I'd forgotten all about this photo! I've photographed thousands upon thousands of gravestones, lots covered with ivy or trees growing around them so you can't read them and this is the only one with a tree coming out of it's head (in a manner of speaking!)

Anyone know what this is?

Anyone have an idea as to what this little fellow is? Found him in my mothers back garden in June of 2006. I've tried the various books I have but haven't managed to find anything like him and I can honestly say I never saw anything like him before or since! I thought I'd lost the photo until I found it buried in an old folder today

Garnish island in Glengarriff and taken from around Bocarnagh which is a few miles out of Glengarriff village. Garnish is beautiful and years ago when you'd drive into Glengarriff there would be lots of men just trying to get you to go out to the island on their boats. These days, you never see them anymore. The whole village is very different to the way it was 20 years ago.

Years ago, you wouldn't have seen the mussle rafts or lines in this photo, but they are there - lots of them.

Glengarriff is in Bantry Bay and Bantry mussles are exported all over the world

Gravestones

These stones are in an old graveyard in Portlaoise and are used as stepping stones! I wonder if they've ever been transcribed?

A seashell :-)

Not any old seashell and not found by the sea - well, not really

Close to........but up a mountain! How it got there - no-one knows, but probably carried by a bird.

Still, it was a sight to see, enough to make me take a photo of it.

The mountain - we were taking one of the walks down round Glengarriff, down the Glen as it would be called locally. Absolutely beautiful walks down there, and the whole place is kept so well - and signposted. Maggie (my Boxer) just loved those walks, and Glengarriff - everywhere around it is so beautiful and so peaceful.

Anyway, there we were on one of the long walks, one which takes you way way up high so you can see miles around and then there was this shell lying off the path. It's a very old limpet and it's been there a long time, or maybe not exactly where I saw it, maybe buried and now or then uncovered. Maybe I'll never see it again when I take that particular walk.

But, as I say, it was a sight to see, so far from and yet so close to where it should have been - so unusual in the place it was in and so very high up, away from the sea

Roads

This photo is quite old now - the road isn't open yet, but this section of it is finished.

Part of the new Dublin to Cork road - soon, we'll be going from Dublin to Cork in about two hours, well, maybe a bit longer! It'll be motorway all the way and no sights to be seen en route

Castle or Church?

We have all kinds of castles in Ireland, from the tiny to the large. The large mind you have tended to survive a bit better than the small ones though. Earlier this week, I was out after a church marked on the Ordnance Survey map, the county I was in doesn't matter, 'cos I could have found what I did find anywhere in Ireland. This particular church was close to an old castle, ok, ses I to myself, should be easy enough to find. Not so! Sometimes, when looking for these 'buildings' or remnants of, you don't see them very easily, you have to keep an eye out for the markers - the walls, the Yew trees or - the ivy! Ivy is a great thing for covering these old buildings, it just loves them to bits - and literally to bits. So, after walking through a totally overgrown lane which I was sure was going to bring me to my destination but ended up as a dead end, I took to the fields and this is what I eventually found - or rather the first of my photos, once I saw this I knew I had found something. But what is that something - the church or the castle?! Later on, I did work out which structure, but this is the kind of thing we find when looking for these type of old structures. The kind which won't be there any more in a few years, thanks to the ivy.
I have more photos taken on the search for this site on my Graveyard blog at

Irish Graveyard Place/