of those vintage prints and showed them at the sessions. Sometimes I was able to hand off prints to the people I photographed 25 years earlier, and frequently to folks who knew how to get them into the right hands. I left them all behind.

My final day in Ennis coincided with a big bagpipe event, the Piping Heaven/Piping Hell Tionol, and a session in Considine’s Bar. It was a session with 6 sets of uilleann pipes. My watch was firing off non-stop warnings that I was in a “loud environment.”I didn’t know it at the time, but I was sitting in with some of the most prominent musicians in Ireland. In the photo are Cyril O’Donoghue (who died unexpectedly in August 2024), John McSherry, and Bighde Chaimbeul.

September – The Cliffs of Moher from the Coast Trail

Most people see the Cliffs from the overbuilt tourist infrastructure (rebranded as “The Cliffs of Moher Experience!”) and share the view with a thousand other people. There’s a coast trail however, and you can hike in from either direction, from Doolin to the North or from Liscannor to the South. I hiked in from the Liscannor side and had abundant opportunities to take in the landscape in solitude. This is a view from the South end of the Cliffs, on a sunny, blustery day that was perfect for photographing in black and white.

October – Mary on concertina, pub at Hylands Hotel, Ballyvaughan

In North Clare I found a lovely, small session run by Rachel Reid at the hotel in Ballyvaughan, a beautiful village on Galway Bay near the tip of Clare. There were just four of us in a quiet pub, and I gently contributed what I could on my bouzouki. Clare is the heart of Irish concertina music, and it was a pleasure to hear it in such an intimate environment. Here’s a video from this session.

November – Cemetery in Ennistymon

On a hill overlooking the village of Ennistymon is a burial ground and a ruin, a Protestant church from 1775 that was sacked in the 1798 Irish Rebellion. It’s a wonderfully haunting place with many centuries-old inscriptions. More the church and the area HERE>>

December – Atlantic view from North Clare

Spring in Ireland guarantees unsettled weather and often spectacular skies. This day was typical, frequent showers interrupted by spells of bright sun. It’s exactly the conditions you want for great images. Here is the late afternoon sky of the beach and the sea from the edge of the Burren.

January 2026 – Cliffs of Moher

Here is the familiar silhouette of the famous Cliffs, taken after a rain shower and with a hard sun reducing the landform to a hard black bulwark against the Atlantic Ocean.