Brow Head, Co. Cork

Mizen Head gets all the glory. The signal station, the bridge, the visitor centre, the tour buses. But Brow Head, just a few kilometres east, is the true southernmost point of the Irish mainland. Almost nobody knows it.

I've been flying this stretch of coastline for years, and from above the headland reveals itself properly. Sheer layered cliffs with exposed rock strata that look impossibly ancient, the Atlantic grinding white water around the base. The day I made this photograph the light was flat and overcast, which suited the aerial work perfectly. No harsh shadows, and the sea had taken on that deep grey-green tone it gets under heavy cloud. The swell was doing serious work below.

What keeps pulling me back is the history. In the early 1900s, Guglielmo Marconi used this remote headland for pioneering long-distance wireless transmission experiments. There's very little left to mark it now. A few remnants on the hilltop, easily missed. But knowing that changes how you read the landscape. For a brief period, this forgotten corner of West Cork was at the cutting edge of global communications.

From three hundred feet up you get the full picture. The flat grassy top, the violence of the ocean, the brown hills of the Mizen Peninsula rolling away behind. All that drama, sitting in relative obscurity while the buses queue up a few miles west. I'm quite fond of that imbalance!