The Long Middle

Loop Head to Achill — Book Two of The Painter's Road

Back on the road after a fortnight at home, Dublin painter Jason O'Brien picks up where Book One left off — at Loop Head, where a squall breaks over the sea arch at George's Head just as he arrives to paint it. The Long Middle carries him and The Curragh through the horseshoe bay at Kilkee (Pollock Holes, pier jump, and a pint at the Greyhound Bar included), out to the Cliffs of Moher and Dun Aonghasa, through Connemara's currach-lined slipways and Kylemore's mirrored lake, up the fjord at Killary, and out to Achill's Keem Bay.

This is the middle stretch of the Wild Atlantic Way — the long green heart of the route, five more Signature Discovery Points found and painted, a bog memorial to Alcock and Brown, a deserted famine village on Slievemore, and the quiet accumulation of a journey that no longer feels like an experiment.

Illustrated throughout with the author's own paintings — twenty-one full-colour plates in oil, gouache and watercolour — The Long Middle is both travel memoir and sketchbook, written for anyone who has ever wanted to disappear into the west of Ireland for a while and come back slightly more themselves.

By F Cosgrove. Available as a full-colour 8.5″×11″ paperback on Amazon. 126 pages.