Illauncreeveen, Glengarriff, Co. Cork

Illauncreeveen sits at the mouth of Glengarriff harbour, less than a hundred metres off the shore near Gun Point, four acres or so of trees and rock. The name is an anglicisation of Oileán Craoibhín, the island of the twigs, or of the shrubs. There's a second reading from sods built up around a creel, so fishermen may once have kept gear out there.

For something that small it's had a fair bit of history on it. The British Navy ran a semaphore station on the island in the 19th century, one link in a chain of signalling posts relaying messages along the coast, and there's still an obelisk standing, about 1.8 metres of it, put up as a navigation mark for shipping. The ruins of an old shack are out there too, well past habitable now. None of that is in this photograph, mind, it's just what's on the island.

The rock around that shore is slate, purple and green and greenish grey, and you can see it in the foreground here in the way it fractures and lies in layers. This is sunset, the water in the harbour gone still, the last of the colour on the Sugar Loaf and the Cahas behind, and a single red mooring buoy off to the right.

Glengarriff is An Gleann Garbh, the rugged glen, and there are around twenty small islands scattered through the harbour. Most of my images are made an hour or three away, up on the Beara, out on the Skelligs, or somewhere off in the west, so a subject sitting this close to the gallery is a bit of a novelty for me!

Available as a print. Link's in my bio.