The Wild Atlantic Way is signposted from Kinsale to Malin Head, and it is a peculiar stretch to start on. West Cork does not announce itself the way Kerry or Donegal do. It arrives sideways: a painted terrace above a harbour, a fort you did not expect, a road that keeps narrowing until there is nothing at the end of it but a cable car.
Five of the paintings from that first stretch are now available as prints.
Kinsale, at the end of the day
Kinsale is a town that has been painted a great deal, and the temptation is to paint the colours — the terraced fronts in raspberry and ochre that end up on every postcard. What is actually worth painting is the hour. In the evening the light comes off the water and up the hill, and the whole town turns the same warm pink and gold, colour and reflection at once. See the print →
Charles Fort, from below
Charles Fort is a seventeenth-century star fort, and star forts are designed to be understood from above — the geometry only makes sense on a plan. From the water below you get none of that. You get sheer angled walls, grass on top, a gull turning, and a sky working itself up over the harbour mouth. That seemed the more honest view: what a sailor coming in would have seen, which is rather the point of building it there. See the print →
The Old Head
The Old Head is a long narrow green finger running out into the Atlantic with a white lighthouse near the end and cliffs falling away on both sides. It is best known now for the golf links that occupy most of it, and for the Lusitania, which went down off this headland in 1915. The painting has none of that in it — just the shape of the land, and the sea unusually calm beneath it. See the print →
Mizen Head
Ireland's most south-westerly point, and the last thing emigrants saw of the country. The signal station sits on a rock separated from the mainland, reached by a bridge thrown across the gorge — and the Atlantic works at the rock from three sides at once. On a still day it looks like an engineering drawing. On a bad one it does not look survivable. See the print →
The Dursey cable car
Ireland's only cable car, and the reason half the people who drive the Beara peninsula drive it at all. A small red cabin on a wire, out over Dursey Sound, with the mountains standing behind and a long drop to fast water below. There is something very Irish about it — an entirely serious piece of infrastructure that looks, from a distance, like a toy someone hung out over the sea. See the print →
All five appear in The Painter's Road, the illustrated account of one summer painting the whole Wild Atlantic Way. Prints are made to order on premium paper or canvas — browse the full collection.