Irish Photos

Here's a few photos I took from the two trips I took to Ireland in 2004. All of these were taken before my days of digital photography and were taken on my 35mm Canon Rebel G.

PLEASE CLICK ON THE PHOTOS TO VIEW THEM BETTER, THE THUMBNAILS ARE AWFULLY BLURRY FOR SOME REASON.

This is one of my favorites. This was taken at a place called Dysert O'dea. The Dysert O'dea high cross pictured here is from the 12th Century. I took this photo with black and white film with a red filter on the lens. It's scanned and I added a little bit of brown texture to give it an aged feel. It's otherwise unaltered.

I love this one. This is the oldest known church location in Ireland. It is located on the North Coast, and all that is left, as you can see, is the foundation and at the front the remains of the altar. Only probably about 15 people could have fit in here, but I can only imagine what it could have been like. About 50 yards to the left was the site of pagan ritual grounds. What would happen in this day is that when St. Patrick would have shared the gospel with these small pagan clans, the whole clan would convert. They would then build a church right next to their former place of worship. Now, thousands of years later, a "coincidental" tree sprouted up at the foot of the altar of the ruins of this ancient church.

Here is one of many clusters of road signs in Ireland, this one taken in Co. Donegal, the origin of all things McGinty. The Irish are masters of obscurity. You may think by looking at this that they are very well organized, but what you don't realize is that there are two directions given, but there are 3 streets. It's up to you to figure out which signs point to which streets.

Here's another one I like a lot. It's not too amazing, but it was just a simple shot that I was glad to have gotten. This is on the Ards Peninsuala in Co. Down, Northern Ireland, where many of my McGinty line comes from. This of course was also 35mm, I only added some vignetting to it.

This is a shot looking through a window of an old abbey at Clonmacnoise near Athlone in the center of Ireland. Clonmacnoise is one of the real gems of the old way of Irish monastic life. Pope John Paul II performed a Mass here once, as well.

This is not a great photo by any means, but I love the piece itself. This is a window at Saul in Nothernen Ireland. Saul is the location of St. Patrick's first church plant. The building is newer of course, being that St. Pat lived in the 400's. But this window behind the pulpit commemorates his work done on this site so many years ago.

This is the oldest standing church in Ireland. It is called Gallarus' Oratory. It held maybe 20 or so people, and it is as it was every since the late 5th Century. It's amazing to stand on the site and appreciate the worship that went on here nearly 1500 years ago! This one of course was modified a lot. I added the celtic stamp in the top left and some texture behind. I actually muted the green, you should have seen how green it was in the original!


Here's another random road sign. I took this one because it is near where my family is from, firstly, but also because of the intrigue it caused me as one of the first encounters I had with the religious/policitcal conflict in Ireland. As you can see, there is orange grafitti on the sign that reads "CIRA," which is a splinter group of the IRA bent on promoting their cause in any way they can, despite the fact that the original IRA had agreed to a cease fire.

Here's my buddy G standing atop a hill known as Navan Fort. This hill is an overgrown lump of remains left from the original fort that dates back to around the first century AD. Navan is the birthplace of Ulster, which is one of the four ancient provinces of Ireland. My entire family line is from Ulster (which is the Northern Province, but is now divided policitcally, 2/3 of it is Northern Ireland (6 counties governed by the UK) and the other 1/3 remains as part of the Republic of Ireland (3 counties that are goverened by Ireland)). My good friend G here grew up in Northern Ireland (the UK part of Ulster) but grew up as a Catholic there, which proved to be very difficult before the peace accord of 1998. The superimposed flag I added in the background is the original Ulster flag that represents all 9 counties of Ulster and is in the shape of a unified Ulster.