Dunquin, Dingle, Co. Kerry

I made this in 2008, on a filthy afternoon right at the tip of the Dingle peninsula. The kind of day where the wind is directly in your face and you're questioning your life choices. It's one of the oldest images in my collection, and still one of my favourites.

Everyone knows that zigzagging slip road dropping down the cliff to the harbour where the boats leave for the Blaskets. Dramatic from any angle. But I wanted the full sweep of that curve in a single composition, so I set up on the cliff edge and spent a while positioning everything carefully, making sure no foreground rock or grass interrupted the line as it wound downward.

It was blowing a gale. The two great pyramidal sea stacks offshore were taking the full force of the Atlantic. I used a long exposure to turn all that violence into something quieter, the sea rendered as mist swirling around their base. And if you look carefully at the very top of those stacks, there are seagulls clinging on up there. They'd found the one spot where they could sit without being blown into next week.

The long exposure did something interesting with the foreground grass too. Where it was sheltered, in the lee of the slope, it's sharp. Where it was getting battered, it's gone soft with motion blur. You can actually read the wind in this image. Seventeen years later and it remains one of the photographs I'm most pleased with!