Gouganne Barra

You feel cream-think green seep into your senses. Smell the effervescence of a rising mountain as drops of sunlight filter down and make a sound of sighing trees. With a glance, your eyes taste the cool springs, like scent of pine. As you feel the grass, soft like fleece beneath yourfingers, you hear it -- the sound of a thousand rains opening for one brief moment.


Gouganne Barra was the home of St. Finnbarr who set up a hermitage in the folds of the mountains. A small chapel remains in his honor. The place has Catholic ties, including a Holy Well beside the chapel, as well as more ancient Celtic pagan connections, with tales of faeries and banshees haunting the ethereal woods. It was not hard to imagines these sprites flitting among the underbrush of the trees and splashing in the trickling brooks, tricking the ancient Irish taking pilgrimages and tourists experiencing the breath-taking Irish landscape. 


Words cannot capture this place; it was surreal, both exquisitely majestic and intimately magical. I took about 200 pictures, but I have chosen my favorites to take you along the climb to the peak, and the descent back down the river and the chapel, as well as a few from the pub where we had sandwiches and tea afterwards. Slaite! (cheers!)


PS-- if you click on a picture it will become bigger!