Ireland, the green island

At the outpost of Europe, Ireland is the first land that impinges wave trains of the North Atlantic. At the top of the cliffs rampart lies a salt campaign, beaten by the breath of the ocean and buffeted by storms so powerful that they project onto the rocks wrecks of cargo ships stranded. Elsewhere, the coast forms rounded handles where the waves break endlessly. To the north is the famous Giant's Causeway and basaltic prisms perfectly geometric emerging from the foam.

The ocean seems to insinuate itself everywhere in Irish land: round of golf or fishing trip, agriculture or drying laundry, everything is done on the seabed, everything is soaked in sea spray. The lighthouses themselves seem more maritime than terrestrial, and the keepers were playing the people of Atlantis in the midst of storms. Thus, the lighthouse of Skellig, nestled like a gull in a cliff, where there is also an invincible sixth century monastery and the ruins of the old lighthouse, is the steepest of Ireland. In the tumult of the Irish Sea, in a string of depressions, the Fastnet on its rocky island, was last seen by the pebble hapless passengers of the Titanic before it sank.

In Ireland, ruins, scattered across the moors, speak of the past, of Celtic origins, and an era where we were constantly looking to the sea to see the slightest veil. Others speak of the efforts of men, fighting against the strong sea winds, as the thousands of miles of windbreak walls that draw on the Aran Islands a giant mosaic. Elsewhere, the streets of Dublin or Belfast speak, about Ireland today.

The face of Ireland is also one of the trawlers and their fishermen almost no sea can dismay, sailboats and charming anchorages, a part of fly fishing at the edge of a river, whiskey distilleries, such as Bushmills, inseparable from the pubs displaying their names in gold letters, and streets full of shops with colourful storefronts. Blue and white at seaside, green and gay at landward, Ireland deploys at all seasons of the year, the scenery where the sea is a perfect host.

Texte : Anne Jankeliowitch