Hail To The Road

A couple of weeks ago we managed to contact a retired forester, P, who lives near Killarney, to see about finding some ancient woodland to photograph. He was very friendly (especially as he wasn't in the best of health) and told us we could call on him and he'd show us maps and give us instructions as to how to get there. So the idea for this road trip: to drive to Kerry and photograph what may be the oldest yew wood in Europe.

We headed off in the afternoon in Dave's car. There was a forecast for high winds and we did get a bit buffeted, but the restless, shifting light was mesmerising, a marvelously murky oil canvas of all the shades of grey, luminous, blinding silvers and golds and sweeps of dense charcoal mixed with China blues... About halfway there the storm gritted its teeth and hail bounced off the windscreen, though there was always that fugitive blue, as above.

As I've said before and will no doubt proclaim again, I love driving like this and I love the unhindered road:

road as itself, metaled, gritted, tarred, humped just enough to shake off the rain
road as metaphor, universally dipped in as river or sea
road as uplift and grief
road as whatever you're having and one more for itself
road as self-connecting circuit soldering time and space
road with the world under its heel
road as the indigo mountain the bright shrine of a forecourt
road as something to walk or be walked over by
road as divining stick for the evening the dawn the poured tar of the night
road as roadkill, the bump, the radar blip swept under the river
road as wakefulness, wiper-thump, sleep's metronome
road as the longest long acre
road as braces for nostalgia, catapult for dream
road and its tributaries, running from the Shire straight into Mordor
road as abyss and the road across
road as return to the hinterland, the one surefire road
road as the road to Rome, The Big Apple, Cape Canaveral
road as space walk
road as streamline and offshoot, motorway/B road/trunk road
road as heat shimmer, makings of a mirage
road narrowing to lane, drive, the place where we pull up the road
road as a drawbridge to sleep on