Mullaghmore, the Burren, Co. Clare

The Burren has been a fascination of mine for years. You drive through perfectly normal green farmland and then the ground just opens up. No soil, no trees. Just limestone, shaped and carved over thousands of years into something that doesn't look like anywhere else in Ireland.

Mullaghmore sits at the heart of it. Not a mountain in any conventional sense. More of a long, sculptural hill with limestone pavement flowing down its slopes in terraces and steps, every surface cracked into grikes where orchids and gentians somehow find a way to grow. I've walked across those pavements many times, feeling the rock shift and crack underfoot. But from the air you finally understand the scale of it. How the karst just goes on and on.

The weather was doing what it does best in the west of Ireland, which is everything at once. Storm clouds rolling in from one side, blue sky holding on to the other. Soft light with occasional breaks where the sun pushed through, picking out the texture of the rock and warming the orange vegetation around the turlough in the foreground. That small seasonal lake appears and disappears with the groundwater level. On this day it was there, sitting quietly in its hollow, reflecting the sky.

Green patchwork fields on one side, grey limestone spreading across the middle ground, and that beautiful little lake anchoring the foreground. The full character of the Burren in a single frame!